00:00:00.000Lindsey Clancy murdered her three kids.0.98
00:00:02.000This is not disputed, but the internet is doing what it always does, turning a horrific tragedy into a dumb morality play.1.00
00:00:09.000The hot takes that you're seeing everywhere are pretty much all garbage.
00:00:12.000This is a very specific case with a very specific fact pattern.0.95
00:00:15.000Is Lindsey Clancy guilty of cold blooded murder, or was she suffering from postpartum psychosis so dire that she was not responsible for her actions?
00:00:23.000That is the only question that matters here.
00:00:25.000The rest of this stuff is just clickbait.
00:00:37.000Okay, so I haven't discussed this horrific and tragic case, this Lindsey Clancy case.
00:00:41.000This is the case of the then 32 year old labor and delivery nurse who murdered her three kids, Cora, five, Dawson, three, and a newborn baby, Callan.
00:00:50.000Those, of course, are the real victims, the dead children.
00:01:16.000The case is about mental illness and postpartum psychosis and a field of medical care psychiatry that is way less competent and knowledgeable than people very often believe.
00:01:25.000And by the way, many psychiatrists will tell you this the human brain is a mystery.
00:01:37.000But here is what this case is not about.
00:01:40.000You, unless you're suffering from postpartum psychosis, not depression, which is very common, psychosis, which is really, really, really uncommon, this case is not about you or people like you.
00:01:52.000And unless you are suffering from either postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis, none of this has anything to do with your understanding of self discipline or the generalized selfishness of modern women or some other such nonsense.
00:02:06.000This isn't about whether postpartum depression exists or whether it's exaggerated.
00:02:10.000First of all, she wasn't even suffering from postpartum depression.
00:02:13.000She claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, in which she had actual voices telling her to kill her children.
00:02:20.000Postpartum depression affects somewhere around one in eight women, according to the CDC.
00:02:44.000Postpartum depression is caused by deficits in neurosteroid signaling, where progesterone and estrogen levels during pregnancy and then postpartum drop suddenly, like after the pregnancy, causing a failure in nervous system inhibition and stress response dysregulation.
00:02:58.000And that, of course, is exacerbated by tremendous lack of sleep caused by newborns.
00:03:11.000And when you add that on top of the drop in progesterone and estrogen, That's really rough, and that can cause postpartum disorder for someone, some postpartum depression.
00:03:23.000Postpartum psychosis the causes are similar, but the effects are wildly different.
00:03:28.000That post birth drop in estrogen and progesterone triggers hypersensitive dopamine pathways, and that precipitates acute manic, delusional, and psychotic states in some susceptible women.
00:03:39.000Postpartum psychosis overlaps very often with bipolar spectrum disorder, so somebody had bipolar before, and then extreme sleep deprivation.
00:04:21.000The way that you can tell whether somebody, for example, has OCD is there's an actual checklist that you go down and you self assess, and people around you assess, and that's how we tell you have OCD.
00:04:38.000And this is really important when we come to cases like this because people have unrealistic expectations of what psychiatry does or what it can do.
00:04:46.000These are not the same fields of medicine.
00:04:49.000Okay, so back to postpartum depression versus postpartum psychosis.
00:04:54.000Again, postpartum depression involves intense sadness or anxiety, a loss of interest in daily life while staying grounded in reality, right?
00:05:06.000In contrast, postpartum psychosis is a rare psychiatric emergency that involves a severe break from reality, includes hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and rapid mood swings.
00:05:14.000So, in other words, if you had postpartum depression and committed a murder, you would still be legally liable for the murder.
00:05:21.000If you have postpartum psychosis and you commit a murder, that's a different thing.
00:05:25.000It's the difference between a voice talking to you and telling you to murder people and you being severely depressed because of hormonal changes.
00:05:33.000So, you're seeing online a lot of women saying, when I had postpartum depression, I felt the same thing she did.
00:05:39.000Even if you had the fleeting thought that you don't like your kids, or this is annoying, and I wish my kid weren't here, that is not the same thing that happened, according to Lindsey Clancy, to Lindsey Clancy.
00:05:48.000And to the people around her saying the same thing.
00:05:51.000According to her, voices were telling her to murder her children.1.00
00:05:54.000So please don't conflate these things because that's stupid.0.97
00:05:57.000And for any men and a few women who are saying that postpartum depression generally is somehow lack of willpower, or that postpartum psychosis doesn't cause people to do violent things, or that postpartum depression.0.97
00:06:10.000Is because of the selfishness of modern women or something.0.99
00:06:13.000Please, please, please stop being a moron.1.00
00:06:18.000You don't know what you're talking about when you say these things.1.00
00:06:41.000That your state of mental health actually has some sort of association with your actions, that goes all the way back to Talmudic times in Judaism, and it goes well prior to Aquinas and Christianity as well.
00:06:53.000So, again, this is not some like newfangled secular theory of how criminal law should work.
00:06:57.000It is deeply rooted in Western philosophy that you are only responsible for the acts that you are capable of willing.
00:07:04.000So, in Massachusetts, the insanity defense is rooted in Commonwealth versus McCool, which establishes, again, very similar standards pretty much across the United States.
00:07:12.000Most are based on the McNaughton standard.
00:07:13.000They established that a defendant is not criminally responsible if, at the time of the offense or as a result of the mental disease or defect, they lack substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of the conduct or have the cognitive ability to understand that their action was wrong or illegal, right?
00:07:29.000They literally don't know the murder is wrong.0.95
00:08:01.000The insanity defense in Massachusetts can't be used for voluntary intoxication.
00:08:04.000So if you take angel dust and then you go kill somebody, you can't use the insanity defense because you're the one who got yourself intoxicated.
00:08:11.000And it also cannot be used for antisocial conduct.
00:08:15.000So If you just keep doing criminal acts over and over and over and over, then you can't just blame mental illness for that.
00:08:20.000But that's not what we're talking about in this particular case.
00:08:24.000We'll get to more on all this in a moment.
00:08:25.000First, think about the things you've owned for 20 years.
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00:09:48.000I know you've been following it and I cannot wait to get your legal analysis on this.
00:09:54.000So, why don't you just walk us through the timeline of what exactly happened, just the facts of the case?
00:10:01.000So, the facts of the case and a lot of this became apparent and in stone yesterday after testimony from Lindsey Clancy's mother and her sister.
00:10:08.000So, in the summer of 2022, this is before.
00:10:12.000The murders in January, 2023, Lindsay's mother testified that she was normal.
00:10:18.000But both her mother and her sister and her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, started noticing a decline in Lindsay's demeanor in the fall of 2022, around October of 2022.
00:10:31.000This is where Lindsay started verbalizing that she was unwell, that she didn't think her anxiety medication was working.
00:10:36.000And by Thanksgiving of 2022 is when Lindsay's sister said that she looked physically unwell.
00:10:42.000And by December of 2022, is when Lindsay told Patrick and her mother that she had thoughts of harming the children.
00:10:49.000We know in December of 2022 is when she started seeking out help and treatment.
00:10:53.000She started reaching out to Shore Health and South Shore Health, rather.
00:10:57.000She started to try to check her in, uh, into these facilities for help.
00:11:01.000And it was in New Year's Eve into New Year's Day of 2022 into 2023 where she did go and check herself into this psychiatric hospital.
00:11:10.000And then she said that she was feeling fine, that she wasn't having these suicidal thoughts anymore.
00:11:15.000And she wanted to get home for her daughter Cora's birthday.
00:11:20.000And then also in January of 2023, Lindsay's sister testified that she started to act normal, that she felt that she was okay.
00:11:28.000Lindsay's sister is a social worker, so she has this mandate that if someone's capable of harming themselves or someone else and the person notices that, that they need to notify someone.
00:11:39.000And during the cross examination on Monday of Lindsay's sister, she said, Lindsay seemed fine.
00:11:44.000I never thought about turning her in because she seemed to be getting better.
00:11:48.000On that fatal day in January of 2023, you have Patrick saying, That it was one of her best days.
00:11:54.000And that's when we all know if you've been following the trial that Lindsay sent Patrick to run some errands.
00:11:59.000And that's when she lured her three children, ages five, three, and eight months down to the basement and strangled them one by one with exercise bands before going to the second story and trying to take her own life by jumping out the window.
00:12:14.000And then that's when Patrick came home.
00:12:16.000He found Lindsay first, found her lying on the snow in January in Massachusetts, and then started searching for the kids, found them in the basement.
00:12:26.000Found Dawson, the middle child, in his office.
00:12:30.000So, the prosecution is saying that he ran from Lindsay because they saw these acts taking place.
00:12:36.000Lindsay, of course, after attempting to take her own life but failing, went to the hospital.
00:12:42.000Now she's paralyzed from the waist down.0.76
00:12:44.000And now she is on trial for first degree murder.
00:12:46.000And the big question is and this is what the defense is going to continue to try to prove this week was she having a postpartum psychosis episode at the time of the killings, which can last hours to days?
00:13:01.000Violence of a psychosis episode can last that long.
00:13:04.000The prosecution's argument then is that there was intent there, that she was aware that she made a plan to get Patrick out of the house, to lure the children down, and to murder them.
00:13:16.000And that's a big debate here as this mental health, where mental health intersects with law and how to move forward from this tragic case.0.97
00:13:28.000So, you know, obviously the online discourse has become unbelievably stupid around all of this.0.92
00:13:32.000You've seen people who are conflating postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.0.98
00:13:36.000Those are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination.
00:13:39.000About 13% of American women will get postpartum depression.
00:13:42.000Again, these are real conditions, and postpartum psychosis is one in every thousand live births.
00:13:47.000And psychosis itself, these things are diagnosed by symptomology.
00:13:52.000There is no MRI where we stick your head in a machine and suddenly we know whether you're suffering from nothing, depression, or psychosis.
00:13:58.000The only way that you can tell what somebody has is by these sort of vague symptomatic descriptions of what is going on.
00:14:04.000We do know, as you say, That she checked herself into a mental hospital just a couple of weeks before, that she'd been obviously having symptoms of psychosis well before this.
00:14:13.000We do know that people have occurrences of this.
00:14:16.000Now, what's amazing about this is honestly, I have a hard time seeing precisely how the prosecution is going to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not an episode of psychosis, because my understanding is they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this was not an episode of psychosis, or at least the psychosis itself was not severe enough to obliterate the requirement under law, which is that she know the difference between good and bad and know what she was doing at the time.
00:14:41.000Yeah, I've said since early last week that I do think that she's not going to be charged with first degree murder in this case.
00:14:46.000And I was speaking to a legal analyst yesterday, and she was saying that these people that are so, so concerned about Lindsey Clancy entering society in 40 days, whenever she's found not guilty, that's just not the case.
00:15:00.000At the end of the day, the court understands that three children were murdered by their mother, the person that's supposed to protect them the most, and that she will have an indefinite lockup, a different type of locked away if she's found not guilty.
00:15:13.000at a mental institution where she is going to be evaluated over and over again.
00:15:18.000And even if she starts showing these signs, because again, it's a roller coaster.
00:15:23.000At the end of the day, these three children were killed.
00:15:26.000I think the prosecution is going to have a hard time too.
00:15:29.000And what we've seen from the defense already is they're going to try to get that misdiagnosis where you had these medical professionals testify for the prosecution and say, yeah, she wasn't displaying signs of psychosis.
00:15:41.000We did not diagnose her with psychosis.
00:15:43.000Well, you're going to have the defense saying, look at this witness.
00:15:47.000A former coworker testified yesterday saying that in the case of Andrea Young, the woman back in 2001 that drowned her children in a bathtub and was having a psychosis episode, when they were discussing this at work, which Lindsay was a nurse, worked around children, Lindsay was crying and saying, how could a mother hurt her children?
00:18:07.000We'll get to more on this in a second.
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00:19:11.000Again, the key here is that over the course of the months following giving birth to her third child, May 26, 2022, Lindsey Clancy started experiencing severe anxiety, depression, and insomnia.
00:19:25.000And then over the course of that fall and up through January of 2023, she sought psychiatric help herself and received a bunch of different prescriptions from different doctors to help herself.
00:19:34.000Again, I'm not aware that she had any sort of underlying bipolar diagnosis before any of this.
00:19:40.000So, I'm not sure, but you know, sometimes this only manifests as an after effect of postpartum.
00:19:47.000And again, there are lots of possibilities here.
00:19:50.000It is possible that this is a result of her postpartum psychosis.
00:19:54.000It's possible it's a combination of her postpartum psychosis and the drugs that she was taking because she was taking a bunch of drugs and in combination with each other, it is not truly crazy to think that going up or going down on the drugs has an impact on your mental health and could cause psychotic breaks.
00:20:07.000Again, when it comes to psychiatric medicine, It's kind of a black box.
00:20:10.000Many of the things that actually work, we even don't know why they work in terms of the brain pathways.
00:20:14.000We have theories, but we actually don't know why they work.
00:20:17.000So a lot of this stuff is just kind of like testing various berries when it comes to medications.
00:20:24.000For certain people, clonopin may work.
00:20:25.000For certain people, clonopin may really, really harm them.
00:20:28.000Everybody's brain reacts differently to these powerful psychiatric drugs.
00:20:31.000And of course, she did have, apparently, postpartum psychosis before that.
00:20:36.000So, again, in January, she checked herself into a psychiatric facility and she disclosed thoughts of harming her children.
00:20:43.000Her husband testified at the case that Lindsey Clancy said she heard a man's voice telling her to kill the kids.
00:20:51.000A few days after this happened, did you receive a phone call from the defendant while she was at Brigham and Women's Hospital?
00:21:01.000I think it was like a week or so after, yeah.
00:21:07.000And what did the defendant say at that time about what had happened with the children?
00:21:17.000She talked about what she went through.
00:21:20.000And what did she say about what she went through?
00:21:23.000She said she heard a man's voice telling her that if she didn't do it now, she would lose her chance.
00:21:32.000Okay, and then her mom also testified and read a text from Lindsey Clancy about three months before the murder of the kids asking for help.
00:21:43.000If this is a copy of the text that you're referring to, yes, it is.
00:22:25.000The question is, what are they the victims of?
00:22:28.000Of Lindsey Clancy, like as Lindsey Clancy, or Lindsey Clancy, a person who is suffering from a serious psychiatric illness and a psychiatric psychotic break.
00:22:39.000For people who have never dealt with people who are mentally ill, I'm just going to tell you when the Bible describes demons taking over people's bodies and that sort of stuff, I'm fairly certain that that is speaking about mental illness because people who are mentally ill, truly mentally ill, are not themselves.
00:23:45.000Now, the trial testimony said that the dosages were within therapeutic limits and not enough to be toxic or lethal, but that's not the question, is whether they were toxic or lethal.
00:23:53.000The question is whether either the postpartum psychosis or the cocktail of drugs or the combination of both.
00:23:58.000Because, again, when you have underlying psychiatric conditions and you go up or you even go down on the drugs, that can have an impact on people.
00:24:06.000It can cause hallucinations, among other symptoms.
00:24:09.000And the answer to that question is just on a medical level, it is possible.
00:24:11.000This is why I say the burden of proof on the Prosecution here is really, really, really high.
00:24:16.000Because if you're asking reasonable doubt, I honestly find it hard to believe they're going to be able to overcome the burden of reasonable doubt when it comes to this sort of stuff, simply because psychiatric practice is, again, so rudimentary compared to the actual problems that people face.
00:24:34.000Now, again, the story here is that January 24th, 2023, she asked her husband, Patrick, to run errands.
00:27:00.000This case is a very specific set of facts.
00:27:02.000And the big takeaway, for me at least, is mental illness is real.
00:27:07.000The practice of psychiatry is rudimentary.
00:27:09.000You have to take extraordinary care when you're dealing with people who have severe mental illness.
00:27:13.000And that includes psychiatrists, many of whom are very often, again, they have a very difficult job because they're dealing with people who legitimately are psychotic in many cases.
00:27:21.000But I will say that the care can be spotty.
00:27:25.000Sometimes it's not comprehensive enough.
00:27:27.000These are difficult, difficult problems.
00:27:29.000And there is sometimes not an easy solve.
00:27:31.000I know we're always looking for the easy take or the easy solve.
00:27:37.000So, again, some of this has become a hot topic because Clancy's parents started to go fund me for their living expenses while they attended to Lindsay between her paralysis and the trial proceedings.
00:27:46.000About $850,000 was raised so far, with most of the comments coming from moms sympathizing with Lindsay because of her postpartum psychosis.
00:27:55.000Now, again, I don't, I wish I had a hot take even on this.
00:27:58.000I really don't even have a hot take on this one, per se.
00:28:01.000Again, I think that if you are saying that it's just like me, it's just like, no, it isn't.
00:28:05.000It's an actual psychological condition that is different from your own psychiatric condition.
00:28:11.000And then there are some morons on TikTok, some lib women on TikTok, who are trying to argue that she shouldn't be prosecuted at all and that her husband is somehow the killer because we have all frontally lobotomized ourselves with the internet.1.00
00:28:22.000We've made ourselves massively, massively dumber.0.99
00:28:26.000And then there is the kind of generalized conservative response you sometimes see that Lindsey Clancy was not the victim.0.95
00:28:31.000Her children are, again, no one is denying the victimhood of the kids.
00:28:42.000That is not the question in this case.
00:28:44.000The question is, again, whether she was in her right mind enough to be held responsible for her actions in that way.
00:28:50.000And again, she is going to go to a psychiatric ward probably for the rest of her life because of this.
00:28:55.000So, this idea that she's just going to be released and just be out on the streets waiting to kill again, that's not what we are talking about here.0.61
00:29:02.000And then there are some people who say that we should get rid of the insanity plea altogether and just execute psychotic killers.
00:29:08.000And that is a vast gap, I will say.0.66
00:29:23.000If the solution were just, if it were a binary between let psychotic killers roam free or kill them, then I would choose kill them because again, you have to prefer the interests of society over the interests of the psychotic killer.0.99
00:30:37.000But she had talked openly about her own postpartum depression, talked about how it was real, and talked about how she gave up custody of her own kids because she was concerned about her safety around the kids, which, of course, is the responsible move here.
00:30:51.000What do you want people to know about postpartum depression that you think they miss?
00:32:03.000In Penantera talked with Jay Shetty about the fact that she gave full custody of her child to the husband or to her longtime partner because she was concerned about safety issues.
00:32:16.000I mean, the idea that anybody would think that I would just give away my child and be okay with it is heartbreaking.
00:32:29.000You know, as you said, I was struggling with mental health.
00:32:36.000And anxiety and the postpartum, and having to act my way through it, and just feeling like I completely lost myself.
00:32:51.000And I think a misconception is that I have been in the past forced into treatment when, in fact, I have been the one who sought it out, who was saying, I desperately need help.
00:33:10.000I don't, I, you know, I know this is going to look terrible, but I am, I cannot live like this.
00:33:18.000I believe she lost like advertising deals as a result of this interview because she talked openly about this sort of stuff, which again, that is ridiculous to me.0.95
00:33:31.000Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.