Prosecutors in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial drew sharp criticism from a criminal defense attorney for their courtroom conduct, including a question about "mortal sin" that the judge ordered stricken from the record.
The trial of the 36-year-old Duxbury, Massachusetts, mother accused of strangling her three children entered a pivotal stretch this week at Plymouth Superior Court, with prosecutors resting their case Monday and the defense launching its own arguments the same day. By Wednesday, a forensic psychologist had testified that Clancy called a suicide hotline at least twice in December 2022 and was turned away both times, weeks before her children were found dead.
Lindsay Clancy faces three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, just seven months old. The defense argues she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis when she killed them. The trial, expected to last six to eight weeks, now heads toward closing arguments scheduled for Monday.
On Tuesday, Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham asked Lindsay Clancy's mother-in-law, Susan Clancy, whether she knew murder was a "mortal sin." Judge William Sullivan called a sidebar almost immediately and ordered the remark stricken from the record.
Criminal defense attorney Donna Rotunno, providing commentary for Fox News Digital, said the moment captured a broader problem with the prosecution's approach. She told the outlet that prosecutors have come across as "uncaring and snarky."
Rotunno went further:
"I understand that your job is to prosecute this murder case and you view this as a first-degree murder, but in sort of ignoring the true emotion that this type of a case invokes, and by ignoring it, you are really tone deaf as to the way the jurors feel."
That is a pointed observation, and it matters for a reason that goes beyond courtroom style. Jurors in a case like this, three dead children, a mother who may have been mentally shattered, are going to carry emotion into the deliberation room whether prosecutors acknowledge it or not. Ignoring that reality is not toughness. It is a strategic miscalculation.
Rotunno described Susan Clancy's testimony as significant, noting that the mother-in-law appeared "deeply sympathetic" to what Lindsay Clancy was going through. For the defense, that kind of witness, a family member of the victims who does not condemn the defendant, can carry more weight with a jury than any expert.
On Wednesday, the defense called Dr. Paul Zeizel, a clinical forensic psychologist, to the stand. His testimony painted a picture of a woman whose mental health was deteriorating, and whose calls for help went unanswered.
Zeizel testified that Lindsay Clancy called a suicide hotline in December 2022. She was turned away. She called again. She was turned away again. The reason, Zeizel said, was chilling in its bureaucratic simplicity:
"They told us she did not meet the standard of care because she did not have a plan."
That detail should stop every reader cold. A woman called a crisis line, twice, and was told she did not qualify for help because she had not yet mapped out how she would end her life. Weeks later, her three children were dead.
Zeizel also described Clancy's mental state during the period leading up to the killings:
"She felt that her brain was damaged. She felt that she should kill herself. And she's never going to get any better."
None of this excuses the deaths of three children. But it raises hard questions about the systems that were supposed to intervene before a mother in crisis reached the breaking point. The defense's strategy is clear: show the jury that Lindsay Clancy did not quietly ignore her own deterioration. She reached out. The system did not reach back.
Kevin Reddington, Clancy's defense attorney, also pushed back on what he characterized as a misleading prosecution narrative about McLean Hospital, the psychiatric facility where Clancy received treatment. Reddington argued that prosecutors had made it seem as though McLean was a world-class institution overflowing with staff eager to help, and that Clancy simply refused care.
Reddington put it bluntly:
"Her involvement in this case came about after one of the prosecutors, I don't recall which, made it out on direct examination that McLean is some kind of a five-star institution where the doctors, the psychiatrists, the psychotherapists, and the counselors were all banging into each other in the hallway trying to interview Miss Clancy, who was just blithely refusing care and treatment, which is not the case."
To support that argument, Reddington asked the court to add Emily Thorndike, a former clinical social worker at McLean Hospital, to the witness list. Judge Sullivan rejected that motion. But the judge did grant a separate defense request to include records relating to McLean's staffing levels and the programs it offered during Clancy's stay there.
That partial victory matters. If the defense can show that McLean was understaffed or that its programs were less robust than prosecutors implied, it undercuts a central piece of the prosecution's case: the idea that Clancy had access to adequate mental health care and chose not to take it.
Reddington closed his questioning of Dr. Zeizel with a pointed exchange. He asked whether Clancy ever mentions her children, a direct challenge to what Reddington characterized as a prosecution suggestion that she does not talk about them.
Zeizel's answer was direct:
"She does speak about her children. She really loves them and misses them and thinks of them every single day. Almost every moment of the day."
For the defense, that kind of testimony is aimed squarely at the jury's sense of who Lindsay Clancy is now, and, by extension, who she was before. A mother consumed by grief over the children she lost is a different figure than a cold defendant who refuses to acknowledge what happened.
Reddington told Fox News on Wednesday that closing arguments will take place Monday. He did not say whether Lindsay Clancy will testify in her own defense. The witness list in the case contains more than 200 names.
Outside the courthouse, a group of supporters planned to wear pink on Thursday morning at Plymouth County Superior Court. Social media posts encouraged similar gatherings in other cities, though the organizers were not identified by name.
Reddington said Clancy is aware of the outside support.
Three children are dead, and nothing in this trial will bring them back. But the question before the jury is not whether a tragedy occurred. It is whether the systems that were supposed to catch a mother in freefall failed her, and whether prosecutors, in their rush to secure a conviction, have failed to reckon with that possibility. The "mortal sin" question, the suicide hotline that turned her away, the hospital staffing records the defense wants the jury to see, all of it points in the same direction. When institutions fall short and then the state demands maximum accountability from the person those institutions were supposed to help, jurors notice the gap.
Accountability runs in every direction, or it runs nowhere at all.
