September 23, 2026:

Lindsay Clancy’s criminal trial for allegedly killing her three children ended in a mistrial on Sep. 4, 2026. Jurors who spoke to the media reported that 11 people voted to find her not guilty by reason of insanity and that a single hold-out juror wanted to find her guilty. 

To me, this should have been an open-and-shut case of insanity. In Massachusetts, that defense applies if a person can’t “appreciate” that their conduct is wrong or control their actions.

Clancy, 36, was, by all accounts, a doting and competent mother. After the birth of her third child, she complained of anxiety, insomnia, and intrusive thoughts about suicide. Her husband, Patrick Clancy, said she’d had thoughts of harming her children. Instead of receiving appropriate psychiatric help, the kind that might have prevented tragedy, Clancy was prosecuted for first-degree murder. 

As a feminist legal historian, I see Clancy’s case as part of a broader tendency to criminalize motherhood and pregnancy when women don’t meet certain gendered expectations: namely, to prioritize reproduction, motherhood, and rigid traditional gender roles above all else. 

If our children die, in the eyes of society—and, too often, in U.S. courtrooms—it is the mother’s fault. And that conclusion holds whether children die from disease, an accident, or as victims of a woman’s own untreated mental illness. 

What is postpartum psychosis?

Postpartum psychosis is a rare but dangerous mental illness that most commonly presents after birth. It may include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, insomnia, and other symptoms. In a given year, one in three of every 1,000 postpartum women in the U.S. will be affected.

Postpartum psychosis is different from the more common diagnosis of postpartum depression, which affects one in seven postpartum people. While people suffering from postpartum depression experience feelings of hopelessness and anxiety, they do not have the break with reality that characterizes postpartum psychosis. 

While the vast majority of people who develop postpartum psychosis will not kill their children, researchers estimate that it carries a roughly 1-4 percent risk of infanticide. 

There is very little research on the condition. Postpartum psychosis is not included in the DSM-5—the professional diagnostic tool used by psychiatrists to identify, define, and treat mental health conditions—as a standalone diagnosis.

More than three dozen countries have passed separate criminal statutes providing for a reduced sentence for postpartum infanticide. A few U.S. states are following suit. In 2018, Illinois began allowing postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis to be considered as mitigating factors when sentencing women convicted of certain felonies; this would apply in cases of child neglect or infanticide. Some New York City lawmakers have called on the state to pass a similar law.

In 2025, Massachusetts proposed a bill that would require postpartum mothers charged with a crime within the first year of giving birth to get a mental health evaluation.

“New moms [in psychosis] lose touch with reality, placing themselves and their children at risk,” Dr. Lee Cohen, the director of the women’s mental health center at Massachusetts General Hospital, told lawmakers at  a committee hearing on the bill in October 2025.

Mothers need more support, get less

Lindsay Clancy was a well-off nurse in Duxbury, Massachusetts, who had, from what we know, a good support system. She had a close family and an involved husband. For months after the birth of her third child, Callan, in May 2022, Clancy reported anxiety and severe difficulty sleeping.

Her symptoms got more severe and eventually turned to suicidal ideation, and intrusive thoughts of harming her children, according to her husband and mother, in the weeks leading up to the killing.

Beginning in September 2022, she sought help from multiple medical practitioners. She spent five days in a psychiatric hospital in early January 2023, mere weeks before her children died. However, she never received an official diagnosis of postpartum psychosis—despite reporting insomnia and sleep deprivation, which have been linked to the onset of psychosis. After the killings, a psychiatrist diagnosed Clancy with postpartum psychosis and testified for her defense at trial.

Clancy was seemingly not prescribed Zurzurvae, the only drug specifically approved to treat postpartum depression.

(Read: This Pill Treats Postpartum Depression. So Why Don’t More People Take It?)

Instead, according to a New Yorker profile on her case, Clancy was prescribed at least 13 medications to treat various other maladies in the span of four months, including: the antidepressant Zoloft, the benzodiazepine Ativan, and the sleep aid Ambien. 

On Nov. 30, 2022, two months before Clancy allegedly killed her children, she was also prescribed Seroquel, an antipsychotic sometimes used as a sleep aid. It did little to help her anxiety or sleep.

Her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, told the New Yorker that Lindsay couldn’t find a therapist with immediate availability after he reportedly called more than a dozen therapists for her. 

Had Clancy been diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, she would likely have been admitted to a hospital immediately. The condition is considered a psychiatric emergency that requires in-patient treatment. The risks to herself and her children would have been communicated to her husband and family.

Tragically, after her pleas for help, on Jan. 24, 2023, Clancy allegedly strangled her three children in the basement of her Massachusetts home. Then, according to the New York Times, she cut her wrists and neck and jumped out the second story window in an apparent attempt to kill herself. 

While Clancy has not been convicted at trial, her defense lawyer did not dispute that she killed her kids—only that she was not sane at the time of the killings.

History of prosecuting mothers

Even when a crime never occurs, mothers may be convicted in the deaths of their young children. 

The U.S legal system tends to criminalize mothers when there are tragic accidents. The legal system presumes criminal wrongdoing—i.e. murder—rather than allowing for mental illness, accident, or genetic disorder. 

In 2016, Katie Smith of Augusta, Georgia was convicted of killing her 2-year-old son, Tucker, based on a determination that he had “shaken baby syndrome,” a medical diagnosis that has faced increasing scrutiny over its faulty diagnostic criteria. The problem with the condition is not that horrific injuries aren’t caused by shaking small children. It’s that the same injuries—brain swelling, brain hemorrhaging, and retinal hemorrhaging—can also be caused by strokes, falls, and other health problems. 

Tucker had been having seizures for a while. He likely had epilepsy, and she had sought medical treatment multiple times. Doctors reassured her that Tucker was healthy. 

On July 30, 2014, Tucker had another seizure. Smith had been told by doctors that these were “breath-holding spells,” so she put him on the bed. However, when she checked Tucker’s oxygen levels later and saw they were dropping, Smith called 911 and tried to resuscitate him. At the hospital, a doctor concluded Tucker had been shaken, and Smith was charged.

Even with this medical evidence and Smith’s attempts to get doctors to pay attention (sound familiar?), she was convicted. After more than a decade in prison, Smith finally came home in August 2026. After her lawyers presented evidence that her son died from epilepsy, prosecutors offered her an Alford plea—a plea that allows someone to not admit guilt, with time served.

Since 1989, 44 people convicted of crimes related to  shaken baby syndrome have been exonerated, including 15 women—a strikingly high proportion considering that women make up only 9 percent of criminal exonerees overall. 

Brandy Briggs is one of these women. In 2006, Briggs—a waitress from a small town outside of Houston—was exonerated after more than six years in prison based on new physician testimony about her two-month-old’s cause of death: complications from a urinary tract infection. 

Briggs, who was only 17 when she gave birth, had brought baby Desmond to the doctor many times for kidney problems and urinary tract infections. Despite his history of health problems, Briggs was still assured to have killed her son based on the faulty science of shaken baby syndrome. 

In 1990, Sabrina Butler was convicted of murder and sentenced to the death penalty in Mississippi. She had rushed her nine-month-old baby, Walter, to the hospital after he stopped breathing in 1989. She was a young, Black teenage mother and was immediately a suspect. 

In 1995, Butler became the first woman to be exonerated from death row in the United States. Walter died from a hereditary kidney condition. Her son’s injuries, experts later testified, could have resulted from her attempting CPR. 

Yet courts continue to convict grieving parents of abuse and murder based on shaken baby syndrome.

Racialized convictions

Black moms may be somewhat more likely than others to be accused and convicted of murdering their own children. 

Some four years before Clancy’s mistrial, another Massachusetts mother, Latarsha Sanders, a Black woman, killed her young children. Her family had been concerned about her mental state, according to New York Times reporting, and her lawyers wanted to argue that she was in acute psychosis. 

The same judge oversaw both Clancy and Sanders’ trials, yet he only allowed psychiatric records to be admitted in Clancy’s trial. Sanders was convicted of murder and sentenced to a double life sentence. She was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and was recently granted a retrial.

Cases I’ve reviewed on maternal infanticide convictions do not seem to show the same stark racial disparities in arrest and conviction rates as other crimes do—the discrepancy between Clancy and Sanders’ trial outcomes notwithstanding. This issue just hasn’t been studied much, so I don’t have good data to rigorously analyze, only anecdotal evidence. But in postpartum psychosis, it seems to me, all moms get the book thrown at them. 

Black women are, however, far more likely to be policed and criminalized for certain other motherhood-related crimes, like taking drugs while pregnant. 

In 1989, Jennifer Clarise Johnson was charged for taking cocaine while pregnant. In 1991, she became the first woman criminally convicted for exposing her child to drugs while pregnant. While Johnson’s conviction was eventually overturned, similar prosecutions against pregnant people continue today. 

Criminally charging pregnant people for taking drugs was part of a larger effort by anti-abortion activists to control women’s bodily autonomy, create a backdoor to fetal “personhood,” and criminalize motherhood when it falls outside the bounds of proscribed societal roles.

These wrongful prosecutions criminalize the worst tragedies of motherhood, and use pregnancy as a way to control women’s bodies and reproduction. 

Lessons not learned

In 2002, there was another sensationalized trial concerning postpartum psychosis. Andrea Yates, a 37-year-old mother from Texas, drowned her five children in a bathtub. Initially convicted of capital murder, she was later found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 2006 retrial. 

Yates reportedly had postpartum mental health issues with her fourth pregnancy as well as prior suicide attempts. The couple was advised not to have a fifth baby, but they did anyway. Yates had also reportedly been told to never to leave Andrea unsupervised with their children. He did anyway. 

Yates’ case could have been a lesson in how severe postpartum psychosis can be, and how much more engaged doctors and dads need to be. That was more than 20 years ago, well before tragedy befell the Clancy and Sanders kids. 

We could also have learned long ago that “shaken baby syndrome” alone shouldn’t be used as a basis to convict anyone of murder. Instead, society continues to demonize mothers. 

Online, the trial was sensationalized as a referendum on women’s rights. Some commenters argued that the Clancy case was proof that women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Other courtwatchers accused those who expressed compassion for Clancy of not caring about children.

Meanwhile, research on maternal health languishes. A few days after the Clancy mistrial, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would cut funding to maternal and infant health grants in order to study “the root causes of infertility” like endometriosis and fibroids, sperm count and erectile dysfunction. One of the eliminated grants funded home-care check-ins for postpartum mothers, which are meant to help new parents—including those who are struggling with their mental health. 

If we as a society were to be honest about postpartum depression and psychosis, which would require better health care and support services, then we would need to actually admit what pregnancy does to our bodies and minds. We’d have to acknowledge how difficult motherhood is. 

But in a time of forced births and pregnancy policing, it’s no surprise that many people would rather just see Clancy as evil.

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