Patrick Clancy After Mistrial: “Will Have to Relive the Pain” of Children’s Deaths

The father of three young children strangled in their Massachusetts home said late Friday that he will never recover from their deaths and that another trial would force him to relive the tragedy after a judge declared a mistrial in the murder case against their mother Lindsay Clancy.

Patrick Clancy issued a statement through attorney David Meier after Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the former labor and delivery nurse charged with killing 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan on Jan. 24, 2023.

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“Patrick Clancy is grateful to the Court and to the jurors for their hard work, their commitment, and their perseverance,” Meier said. “The loss of Patrick’s children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful — for Patrick, for his family, and for all us.”

The mistrial is not an acquittal and does not erase the fact that three children are dead.

Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. She has not disputed that she killed the children in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home with exercise bands after sending her then-husband out to pick up takeout and medicine. When Patrick Clancy called 911, he told the dispatcher, “She killed the kids.” Callan died days later.

Clancy then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window. She remains paralyzed from the waist down and has been held without bail at Tewksbury Hospital, a forensic psychiatric facility.

The legal fight was never about whether the children were killed. It was about whether Clancy could be held accountable.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued that postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her behavior to the law. Prosecutors said she acted intentionally and with planning, arranging for her husband to leave the house and killing the oldest child first because she was most likely to resist. They told jurors Clancy remained capable of ordinary tasks that day, including taking the children to the doctor and playing with them in the snow.

Sullivan instructed the jury of nine women and three men that a person is not criminally responsible “if she has a mental disease or defect” and, as a result, “lacks the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.” He also reminded them that mental illness alone does not erase criminal responsibility.

Deliberations began August 27 after a trial that included more than 80 witnesses and more than 300 exhibits. Jurors spent days — nearly 40 hours by one account — trying to reach a unanimous verdict required under Massachusetts law. They repeatedly told the court they were deadlocked.

On Friday they sent a note that read, “It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to.”

A day earlier, jurors said one member “refused to listen” to the court’s directions. Reddington asked that the juror be removed, telling the judge, “If we come back in a half hour with a mistrial because of a juror that has just spurned the instructions of this court, it’s a shame. It’s a real shame.”

Sullivan refused, saying, “I don’t feel it’s appropriate to say I agree with one juror or 11.” The court has not independently confirmed how the panel was divided.

Sullivan paused before formally declaring the mistrial so the defense could seek emergency relief. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied the request.

After the ruling, Reddington said his client and her parents were “robbed by one (juror) for whatever (their) agenda was” and that the outcome came down to a single juror who did not follow the law on reasonable doubt. “Obviously, if we didn’t have that one individual, we would have had a verdict and we would be out of here,” he said.

Clancy remains charged with murder and is expected to stay institutionalized while Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz decides whether to retry the case. Cruz has maintained that the killings were cold-blooded murder.

A hearing is scheduled for September 29.

Pro-life writers have called that reaction a moral inversion: compassion for a mother who killed her children, with far less public focus on Cora, Dawson and Callan themselves.

Journalist Caitlin Flanagan wrote that “what began as admirable compassion for a woman who says she was driven by mental illness to commit the world’s greatest form of evil has turned into something strange: an almost exultant, fan-like celebration of Lindsay Clancy.”

Paul Batura of Focus on the Family argued that a culture already trained to treat a child’s death as secondary to a mother’s distress — first in abortion, then in cases like this one — struggles to say plainly that killing children is wrong even when the mother is ill. Postpartum mental illness is real, he wrote, but “an individual can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible.”

Abby Johnson, CEO and founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries, who herself experienced postpartum psychosis after the birth of one of her children, said the intense identification with Clancy reveals a deeper moral distortion long cultivated by abortion advocacy.

“I am not arguing that compassion for Lindsay is wrong…What concerns me is something different. We have become extraordinarily practiced at looking at a dead child and asking first what his or her mother was going through. And abortion taught us how to do that. For decades, the defense of abortion has depended on shifting the moral center of the story away from the human being who dies and toward the human being experiencing the crisis. The mother’s suffering becomes the justification. But suffering does not make killing good,” Johnson wrote.

Johnson stressed that mental illness may affect legal culpability without changing the moral nature of the act.

“Mental illness may affect a person’s culpability for an act. It does not change the moral nature of the act itself,” she said. “Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them.”

Johnson argued that culture has spent more than 50 years training itself to begin with a mother’s fear, financial stress, lack of support or depression until the child’s humanity nearly disappears—first in abortion and now in cases like this one.

“We can demand better postpartum mental-health care in their names. We can acknowledge that their mother may have been gravely ill. We can pray for Lindsay,” Johnson wrote. “None of that requires us to forget where the greatest irreversible harm occurred. Three children went to bed on January 24, 2023, in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never get to grow up.”

Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot be allowed to become peripheral to their own story.