Defense set to continue calling witnesses in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial – The Boston Globe
The attorney for Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury woman charged with murder in the deaths of her three children in January 2023, is expected to continue calling witnesses in her murder trial on Thursday.
Jurors on Wednesday heard testimony for the first time since the trial began about how Clancy now feels about her three slain children.
Paul Zeizel, a psychologist who has evaluated Clancy dozens of times and was called to the stand as a defense witness, testified that Clancy still speaks about her children.
“She really loves them and misses them and thinks of them every single day, almost every moment of the day,” he said.
Clancy has admitted to killing her three young children at the family’s Duxbury home. Prosecutors contend that she acted intentionally and should be held criminally responsible. Clancy’s defense says she suffered from postpartum psychosis, which affected her sense of reality.
Clancy, who cut herself and jumped from a second-story window in a failed attempt to end her life after killing her children, remains paralyzed from the waist down. She has been held without bail at Tewksbury Hospital, where she continues to receive treatment.
Should jurors acquit her in Plymouth Superior Court, she would not go free but would be sent to a state psychiatric hospital where she’d come up for periodic reviews to determine whether she can live safely in the community.
How Wednesday’s testimony unfolded
By Camilo Fonseca and Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff
Psychologist Paul Zeizel faced sharp cross-examination from a prosecutor, who suggested he was subject to confirmation bias in his assessment of Clancy. On redirect, Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, refuted that assessment.
In the afternoon, the judge in the case denied a motion from the defense to allow testimony from a former McLean Hospital social worker who posted on social media pushing back on a claim by prosecutors about the facility.
The former employee at the psychiatric hospital told Judge William Sullivan that after watching the trial, she posted a TikTok video that challenged claims by prosecutors that there were adequate staffing levels at the facility when Clancy was admitted in early January. Sullivan suggested her testimony had “limited materiality” to the trial because she hadn’t worked at the hospital for roughly a year before Clancy sought treatment there.
Prosecutor sharply questions psychologist who evaluated Lindsay Clancy in hospital