Through weeks of testimony, defense attorney Kevin Reddington tried to convince those jurors that, in the months before the killings, Clancy was a profoundly mentally ill woman desperately trying to get help. The records show she went to multiple providers, called a suicide hot line, tried more than a dozen medications in the hopes of getting relief from the disturbing thoughts intruding upon her daily. The system failed her at every turn, Reddington argued, utterly unequal to the severity of her illness.
The case “sure as hell is” about postpartum care for women, he said in his opening statement. In his closing on Thursday, he made a point of noting that all of the prosecution experts who testified Clancy should be held responsible were men.
“You have these men coming in here that don’t even know psychosis from schizophrenia,” he said, adding that they don’t understand postpartum illness, either.
It’s a point that will resonate with anyone who has struggled in the months after giving birth. And it has clearly resonated with women across the country, who see in Clancy’s case proof that we don’t take the struggles of new mothers seriously enough. On Aug. 20, 400 of those women gathered outside the courthouse, dressed in pink, to raise awareness of how difficult it is for women to get adequate treatment for postpartum illness.
For prosecutors, convicting Clancy meant defending that system, at every turn. Her health providers did everything right, they argued. It was Clancy who failed.
“This defendant had a means and access to mental health that most people don’t, and she chose to deal with her mental health issues in the worst way,” Buckingham said. “She chose to manipulate her providers, seek out the quick and easy fix when she was feeling depressed and anxious, and when she didn’t get what she expected, she chose an alternate route.”
It’s a risky argument to make to anybody who has even a glancing familiarity with the mental health system in this country. Legions of Americans know firsthand how difficult it is to find adequate psychiatric help, especially in an emergency. We all know how often people in dire need spend days in hallways in overcrowded emergency rooms, unable to find a spot in a facility designed to treat mental illness. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague tried to thread the needle by acknowledging that in her closing statement.
“This case is not about our mental health system or how it treats women,” she said. “That’s a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue. But an issue that’s not on trial here.”
She then went on to list the many ways in which Clancy was to blame for her inability to get a handle on her mental health struggles.
“It’s not the system . . . that caused her to strangle her kids,” Sprague said. “In fact, she had more access to treatment and care and support than a lot of people do.” Clancy had good health insurance, maternity leave, a loving family who wanted to help her, a nanny, and preschool for her two older children. But she was impatient, noncompliant, and withheld information from her providers, Sprague said, lying when they asked her if she was having disturbing thoughts. She was worried her kids would be taken away from her.
The prosecutor argued that was proof that Clancy knew the difference between right and wrong — that she was not incapacitated by mental illness. Sprague was betting that jurors would not see through the broad stereotypes of mental illness that prosecutors presented in the courtroom.
But a person in the grips of severe mental illness, including psychosis, can behave rationally in some ways, experts say. They may be unable to control themselves during an act of violence, but still understand they will get in trouble for it.
The fact that Clancy was functioning in some moments does not preclude her having an auditory hallucination in which she was ordered to kill the children she loved by a male voice she could not resist, as she and her attorney have claimed. We’ve seen this in other cases: A mother can care well for her children right up until she does the unthinkable to them. She can obey traffic signals and worry about their health and build a snowman with them just hours before she takes their lives, as Clancy did. Her illness can also make her genuinely believe killing them is the only way to save them.
She can take them on a visit to a museum, as Clancy and her husband, Patrick, did two weeks before that awful January evening. But to Sprague, the video from that visit is proof that Clancy was criminally responsible for their deaths. The prosecutor argued that if she could control herself at the museum, she could control her actions on the evening she killed the children.
“If you watched that video and . . . we asked you, ‘Pick out the woman who is depressed. Pick out the woman who wants to kill herself. Pick out the woman who’s about to kill her kids,’ you couldn’t,” Sprague told jurors. “She’s completely calm. All her behaviors are typical and normal because she’s able to control her behavior.”
The complexities and apparent contradictions of mental illness may be difficult for ordinary people to get their heads around. But every single mother on this planet knows what it’s like to act normal and try to show your kids a good time, even when you’re in excruciating pain on the inside. Just ask us.
In that video from the science museum, prosecutors see a controlling, manipulative woman. They see a woman who faked psychosis to get away with killing the three children who, they say, stood in the way of Clancy’s plan to take her own life — a plan they suggest she was not strong enough to complete.
It’s hard to see the logic in their argument, but maybe the jury will buy it.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.