If Massachusetts retries Lindsay Clancy for killing her three children, the Commonwealth should not simply rerun Trial One with different jurors. It needs a different theory of presentation. The first trial became overwhelmingly a battle of psychiatrists. Postpartum psychosis, depression, medications, hospitalisation, delusions, mental-health treatment and Clancy's psychiatric history occupied the intellectual battlefield. The defence wanted the case fought there because psychiatry offered the route to a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The Commonwealth contested that narrative, but it largely fought on terrain selected by the defence. Trial Two should add another battlefield: put the exercise bands on trial.
Exercise resistance bands are unusual ligatures. They are elastic devices deliberately manufactured to resist elongation. Their precise mechanical behaviour depends upon their material, dimensions, condition, degree of stretching, number of wraps and manner of application. That means nobody should simply announce from an armchair how much force Lindsay Clancy needed to exert or for precisely how long. Measure it. The Commonwealth presumably knows what bands were used and possesses the forensic evidence concerning how they were applied. A biomechanical or materials expert could test identical or appropriately comparable bands and establish their force-extension characteristics. The medical examiner could explain what the injuries reveal about the mechanisms involved, while other forensic evidence could establish as much as possible about application, positioning and duration. Then put those physical facts alongside the psychiatric evidence.
This would not establish that Clancy was sane. That is too crude an argument, and it would give the defence an easy answer. Psychotic people are capable of organised physical behaviour. Someone suffering severe mental illness can walk, drive, manipulate objects, follow sequences and perform physically difficult actions. The prosecution's point should be subtler and much more difficult to escape. Clancy did not perform one instantaneous violent act; she killed three children separately, and that means sequence matters. There was a first child, an application of a ligature and a period during which constriction continued. There was the completion of that act, followed by a transition to another child, another positioning of the ligature, another application and another period of persistence. Then came another transition and another child. Whatever psychiatric state existed had to exist through that entire sequence if it is to explain the entire sequence.
That should be the Commonwealth's question throughout Trial Two: not simply whether Lindsay Clancy was psychotic, but what exactly her mental state was while she was doing each of these things. The distinction is enormous. A diagnosis does not commit a crime, and a diagnostic label does not tell us automatically what somebody understood at a particular second. The legal question concerns Clancy's criminal responsibility at the time of the killings. Consequently, the prosecution should break "the killings" apart and make the defence account for the actual conduct involved.
The physical sequence provides something especially important: repeated opportunities to stop. The prosecution need not claim that killing the first child would magically have terminated a psychotic episode. Psychiatry does not operate through an on-off switch, and there is no scientific basis for asserting that the sight of the first dead child necessarily would have restored Clancy to reality. Nevertheless, the completion of the first attack created another moment in the sequence at which the conduct could have ceased, and it did not. The movement to the second child created another, the completion of the second killing created another, and the movement to the third created yet another. At each stage the violence continued. Only after all three children had been attacked did the violence turn towards Clancy herself. That chronology does not prove legal sanity, but it demands explanation.
This is where the distinction between shooting and ligature strangulation becomes useful, provided it is not overstated. A gun can produce death through an extraordinarily brief physical act: a finger moves, the weapon fires and the irreversible consequence follows almost instantaneously. That tells us relatively little about whether the perpetrator would have persisted in the same conduct for a prolonged period. Ligature strangulation is different because it necessarily unfolds through time. In this case it also occurred sequentially against three separate victims. The prosecution therefore had a series of actions rather than one instantaneous event from which to argue persistence, organisation and repeated continuation. Those characteristics do not disprove psychosis, but they are evidence that the psychiatric experts must explain.
That distinction should govern the Commonwealth's entire approach to a retrial. Do not ask a physicist or biomechanical expert to diagnose Lindsay Clancy. Ask the expert to establish the physical facts, then ask the psychiatrists whether their reconstruction of Clancy's mind adequately explains those facts. The cross-examination almost writes itself. The expert says that Clancy was psychotic when she killed her children, and the prosecution accepts that psychosis and purposeful motor behaviour are not mutually exclusive. A psychotic person can perform a sequence of organised actions. Very well: what evidence establishes that Clancy was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct during the first strangulation? What establishes that state at its completion and during the transition to the second child? What establishes it while the second ligature was being applied, after the second child was incapacitated and during the transition to the third? Finally, what establishes that the same legally incapacitating state persisted until the third killing was complete?
Those questions force an important distinction between diagnosis and reconstruction. A psychiatrist may have abundant evidence that Clancy suffered severe mental illness, but that does not necessarily establish her precise mental state at every stage of the killings. If an expert concludes that she must have remained psychotic throughout because otherwise she would not have killed three children, another question becomes unavoidable: how do you know? There is a danger of circularity here that Trial Two should explore relentlessly. Clancy killed her children because she was psychotic; we know that she was psychotic at the legally relevant level because otherwise she would not have killed her children. That cannot be allowed to become a self-proving proposition.
The physical evidence also gives the jury something psychiatry cannot: an external anchor. Psychiatric evidence in cases like this is inevitably interpretative. Experts examine medical records, medications, statements, reported symptoms and behaviour and reconstruct a mental state after the event. Highly qualified experts can examine essentially the same material and reach different conclusions. An exercise band does not have an opinion. Its elasticity can be measured, its dimensions can be measured and its behaviour under load can be measured. The injuries can be documented and the chronology reconstructed to whatever extent the evidence permits. The prosecution should distinguish rigorously between what can be demonstrated experimentally and what remains unknown, because doing so makes the demonstrated evidence more powerful rather than less.
Bring the band into the courtroom and let an expert explain what it is. Show the jury how the particular type of resistance band behaves when elongated, establish experimentally what can legitimately be established about its mechanics, explain the forensic evidence concerning its use and put the chronology beside it. This should not become theatre unsupported by science. The prosecution should not have jurors casually experimenting with an exhibit unless the judge permits an appropriate demonstration and the conditions meaningfully correspond to the evidence. But there is nothing improper about making the physical instrument of death intellectually central to the prosecution case. The band should cease being background scenery and become the organising object around which the prosecution asks its central question: whatever was happening inside Lindsay Clancy's mind, what does the sustained physical conduct tell us about her capacity to act, persist, change tasks and continue?
This is also where Trial One seems to have missed an opportunity, due to the female paradigm the case existed in. From the public coverage, the Commonwealth did not develop the physics and biomechanics of the bands into a major independent strand of its case. The prosecution challenged the defence psychiatric narrative, but it did not make the physical mechanics of three sequential ligature killings the centrepiece they could become at a retrial.
The Commonwealth should be relentless without becoming theatrical. It should concede what genuinely should be conceded: Lindsay Clancy suffered serious mental-health problems, the evidence of psychiatric illness is real, postpartum psychosis is real, and a person can be severely mentally ill while nevertheless performing organised actions. Then comes the word that matters: but. Mental illness is not automatically legal insanity; diagnosis does not automatically establish incapacity at the moment of an offence; the relevant mental state must account for what Clancy actually did; there were three victims rather than one; the killings were sequential rather than simultaneous; each transition created another stage in the conduct; the violence continued until all three children had been attacked; and only then did Clancy turn the violence upon herself. And, most importantly, she came out of the alleged psychotic state at least when her husband found her.
That is the larger lesson from Trial One. Too much of the public discussion has treated psychiatric diagnosis as though it ends the inquiry when it should begin it. The existence of mental illness is one question, the nature and severity of that illness are another, and its effects at the legally relevant moments are another still. The prosecution needs to keep those propositions separate. There is even a usable version of the brutal line that the raw argument produces: this looks less like an instantaneous psychotic explosion than a sequence of terrible tasks being completed. The prosecution should not state that as medical fact; it should make the jury ask the question. Was this a psychotic episode that happened to involve a succession of organised acts, or does the succession of organised acts tell us something important about the nature and legal significance of the psychiatric state? That is a jury question.
There is a broader lesson here about criminal trials dominated by psychiatric evidence. Experts necessarily speak in diagnostic categories, and lawyers naturally follow them into arguments about symptoms, medications and competing diagnoses. Eventually the human actions constituting the alleged crime can almost disappear beneath layers of clinical terminology. The physical evidence cuts through that abstraction. Three children died, they died separately, ligatures were applied, each killing required conduct unfolding through time, after one child there was another, after two there was a third, and after three came the suicide attempt. Whatever psychiatric theory the jury ultimately accepts must fit those facts rather than displace them.
That should be Trial Two. Put the psychiatrists back in the witness box and let the defence call every expert it considers necessary. Let the jury hear the full evidence about postpartum psychosis, medications, depression and Clancy's psychiatric history. Nothing should be suppressed or trivialised. Then put the exercise bands beside that evidence: measure them, explain them, reconstruct what can properly be reconstructed, build the chronology, identify every transition that the evidence supports and ask the psychiatric experts, stage by stage, to explain how their conclusions fit what physically occurred.
Psychiatry can tell the jury what might have been happening inside Lindsay Clancy's mind, while the bands, the bodies and the sequence tell the jury what Lindsay Clancy actually did. Trial Two should force those two bodies of evidence into direct confrontation and then let twelve jurors decide.