A jury in Massachusetts is deliberating the fate of Lindsay Clancy, a 36-year-old former labour and delivery nurse charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months old — at the family's home in Duxbury, a suburban town south of Boston. Clancy does not dispute that she killed them. Her defence rests entirely on a claim of legal insanity, arguing that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and therefore unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions or conform her behaviour to the law. If convicted of first-degree murder, she faces life in prison without parole.

The five-week trial, which drew testimony from more than 80 witnesses over 21 days, centred on a sharp dispute between psychiatric experts. The defence argued that Clancy had been suffering from hallucinations and delusions following the birth of her youngest child, that she had been placed on more than a dozen medications, and that her various healthcare providers had failed to share information with one another — missing critical warning signs. Family members testified that Clancy had been