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Why Lindsay Clancy’s defense would have crumbled in a California courtroom  

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Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial in Massachusetts ended in a mistrial. Had the case been tried in California, however, she would have faced a significantly tougher legal test.

There is little dispute that Clancy was mentally ill when she killed her three young children. Before the killings, she struggled with depression, anxiety, insomnia, paranoia and suicidal thoughts.

She sought treatment from multiple providers, spent time in a psychiatric hospital and took numerous medications.

After strangling her children, she attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window. She survived but was left paralyzed.

That history is heartbreaking. But it was not the central legal question at her trial.

The question was whether Clancy was legally insane when she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan.

Mental illness and legal insanity may sound like the same thing, but they are not. A person can suffer from a severe psychiatric disorder — even one involving hallucinations or delusions — and still be legally responsible for a crime.

In Massachusetts, a person is not criminally responsible if, because of a mental disease or defect, she could not know right from wrong, or could not obey the law.

That gave Clancy’s lawyers two potential arguments.

First, they could argue that postpartum psychosis prevented her from appreciating that killing her children was wrong, because she delusionally believed she was protecting them, or sending them to heaven.

Second, they could argue that even if some part of her understood that the killings were wrong, a command hallucination or psychotic episode meant she could not control........

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