A veteran prosecutor who put Susan Smith behind bars says the female-majority jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial could deliver a verdict few observers expect, not because women are softer on a mother who killed her children, but because many have faced the same struggles and refused to break.
Tommy Pope, the South Carolina lawmaker who convicted Smith more than three decades ago, told Fox News Digital that women who have battled postpartum depression themselves may hold Clancy to a harder standard than male jurors would. The jury panel seated at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachusetts, includes 12 women and six men. Only 12 of the 18 will deliberate; the rest are alternates who will be dismissed before the panel retires.
Clancy, 36, faces three counts of first-degree murder for the January 2023 strangulation deaths of her three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, at the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Her defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, argues she is not criminally responsible because she was experiencing postpartum psychosis when she killed them. Prosecution experts spent Tuesday challenging that claim, and testimony wrapped up Wednesday. Closing arguments are expected Thursday, after which the case goes to the jury.
Pope, who now serves as speaker pro tempore of the South Carolina House of Representatives, drew on his experience prosecuting Smith, a mother convicted in 1995 of drowning her two sons, three-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander, by strapping them into her car and letting it roll into a lake. Smith initially told police a Black man had carjacked her with the boys inside. Her story fell apart, and she admitted to the killings. She was sentenced to life in prison.
The Clancy case is different in its facts but raises the same core question: can a mother who kills her own children claim she was not in control? Pope suggested the answer may depend less on gender than on personal experience.
"For the most part, the women were the ones that said, you know, when I had my kids, I went through hell, or I went through depression, or I battled this, or I was overwhelmed. But they're the most important thing in my life. And so, strange twist, while a woman may have even faced postpartum depression, she may have overcome it and then be less sympathetic to Clancy."
Pope also flagged Clancy's paralysis, she now sits in a wheelchair beside her attorney, as a factor that could cut the other direction. Clancy was paralyzed after jumping from an upstairs window the night she killed her children. Whether that act was a deliberate suicide attempt or something else remains disputed at trial.
"A weird mix, too, is having her in the courtroom, whether she intentionally injured herself or, as the prosecution said, tried to slide down and just got injured. You have somebody that's now paralyzed, which obviously doesn't equate to killing three children. But some jurors, and I would think maybe even more so men, would think, well, she's already punished. She's in a wheelchair. So in a strange twist, it could almost be the opposite."
In short, Pope expects the jury's sympathies to defy easy prediction. Women who endured postpartum depression and came through it without harming their children may see Clancy's defense as an excuse, not an explanation. Men, confronted with a defendant who is visibly disabled, may feel she has already suffered enough. Neither reaction maps neatly onto the assumption that a female-heavy jury favors a female defendant.
The defense built its case around testimony from forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick, who told jurors earlier in the week that Clancy killed her children while experiencing a "command hallucination." Resnick described a woman who felt overtaken by a force beyond her control.
"Not only did she hear a command, but she felt that her body was taken over by an external force where she was in a dream state and did not have control of her own body. It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings."
The prosecution answered with Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who consults for the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. Saathoff told jurors that Clancy had never mentioned hearing voices to any of the mental health professionals, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, or physicians she saw before the killings, including staff at a facility called McLean.
"What was significant to me is that she had not spoken about hearing voices before to any of the mental health professionals, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, physicians and staff in the emergency department, or at McLean."
Saathoff went further, pointing to a detail he called unprecedented in his experience: the alleged voice stopped the moment Clancy finished strangling her youngest son, Callan.
"This was the first time she reported that, and that she experienced an auditory hallucination, according to what she told me. So that was unusual. And then what was very unusual was the fact that the voice stopped with the strangling of her youngest son."
AP News reported that Saathoff also challenged the defense's psychosis theory on practical grounds, arguing that Clancy's ability to strangle all three children quickly and methodically with exercise bands, in the short window her husband was away, pointed to control and planning, not a psychotic break. "Having no instructions as to how to do it, but being able to execute those decisions... that is surprising that she's able to accomplish all of this without any other kind of direction or plan," Saathoff testified.
Psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, who also testified Tuesday, told the court that a person hearing a command hallucination can, "in some cases," still conform their conduct to the law. That single concession goes to the heart of the prosecution's theory: even if Clancy heard a voice, she may still have been capable of choosing not to obey it.
High-profile murder cases often turn on whether jurors trust the mental-health evidence presented by each side. In other recent trials, prosecutors have revealed hidden evidence that reshaped the picture of a defendant's state of mind, and the Clancy case hinges on a similar credibility contest between dueling psychiatric experts.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy were all younger than six when they were found strangled at the family's Duxbury home in January 2023. The Washington Examiner reported their ages at the time of death as five, three, and eight months, respectively. The sheer vulnerability of the victims, none old enough to attend first grade, has shaped public reaction from the start.
That reaction has been deeply polarized. A GoFundMe page for Clancy's parents, called The Musgrove Family Fund, has raised nearly $1 million, with many donors expressing solidarity with Lindsay herself. Outside Plymouth Superior Court, supporters, some of them young women wearing pink, have gathered during the trial, making heart signs and, in some cases, bringing their own children.
One unnamed woman outside the courthouse told Fox News Digital that the trial had opened her eyes to the state of postpartum mental health support.
"This trial has really made a lot of us realize just how bad things are. Obviously, a really sad story and hard to listen to at times. But if this moves the needle just a teeny tiny bit, and women start to experience more support, then I'm here for that. I was just telling my friend that when I had my children and left the hospital, nobody really said anything about postpartum, you know, be on the lookout for things. And...you know, we just had to figure it out ourselves. It shouldn't be that way. And I hope things change."
Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are real conditions, and no serious person disputes that mothers deserve better screening and support. But sympathy for the illness is a different question from whether a specific defendant should be held criminally responsible for killing three children. The prosecution's case rests on that distinction.
Cases involving postpartum depression and domestic violence have drawn national attention before. In one Colorado case, a husband was charged with murder after claiming his wife, who suffered from postpartum depression, had taken her own life, a reminder that these tragedies resist simple narratives.
National Review's Caroline Downey compared the pro-Clancy movement to the public sympathy that surrounded Luigi Mangione during his trial, calling it "Luigi Mangione madness all over again." The pattern is familiar: social media rallies around an accused killer, supporters show up at the courthouse, and the actual victims, in this case, three children who cannot speak for themselves, recede into the background.
Breitbart noted that nearly $1 million had been raised for the family of what it described as an "admitted child killer." The fundraising total alone signals how far the public conversation has drifted from the three small victims at the center of this case.
The legal system, at least, has not lost focus. The jury at Plymouth Superior Court will weigh specific testimony, specific evidence, and a specific question: did Lindsay Clancy know what she was doing when she strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan, and could she have stopped? The prosecution says the answer to both questions is yes. The defense says psychosis robbed her of that capacity.
Murder convictions in cases with mental-health defenses often face long appellate roads. The Supreme Court's recent reinstatement of a murder conviction in another high-profile case underscored that even settled verdicts can be revisited years later. Whatever this jury decides, the legal battle may be far from over.
Closing arguments are expected Thursday. After that, 12 jurors, most of them women, will decide whether postpartum psychosis is an explanation or an excuse. Three children who never got a vote are counting on them to know the difference.