This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Lindsay Clancys attorney sought to blunt prosecutors portrayal of the Massachusetts mother as organized and calculating, pressing a hospital psychiatrist to acknowledge that a person can communicate, make plans and carry them out while experiencing psychosis.
“People can communicate and plan and act on plans even if theyre in the middle of a psychosis, right?” defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Dr. Sejal Shah Monday.
“Yes,” Shah replied.
Reddington then asked whether someone must be “drooling and stumbling and unable to walk and talk” to be psychotic. Shah said no and agreed that a person in psychosis can still communicate with others.
Clancy is charged in the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, inside the familys Duxbury home. Her defense maintains she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors argue she acted deliberately and understood what she was doing.
LINDSAY CLANCYS EX-HUSBAND DETAILS BIG SPIRAL AS EXPERT SAYS ONE PART SCARED ME IN MOMS MURDER TRIAL
Seth J. Zuckerman, a celebrity criminal defense attorney, former New York City prosecutor and founder of Zuckerman Legal Group, said the case will turn on Clancys mental state at the precise time the children were killed.
“What was in her mind at the exact time that she killed her children?” Zuckerman told Fox News Digital.
He said prosecutors have focused on Patrick Clancys trips to CVS and a local restaurant, along with his communications with his wife, to portray her as lucid during the critical time frame.
WATCH: Psychiatrist calls Lindsay Clancy an ‘honest’ patient
LINDSAY CLANCYS EX-HUSBAND DETAILS PILL USE AS EXPERT SAYS EVIDENCE COULD SHAPE MURDER TRIAL
Shah, an associate chief of psychiatry and medicine at Brigham and Womens Hospital, first evaluated Clancy five days after the killings.
She testified that Clancy was confused, made mistakes during a cognitive assessment and had experienced visual hallucinations after spinal surgery.
Shah diagnosed delirium and said possible causes included anesthesia, oxygen problems and an elevated heart rate. The symptoms resolved by the following day, Shah said.
During later evaluations, Clancy appeared calm and cooperative, displayed organized and goal-directed thinking and denied hallucinations and suicidal or homicidal intent.
Reddington used cross-examination to argue those observations did not establish Clancy was free of psychosis at the time of the killings.
“Was she, in your opinion and your experien
