I Understand Why a Jury Could Not Convict Lindsay Clancy

When she jumped out a second-story window of her suburban Massachusetts home, Lindsay Clancy did not put her hands out to break her fall.

This detail from the weekslong trial of Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who was charged with murdering her three small children, is one I cannot shake. Both the defense and the prosecution agree that Clancy suffered from mental illness in the period leading up to the killings and her suicide attempt. “She really did a free-fall dive headfirst” onto the “hard, frozen ground,” said Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, a forensic pathologist and a former chief medical examiner in Rhode........

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