The Duxbury mother who is charged with strangling her three young children to death will pursue an insanity defense, her lawyer confirmed.

“… Statements of the defendant as to her mental condition will be relied upon by defendant’s expert witnesses and the defendant does intend to present to the Court a defense of lack of criminal responsibility,” attorney Kevin Reddington wrote in a brief filing dated Dec. 13.

Reddington has maintained that his client, Lindsay Clancy, was emotionally unstable the evening of Jan. 24, 2023, when her children lost their lives with exercise bands twisted around their necks in the basement of the family home at 47 Summer St. in Duxbury.

Clancy had at the time been suffering from postpartum depression, Reddington has said in court. Court documents say that Clancy, who was a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, was taking medications including antidepressants, anxiety-targeting benzodiazepine drugs, and the antipsychotic drug Seroquel at least as far back as the September before the deaths.

The case

Clancy is accused of the murder of her three children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, who unlike his older siblings survived the night and held on for three days — long enough to turn 8 months old when he died at Children’s Hospital in Boston on Jan. 27, 2023.

They were killed, Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said at Clancy’s initial arraignment at Plymouth District Court, by ligature strangulation, in which Clancy would have had to hold the ligature, which police allege was an exercise band, in place for up to 5 minutes per child to cause death.

“Therefore she had to strangle each of them to unconsciousness and then make sure the bands were squeezing their little necks for several minutes,” Sprague said. “She could have changed her mind at any point during that time and removed those bands from their necks and she did not.”

Sprague added Lindsay Clancy “killed the kids because she heard a voice and had ‘a moment of psychosis.’” When her husband asked “what voices” Sprague said she responded that she “heard a man’s voice telling her to kill the kids and kill herself because it was her last chance.”

Authorities say that Clancy then attempted suicide by cutting herself in the master bedroom and then leaping from the window. Her husband, Patrick Clancy, found her on the ground outside the home when he returned a little after 6 p.m. from the errands Lindsay Clancy sent him on that night to pick up dinner from a Plymouth restaurant and a children’s laxative from the pharmacy.

Sprague said that Patrick Clancy asked his wife what she had done.

“I tried to kill myself and jumped out the window,” the wife responded.

“Where are the kids?” he added.

“In the basement,” the mom said.

“Guys?” the dad called out as he went searching for his children, Sprague added.

“He could then be heard screaming in agony,” Sprague said, and “begged them to breathe” as he pulled the bands from their necks. And when first responders arrived and met him in the basement, he yelled out to them “She killed the kids!”

The case has been a slow moving one, with this latest filing being only the 17th Plymouth Superior Court docket entry.

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Lindsay Clancy has attended court hearings through internet telephony from hospital beds. She is paraplegic, Reddington has said.

“We all know … that this is an individual in dire medical condition. We all know, as counsel concedes apparently, that this woman is a danger to herself. I question whether she would even make it to a trial. She’s suicidal,” Reddington said in court to argue that she not be transferred to a jail setting. “She’s extremely emotional. However she’s unable, and has been unable, to express any happiness or sadness, or cry.

“And, in fact, sometime about a month or two ago, she made the comment that ‘I just wish I could feel something.’”

This is a developing story.