Lindsay Clancy's murder trial is in the hands of a jury after a month of searing testimony about the deaths of her three children in 2023 and the psychiatric problems she experienced before she killed them. Closing arguments concluded Thursday in the case, which has sparked debate online and demonstrations outside the courthouse over maternal well-being and the mental health system. The jury was sent off to deliberate at around 12:30 p.m. Here are some basics about the case.
Clancy, 36, is a Massachusetts woman who is charged with murder in the deaths of her children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. She hasn't disputed killing them but has pleaded not guilty to murder by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
Clancy was on maternity leave from her job as a labor and delivery nurse when the children were strangled on Jan. 24, 2023. She has been in custody since.
The children were strangled with exercise bands in their home in coastal Duxbury, Massachusetts. Their father, Patrick Clancy, discovered them in the basement when he returned from errands Lindsay Clancy had asked him to run. He found her badly injured in the yard, where she landed after jumping from a second-story window. She remains paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.
The trial hinges on Lindsay Clancy's mental health and whether she understood that killing the children was wrong.
Prosecutors contend that she did and that she acted intentionally. They noted she was involved in everyday activities the day of the killings, such as taking her children to the doctor and playing with them in the snow. The prosecution claims she deliberately sent her then-husband on errands to get him out of the house, and prosecutors have questioned the seriousness of her suicide attempt.
Clancy's lawyer, Kevin Reddington, maintains that she was so mentally ill that she shouldn't be held criminally responsible for the killings. According to her defense, she had bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis and, ultimately, it led her to believe she heard a voice telling her to kill the children so she could end her own life.
In diary entries Clancy wrote in the months before the killings, she described feeling anxious, overwhelmed, preoccupied with the details of her infant's care, beset by “brain fog,” and “desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone.”
Both the prosecution and the defense have drawn on expert testimony to support their contrasting views of Clancy’s mental state at the time of the killings.
One forensic psychiatrist, testifying for the defense, said Clancy was “clearly psychotic” and held a delusional belief that her children would be better off dying with her than being left behind. The prosecution's experts agreed that she had serious psychological problems, but said she wasn't psychotic. They also questioned Clancy's account of being commanded by a voice and asserted that she knew right from wrong and had control of her behavior.
It's a rare and serious condition that can cause disorganized thinking, delusions, hallucinations and other symptoms. It affects an estimated 1 to 2 out of 1,000 women after childbirth, but the risk is somewhat higher for people with certain mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder.
Postpartum psychosis is different from postpartum depression, a more common mood disorder.
According to court testimony and exhibits, Clancy's psychiatric decline began about three months after Callan was born, as she looked ahead to returning to work. Starting in September 2022, she sought help from multiple providers and programs, even checking herself into a psychiatric hospital for several days in early January 2023.
Her defense maintains that her care was disjointed and that her medications were poorly managed or even improper. Clancy and her husband have separately sued several people who treated her. Those claims haven't yet played out in civil court.
Prosecutors sought to underscore that Clancy had ample access to care but sometimes disregarded providers' advice, switched among providers and stopped taking certain medications. The clinicians testified that although she reported feeling suicidal, she denied having a plan to harm herself or anyone else and didn’t exhibit signs of mania or psychosis.
According to Clancy's mother, however, Clancy told her mom and then-husband in December 2022 that she thought about harming the children.
She chose not to take the witness stand. She watched the proceedings from the defense table, occasionally weeping, as when prosecutors showed autopsy photos of the children to the jury.
If Clancy is convicted, her sentence could be as severe as life in prison without the possibility of parole. If she's found not guilty due to a lack of criminal responsibility, the court will decide whether she can be released from custody or should remain confined in a state mental health facility.
If the jury can't reach a verdict, prosecutors would have to decide whether to retry the case. If a mistrial were declared for some other reason, the next steps could depend on the circumstances.
Lindsay Clancy listens to testimony during her murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court, on Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2026 in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr /The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump launched the war with Iran in late February, he initially forecast it would last four weeks to five weeks. Six months later, there still is no off-ramp in sight despite Trump's repeated assertions that the war has been won or a deal to resolve it was nearly complete.
A June memorandum of understanding was designed to pave the way to end the war but has fallen by the wayside. U.S. stockpiles of key weapons have diminished and the Republican administration has pivoted to pressuring Iran economically rather than conducting more strikes.
“No negotiations are happening right now, and this will continue until the president feels that maybe they come to the table in a meaningful way,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday.
As the shape of the war has morphed over the past half year, so, too, have the goals.
One of the prime goals now — reopening the Strait of Hormuz — was not one of Trump's original objectives. The waterway, which had been a vital shipping lane through which about 20% of the world's oil passed, was open and free to all.
Iran seized on it as a chokepoint for the global economy. The strait has been largely closed since the war started, driving up prices for fuel and fertilizer needed for farms and creating economic and political pressure in the U.S.
The U.S. has had tactical success with its goals to degrade Iran's military capabilities. But some of the other key objectives Trump laid out at the start of the conflict remain unfulfilled and others have shifted.
Here is a look at the objectives and what we know about where they stand:
In June 2025, Trump declared that the U.S. had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. But when the war started, his aides justified the strikes by warning that Iran had been just weeks away from developing a bomb.
One of the most pressing questions has been what will be done with a stockpile of about 970 pounds (440 kilograms) of enriched uranium that Tehran could potentially use for a weapon. The material is believed to be buried under three sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel last year. Trump said in a May 29 social media post that it would be retrieved by the U.S. “in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED.”
Iran has not said whether it would consent. Without permission from Iran, experts have said seizing it would be a dangerous mission requiring a sizable deployment of U.S. troops into the country.
Officials said that Tehran reaffirmed in the June memorandum of understanding that it would not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The deal called for Iran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. But many other details about Iran's program were left for future negotiations, and it's unclear how much progress, if any, was made before talks quickly fell off.
Trump has said that a proposed deal with Iran would include the reopening of the strait and the U.S. ending its blockade of Tehran’s ports, but at other times he has suggested the international waterway would somehow become American territory and indicated the U.S. could impose a toll on passing ships.
Trump also has repeatedly said that the strait is open, including during an interview on Wednesday on conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s radio show.
“It’s a functioning strait. Yes, every once in a while, there’ll be a drone or a rocket or something shot, but it is a very functioning strait,” Trump said.
One of the prime objectives laid out by the administration was to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground."
Trump said in late March that Iran's missiles “are mostly decimated" and that 90% of their missiles and launchers were knocked out.
By mid-May, that shifted to a more conservative estimate, with the president saying that 82% of Iran's missiles were gone.
Iran has shown its ability to still launch attacks in the region, including drone strikes on ships sailing through the strait.
As recently as July, the U.S. military still had Iranian military targets to strike, with its Central Command announcing it was striking “Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites and communications networks.”
Early in the war, the president and his administration sometimes listed this as a standalone objective. Other times, it has fallen off their list.
U.S. Central Command has said its targets for strikes in Iran have included weapons production and missile and drone manufacturing facilities.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers in early June that Iran has had “massive destruction” of its defense industrial base and “80 to 90% of attrition. It will take years for them to rebuild it.”
The U.S. and Israel quickly established air superiority in the skies above Iran, where they flew largely unchallenged.
Rubio told lawmakers that Iran still has drone capabilities, but it lacks the ability to use swarms of drones to attack targets, as it did at the start of the war. He also said Iran does not have a navy anymore, and relies on small craft outfitted with machine guns that harass ships and sometimes drop mines in the water.
Trump on Wednesday said that Iran's navy and air force are “totally gone."
Trump, in a March social media post, added another objective for the U.S.: “Protecting, at the highest level, our Middle Eastern Allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others."
The U.S. maintains thousands of troops on bases and other installations in the region, but Trump has been unclear on how far he would be willing to go to protect Middle East allies from threats in the long term. In June, when the U.S. said Iran fired missiles at Kuwait and Bahrain, the U.S. launched strikes on Iran in response.
But one ally — Oman — has notably not been feeling the warmth of Trump's offer of protection, and instead has grappled with Trump's wrath over the deal it was negotiating with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. In mid-August, he threatened in an interview that the U.S. would bomb Oman if it “gets in the way," using an expletive for emphasis.
In March, Trump and his administration repeatedly said degrading Iran's proxy terrorist networks was a key goal.
As time has gone on, administration officials have offered fewer updates about this objective, which the president described as ensuring that “the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces” and “ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.”
Early on, the U.S. struck Iranian-aligned militia groups in Iraq. But the biggest focus has been Israel's war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, which Iran backs. Iran has insisted that the fighting in Lebanon must be stopped as part of any deal with the U.S. Israel and the Lebanese government announced a deal, which was mediated by the U.S., for Israeli forces to leave southern Lebanon in exchange for Hezbollah's disarmament — something an administration official described as a “huge step,” speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to address the issue on the record. But the militant group has refused direct talks and its leader has said it will not disarm.
Associated Press writer Konstantin Toropin contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One, Friday, Aug. 21, 2026, at Joint Base Andrews, Md., en route to South Carolina. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
