Jury selection begins in Lindsay Clancy trial. Here's how long it could last.

Jury selection began Monday in the case against Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury, Massachusetts, mother accused of strangling her three children.

Five jurors were seated in the first day of jury selection, with 18 needed, with six alternates deemed necessary because of the disturbing nature of the case.

Nearly 90 potential jurors appeared at Plymouth Superior Court, standing face-to-face with the defendant as they were questioned the judge, prosecution and defense. Clancy seemed engaged in court on Monday, helping to pick a jury that will decide if she’s guilty or not criminally responsible in the January 2023 deaths of her three young children.

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A nurse by profession, Clancy is partially paralyzed after trying to kill herself in the same incident that left her children dead. She’s pleaded not guilty, and the now-35-year-old plans to argue an insanity defense, claiming she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and received improper treatment.

“It’ll be a complex case that will have a lot of issues that the jury is going to have to address, and they’ll be difficult to address because of the nature of the way these children met their death,” NBC10 Boston legal analyst Michael Coyne said.

For now, the defense was denied a motion to add more medical experts to its witness list.

Clancy and her husband filed lawsuits earlier this year accusing her medical providers of failing to properly diagnose, treat and monitor for her for a “severe postpartum psychiatric condition.”

Lindsay Clancy’s lawsuit detailed how she was depressed, having trouble sleeping and repeatedly hearing voices urging her to harm her children and herself. She spent several days at a psychiatric hospital just weeks before the killings.

“Lindsay Clancy did everything a mother in her situation could do. She recognized something was wrong with her. She sought medical treatment. She went to emergency rooms. She called crisis hotlines. She admitted herself to hospitals. She took the medication prescribed to her. She communicated her worsening symptoms to her providers. She told them the medications were making her worse,” the lawsuit said.

On the day of the killings, Clancy said, she heard voices saying, “This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself.”

Prosecutors aren’t buying it. The district attorney has gone on record saying that Clancy plotted the murders, and the assistant district attorney has said Clancy conducted research on the internet about how to kill for days before the deaths.

These details will have a big impact, according to Coyne.

“A lot of times, jurors and others, we all do, perhaps, think that someone is always responsible for their own acts, and therefore she should be held accountable,” he said. “So it will be a complex case that will have a lot of issues that the jury is going to have to address, and they’ll be very difficult to address because of the nature of the way these children met their deaths.”

Coyne said that he thinks a jury won’t be seated before mid- to late-August.

Legal expert Margo Lindauer said she thinks there’s a reason the judge wants so many jurors in this case.

“It’s common to have a few alternates. It is not common to have six alternates. So what this tells me is that the judge is preparing kind of the case at large that the facts that are going to emerge are going to be so egregious that there is a likelihood that multiple jurors after they are chosen may drop out,” she said. “I don’t know if the public is prepared for the seriousness of the testimony and evidence that is going to emerge.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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