Dozens gather for silent rally in support of Lindsay Clancy outside courthouse

As Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial continues to garner widespread attention across the nation, community members gathered at a silent rally Thursday outside the courthouse in Plymouth in support of the Duxbury mother.

While a short day of testimony was held inside Plymouth Superior Court, dozens attended the event, called Stand In Peace For Lindsay.

They group stood in silence, all wearing pink, without protesting or holding any signs. Nevertheless, the rally apparently affected proceedings inside court, where the jurors were polled one-by-one before testimony got underway — a source told NBC10 Boston that it was at the prosecution’s request following the standout.

Participants who spoke to NBC10 Boston in the courthouse and outside said they were there to raise awareness about mental health, most citing a personal postpartum or bipolar disorder story — the defense in the case says Clancy wasn’t criminally responsible for killing her children and brought in a psychologist as an expert who says she has bipoloar disorder, though she wasn’t diagnosed with it as she sought help before killing her children.

If you or someone you know is a new parent who’s struggling or in emotional distress, you can call the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 833-TLC-MAMA (833-852-6262) any time. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.

Few of the participants mentioned Clancy by name.

Photos from the Lindsay Clancy rally

The rally was organized by the same group that organized a rally outside the Norfolk Superior Courthouse in Dedham during both of Karen Read’s murder trials. There are expected to be a number of rallies like it across the U.S. One was even advertised in the Netherlands.

It comes after we’ve learned more about Lindsay Clancy — the person she was in the days, months and years before the killings, and in the time since then.

Wednesday’s testimony

A psychologist testifying for the defense said at her murder trial Wednesday that Clancy didn’t appreciate the “wrongfulness” of killing her three children because of her mental health issues.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in emotional distress, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.

The testimony of Paul Zeizel is the strongest evidence yet to support the defense contentions that Clancy should not be held legally responsible for murder because she has bipolar disorder and was in the grip of a rare mental illness called postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children before trying to kill herself. Zeizel began seeing Clancy as a patient at a hospital after the deaths.

“She was unable to conform her behavior to the rule of law. She had no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act,” Zeizel said, adding that she had “a mental disease or a defect.”

Clancy, 36, has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the deaths of Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, who ranged from 8 months to 5 years old. Postpartum psychosis is linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth. Researchers estimate that the condition — which is more serious and less common than postpartum depression — afflicts 1 to 2 per 1,000 women after delivery.

Prosecutors say the former labor and delivery nurse planned the January 2023 killings and contrived to get her husband out of the house by sending him to pick up medicine for one of their children and dinner for the family.

Clancy was not getting better

Zeizel, who said he spent more than 35 hours with Clancy over dozens of visits and reviewed her medical records, said she went to a perinatal clinic in December 2022 because she felt her “brain was damaged,” “she should kill herself” and that she “is never going to get any better.” She also showed signs of psychosis, was paranoid and feared that people could hear her thoughts and that she would lose her children.

“She was worried that her children would be removed from her and that she would never see them again,” he said.

But just because she was in a psychotic state, Zeizel said, that didn’t mean she couldn’t do “everyday tasks of living” like driving and searching the internet, a reference to the fact that the day of the killings she took her daughter to the doctor, played with the children in the snow and searched online for a pharmacy and a restaurant.

“So the fact she is not talking about the unicorns in the corner, she is not slurring her words and she is not unable to walk, to your opinion to a degree of medical certainty, does that mean she is not in a psychotic state?” Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington asked.

Zeizel responded: “It does not.”

Prosecution challenges Zeizel’s credibility

On cross-examination, prosecutors pointed out mistakes Zeizel made in his report about Clancy and questioned whether he could be objective about her diagnosis when he was seeing her as a patient and working with the defense including appearing with Reddington at a news conference.

Zeizel acknowledged that there was nothing in Clancy’s medical records in which she reports hearing voices telling her to kill herself, only that she told her caregivers that “she wanted to die.”

Prosecutors have questioned the seriousness of Clancy’s suicide attempt. After strangling her children, Clancy jumped from a second-story window and remains paralyzed from the waist down.

Prosecution brings up the children’s birthdays

Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham also read from daily reports from Tewksbury Hospital, the state psychiatric hospital where Clancy stays, that included the anniversary of the killings and what would have been her children’s birthdays. Those reports mentioned her parents sometimes visiting or her talking with other patients. But they never mentioned anything she did to remember her children.

Reddington asked Zeizel if he saw anything in the record from the hospital about her “laughing, and partying and having a good time” while in the hospital.

“Lindsay Clancy has bad days and worse days,” Zeizel said.

Zeizel also said Clancy often talks about her children, aiming to dispel prosecutors’ contention that she never mentions them. “She really loves them and misses them and thinks of them every single day, almost every moment of the day,” Zeizel said.

Dr. Margaret Spinelli, a forensic psychiatrist and postpartum psychosis expert, was expected to testify on Wednesday but did not. It’s unknown at this time why she wasn’t called. Judge William Sullivan dismissed jurors early due to “an unforeseen circumstance” and asked them not to speculate.

We’ll have a livestream of Thursday’s proceedings here.

If convicted of murder, Clancy faces life in prison without parole. If found not guilty because of a lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility.