Lindsay Clancy’s Courtroom Outburst Brings Trial To A Halt

Lindsay Clancy’s emotional outburst brought trial proceedings to a halt on Wednesday as she sobbed throughout the testimony given by the medical examiner who performed autopsies on two of her three children.

As medical examiner Barbara Olson delivered details about the autopsy performed on Cora Clancy (age 5), Clancy could be heard crying intermittently — and at one point, she cried out, “I can’t do this!”

Olson testified that Cora Clancy had died of asphyxiation, and she explained that the child had likely felt pain until she passed out from the lack of oxygen — which could have been as brief as ten seconds or as long as 30 seconds.

“There is a component of pain present until loss of consciousness occurs,” Olson said.

Olson testified a short time later that Dawson (3) had also died of asphyxiation.

Video showed Clancy’s lawyer, high-profile defense attorney Kevin Reddington, holding Clancy’s hand as she wept throughout the testimony, her head resting on her arms on the table.

Twice during Wednesday’s proceedings, as Clancy showed visible emotional reactions to the testimony, Judge William Sullivan brought the trial to a halt, sending the jury out as two women came in and tried to console the defendant.

Clancy is on trial for strangling all three of her young children with exercise bands — Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (eight months) — before cutting her own wrists and throat and jumping from the second-story window. The fall did not kill her, but left her paralyzed from the waist down — and she has been attending court in a wheelchair.

The defense has not argued that Clancy did not strangle her three young children, but has instead argued that she is not criminally responsible for the killings by reason of insanity. Clancy, the defense says, was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis — made worse by a series of mood-altering medications — at the time of the killings.

Clancy had also been turned away after calling a suicide hotline twice because she reportedly did not have concrete plans at the time to act on her suicidal thoughts.