Lindsay Clancy AND Kohberger: The System On Trial in BOTH

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
We're in.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Coming to you today in Technicolor on the program. Lindsay Clancy's murder trial is in its second week at Plymouth Superior Court. Both sides agree she killed her three children. That's not up for debate. But the prosecution just spent a week showing a jury exactly how. And some of what they showed may be impossible to unsee. We're going to be talking about what's going on with the prosecution, what's going on with the defense in a conversation we've been wanting to have for a while now. Criminal Defense Attorney Bob Motta is with us, host of Defense Diaries, to help break down where this is all going.
My goodness, and of course, Robin Drake here as well. Patrick Clancy testified that his wife, Lindsay, was having one of her best days on January 24th. She built a snowman with the kids, texted normally. And the prosecution says she opened Apple Maps to time the drive to a restaurant the family didn't normally use and tacked on a CVS errand that wasn't in prior text. They want the jury to believe that if she was having one of the best days, she couldn't possibly be in psychosis.
Well, I mean, that's I guess you could come to that conclusion if you don't understand mental health or psychosis just through conjecture as a lay person. But that's really not how mental health works. Bob, how good are juries at understanding complex mental health issues that they're being asked to understand in a case like this?

**Robin Drake** (1:40)
Good question.

**Bob Motta** (1:41)
Not great.

**Robin Drake** (1:42)
Yeah.

**Bob Motta** (1:42)
As a general proposition, not great. That's no indictment on the jurors. No. Because it's humanity. People come in with their predispositions and their biases and the way that they think about mental health and mental illness.
It's very difficult in a jury trial to change somebody's long-held beliefs in terms of how they feel about something in particular.
The concept that you're going to be able to put a couple of experts on that are going to explain it and the light bulbs are going to go off just doesn't work that often. You know what I mean? It's a frustrating thing. They always, attorneys behind closed doors and sometimes openly such as myself, always refer to an insanity defense as the defense of last resort. It's for a reason because of what I just talked about. It is very difficult to change someone's perception and mind if they come into a trial feeling a certain way about mental illness, whether that be that they don't believe that the stories that they're being told, that this can actually be going on in somebody's mind or as you pointed out, that there's times where lucidity is happening in the throes of a psychotic break. People just don't understand it if they haven't experienced it, either firsthand or with a loved one that they've had to live with, or live by, or live through in terms of them going through a psychotic break. It's a really hard thing for people to understand and come to grips with. And then you compound the fact that here you have three beautiful little children whose lives were lost at the hands of the person who is sworn and genetically bound to protect them more than any other person on the planet, and people cannot put that aside to get to that other question.

**Robin Drake** (3:53)
So, there is, as you said, I mean, the negative confirmation bias towards any abhorrent human being that would do this, regardless of explanation, is, like you said, it's really hard to overcome, and who knows if they'll get there on this one. What I'm curious about, though, because of the psychosis aspect, which is hard to overcome because you're, like you said, you gotta put your emotion aside and you gotta look at the facts and data of the science behind this, but I'm also seeing, and that's what I'm curious about your thoughts, Bob, because you've been in a lot of courtrooms that may or may not have, or maybe I'm curious about how, what it takes to overcome that confirmation bias. If you're going in thinking, no matter what you say to me, when a mother does this to her children, it's guilty, guilty, guilty. But what I'm seeing, if you can take that step back is, and I said it to my wife and she, and she's like, yeah, that's pretty interesting and profound. The prosecution looks like, again, I'm just going from visuals in the courtroom itself, and then from testimonies we're hearing, I'm doing the best I can to watch it the entire time like you are too.