Lindsay Clancy Would Be the Most Hated Inmate in the Building

**Tony Brueski** (0:02)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
Here we are, Lindsay Clancy. We're getting very close to closing arguments. And Wednesdays, as we always do, we are going to break into the psychological end of this case. Lindsay Clancy, of course, paralyzed from the chest down, has been under round the clock suicide watch since January 23 If the jury convicts, the most likely destination is MCI Farmingham, the oldest women's prison in the country, operating since 1877
Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott is with us to help us break all this down. What happens if she goes to prison? What happens if she stays in a mental health facility like Tewkesbury?
Where does this all go? We're going to talk about Patrick as well today. But let's start here. For three and a half years, Lindsay Clancy has been a patient. Everyone around her, nurses, doctors, aides, exist to help her. The system has currently said, yeah, she doesn't belong in the county jail. She belongs in a mental health facility. A guilty verdict makes her an inmate and everyone around her exists to contain her. Like I said, Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author with myself and Robin Drake, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. I guess I want to start here. Why is it Shavaun? I know this is probably a function of how our system currently works, but you have a system that currently has said, this woman does not belong in a jail. She belongs in a mental health facility and she's been there ever since, still is to this day.
Why is it that what could happen next is a decision that is very much about mental health, it's very much about where she goes from here, that could remove her from a hospital-like setting, where she is contained securely, to something that is not that. It's a decision about mental health that will be made by people who are not practicing in the world of mental health, just regular folks out on the road, jurors, making the decision about something so critically important that are not educated on it. That to me, it just seems bizarre, it seems strange, but I know this is how our system works. What are your thoughts?

**Shavaun Scott** (2:27)
Well, it's, yes, I think looking at all the clinical evidence that we've been hearing all week, she's seriously mentally ill. She belongs in a place that's focused on support for mentally ill people and treatment.
Now, prisons do have units or wards or whatever, whatever they call it. For people who have disabilities, whether they be severe psychiatric disabilities, health disabilities, they're not typically put in the general population, and I think that would not happen for her just because she's paralyzed. But it's not going to be the same level of care and the intensity of care that she's getting at Tewkesbury where she's at right now, and certainly from all the evidence, everything we've heard this week, she's severely mentally ill, and the treatment that she would get at Tewkesbury is certainly ethically the right thing to do for her.

**Tony Brueski** (3:31)
It feels like a real ethical conundrum. I mean, to me, this is how it works, Robin.

**Robin Drake** (3:38)
Yeah, no, I'm totally with you, Tony, and what an insightful question. I'm not validating you for the sake of it. This is probably, I think, one of the harder... There's so many hard things in this, but this is one of the bigger ones for me as well, because as a jury, their job is not to think in terms of sentencing.

**Tony Brueski** (3:57)
Yeah.

**Robin Drake** (3:58)
Yet their decision is going to impact the sentencing to this point. And so this is an interesting gap I'm seeing here because, to everyone's point, there's, like Shavaun said, there's not one mental health professional that's testified for either side that says she's well.
And which is an interesting observation. She has been in a facility for mental health since she committed a horrendous act. And yet, based on 16 people, 16 or 18, I'm sorry.

**Tony Brueski** (4:30)
18

**Robin Drake** (4:31)
18 Someone else is going to make the decision who's not a clinician on where she spends the rest of her life or if she's found not responsible by reason of insanity or whatever, it'll be an undetermined amount, but definitely for a long foreseeable future. So that's a very, very interesting ethical question.

**Tony Brueski** (4:49)
It seems like an odd place for the road displayed for who's making that decision, where it's not a medical professional making a medical decision for someone based on a judicial ruling. But I mean, it is what it is.