Lindsay Clancy's Jury Heard a Rule That Flips the Entire Case

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
All right, welcome. Here we go.
Closing arguments just wrapped up in the Lindsay Clancy case. What happens next? What could be the possible outcomes for Lindsay Clancy? We are going to break all of that down in great detail today. We got a great panel to do exactly that. Lindsay Clancy's jury has sat through 21 days of testimony, 84 witnesses.
Closing arguments, they have just taken place. And now that they've ended, 12 people have to decide whether a mother who admits to killing her three children goes to prison or goes to a psychiatric hospital. Eric Faddis, defense attorney, former prosecutor. Joining myself and Robin Drake, retired FBI special agency for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis program. And master class extraordinaire.

**Robin Drake** (1:02)
Can I say that one? Yes, you can. We are live with our master class.

**Tony Brueski** (1:06)
Okay. And link is in the description. Robin has a master class now, which is freaking amazing.
Go and check that out. Okay. Eric, let's begin with this. Nobody in this case is arguing about what happened. The children are dead. Clancy admits she did it. The only question the jury has to answer now is whether she was criminally responsible when she did the act. So what does that task now actually look like inside this courtroom with these jurors, more importantly, in the jurors' deliberation room? Now that the instructions have been given and it's up to them to decipher whether or not she was there, she was mentally with it. She could tell right from wrong. Again, there's so many caveats because every time I say one of these things, it breaks it down, well, what is right from wrong? Mean in that stage? What's your best way of describing it here?

**Eric Faddis** (2:01)
Sure, so Tony, in these cases, during closing arguments, I'll usually give the jury some recommendations in terms of how to go about their job back in that deliberation room. So in this case, part of that job is going to be determining, has the prosecution proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she could appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct?
And so essentially, no new right from wrong. And also, whether she could conform her actions to the law. And so you can kind of go about that in a step-wise fashion. And really, the question for the jury, Tony, is whether there's a reasonable doubt as to whether she's criminally responsible. It's not, you know, did the defense prove that she is not criminally responsible? Because that's not their burden. Is there a reasonable doubt? Is there a lingering question that is significant in the jurors' mind as to whether she is criminally responsible in terms of being able to know right from wrong and conform her behavior to the law? That is the overarching inquiry.

**Robin Drake** (3:01)
You know, given how complex this case has been, I mean, in all honesty, I have probably learned more covering this case than any case we've covered in the last four years with Tony, because there's so many different things we had to learn about. I mean, we're watching Reddington, who admitted, you know, outside the courtroom as well, you know, what he had to learn about postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression, women's health, the medical system, and we're all covering this so closely that it's been a massive education on a lot of sides and seeing failures on others. With all this complexity and the lawyers trying to break it down to be consumable by these really heroic jurors that have to have the hardest decision now, what do you think is the hardest instruction, if you could guess, for them to follow on this? Because there's going to be many of them or maybe there's not, maybe it's pretty simple, I just don't know.

**Eric Faddis** (3:51)
You know, there's a central instruction, Robin, that's given in every case of which I'm aware that's criminal and that is that the jurors cannot let sympathy or prejudice influence their deliberations. So that's the thing. This is a heart wrenching case. It is so evocative. That's why in part it's gotten so much attention.
But the jurors have to, you know, do they turn off their hearts? I, you know, it depends on how you interpret that instruction. But to try to have some sort of cold calculated legal analysis about this case without emotions playing into it one way or the other, emotions for three dead children and emotions for a mother who was clearly suffering, those things should not enter into the deliberations. We'll see if the jury can do that.