Three children are dead, and a Massachusetts jury couldn’t agree on who bears responsibility for their deaths.
The mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case has set off a national argument about postpartum psychosis, accountability, and what it means when eleven jurors lean toward letting a mother walk free.
And Dr Phil McGraw went on Fox News and said something that needed to be said — while the bigger scandal of what this hung jury reveals is only beginning to sink in.
Three Children the Country Almost Forgot
Lindsay Clancy, 36, stands accused of strangling her three children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — at the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts home in January 2023. She faces three counts of first-degree murder. The defense does not dispute that she killed the children but argues she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time and was not criminally responsible for her actions.
Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial after the jury of nine women and three men reported, for the third time, that they could not reach a unanimous verdict. The jury’s final note read, “It is with a heavy heart that we report we are still unable to come to a decision and will not be able to.”
The apparent split was 11 to 1 in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. One man held the line. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington thanked the jurors “minus one,” called the holdout juror a thief who “robbed” his fellow jurors of seven weeks of their lives, and said he hoped that man could “sleep well at night.”
Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz told reporters his office would not decide immediately whether to retry the case. That determination will come at a later date. And the three children whose deaths set this entire proceeding in motion remained exactly as forgotten as they were the day the jury walked in.
Dr Phil Says There Was a Failure — He’s Right, But Not for the Reasons He Thinks
Medical analyst Dr Phil McGraw appeared on Fox News Live with anchor Aishah Hasnie and made clear he wants accountability. He said Clancy’s children — Cora, Dawson, and Callan — “are the real folks we need to give our attention to here.”
“Three innocent children did lose their lives, and you can never explain these situations away simply,” McGraw said.
He was equally direct about the charges. “I’m not excusing what she did in any way,” he said. “I think she should be held fully accountable, but I think we need to understand causation.”
McGraw called the case a “psychiatric emergency that wasn’t treated as such” and described postpartum psychosis as a condition requiring immediate inpatient hospitalization, not a medication adjustment or a follow-up appointment. “Postpartum psychosis is a psychiatric emergency that requires immediate hospitalization,” he said. “It’s not a time to adjust medications, it’s not a time to schedule an extra appointment during the week. It is a psychiatric emergency that requires in-patient care and separation from the children. Not tomorrow morning, not tomorrow afternoon, but immediately.”
He called the mistrial a “teachable moment for the country” while warning that it becomes something far more dangerous if people use it to turn Clancy into some kind of “heroine.” “There’s nothing to be celebrated here,” he said. “If there’s any lesson to be taken for our culture, it’s that there was a failure here.”
McGraw also raised the specter of a “copycat” effect. “We certainly don’t want that to take place here, so we need to look at what the cultural effects are,” he said.
He criticized the prosecution’s performance, calling it a “pretty clunky presentation,” and said the defense’s case was “much more understandable and much more coherent than what the prosecution did.”
And he warned that mental illness in courtrooms tends to become “kind of a political, ideological football that’s used to try to skew something or is kind of debunked by another side rather than looking at what actually took place.”
McGraw stressed that accountability will come regardless. Even if Clancy is not found criminally responsible, “she’s not going home,” he said. “She’s going to have to live with this the rest of her life and probably in a psychiatric facility if, in fact, she is not guilty by reason of mental defect or disease.”
What This Mistrial Actually Reveals
Let’s be plain about what happened in that Plymouth courtroom. Nine women sat on a jury charged with deciding whether Lindsay Clancy bears criminal responsibility for the deaths of three small children. Eleven of twelve jurors reportedly leaned toward letting her go. One man refused to go along. The result is a mistrial that left the charges against Clancy completely unresolved and forced the father of those children to absorb more pain with no end in sight.
Patrick Clancy, through his attorney David Meier, issued a statement that said everything without saying much. “The loss of Patrick’s children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful — for Patrick, for his family, and for all us.”
That is a man who has already lost everything being asked to lose it again.
The mistrial is an outrage, and it is the direct product of woke leftist feminism run amok. Eleven jurors, including all nine women on the panel, reportedly favored acquitting a woman accused of killing three children. The defense attorney attacked the one holdout publicly, called him a thief, and questioned his motives. The same attorney praised every other juror as “so beautiful, so wonderful.” The message was not subtle: the correct verdict was acquittal, and any juror who disagreed was the problem.
Joe Rogan put his finger on the double standard before the mistrial was even declared. “This lady killed her kids and everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, she needed help,'” Rogan said on the Joe Rogan Experience. “Imagine if a single father killed his kids. Do you think there’d be any dads out there? ‘We get it. We understand. I also get sad!'”
Mary Marslender, a former GOP consultant, agreed. “Joe Rogan is spot on. Would there be a supporter rally for a father who committed the same act? Of course not. If a man mapped how long his wife would be gone, sent her out for takeout and then violently strangled his three children in the basement, no one would be posting ‘I am him,'” Marslender said. “There would be no GoFundMe campaign framed as solidarity. He would be labeled a monster, and these same women in pink would be the first to condemn him.”
That is the reality this mistrial exposes. Woke leftist feminism has constructed a legal and cultural framework in which a mother who allegedly kills her children can become a sympathetic figure with a social media following, while the children she allegedly killed are reduced to footnotes in a conversation about mental health awareness. The nine female jurors who reportedly favored acquittal delivered a verdict that woke feminism demanded of them long before they ever entered that deliberation room.
The defense’s postpartum psychosis argument is a contested legal claim, not settled science. Prosecutors told the jury that Clancy had the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions and could follow the law. That argument deserved a full adjudication. It did not get one.
McGraw said situations like Clancy’s “occur one or two times out of 1,000,” but added, “One or two times out of 1,000 are one or two times too many. This is avoidable.” He is right that it is avoidable. But the way to avoid it is not to treat the courtroom as a place where sympathy for the accused overrides the demand for justice for three dead children named Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz now carries the weight of deciding whether to retry this case. The charges remain unresolved. The children remain dead. And the single juror who refused to hand down an acquittal on charges of this magnitude deserves something other than the public shaming Reddington delivered from the courthouse steps.
Prosecutors should retry this case. The allegations must be fully tested before a jury willing to weigh them without the pressure of woke feminist orthodoxy telling them what the right answer is. Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months. Their lives demanded more than a hung jury and a defense attorney’s contempt for the one person in that room who took the charges seriously.
Sources: Fox News, “Dr Phil says Lindsay Clancy mistrial a ‘teachable moment’ on postpartum psychosis: ‘There was a failure here'” (September 5, 2026); Fox News, “Rogan shreds supporters of Lindsay Clancy, says they wouldn’t rally if a father were on trial for same crime”; Fox News, “Patrick Clancy speaks out after hung jury in Lindsay Clancy case, addresses prospect of another trial”; WBUR News, “Judge declares mistrial in Clancy case after jurors, with ‘heavy heart,’ fail to reach verdict” (September 4, 2026); CBS News Boston, “Lindsay Clancy murder case ends in mistrial”; NewsNation, “Lindsay Clancy mistrial: Trial ends in hung jury”; Legal Insurrection, “Judge Declares Mistrial After Jury Deadlocks in Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial.”
