09/07/2026
After five weeks of testimony and seven days of deliberation, the jury in Lindsay Clancy’s trial could not reach a unanimous verdict. Eleven jurors agreed; one man on the jury did not, and Clancy’s defense argued in an emergency appeal that this holdout juror was refusing to follow the judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt. That appeal failed, and the judge declared a mistrial on Friday. The judge has indicated he’d like to retry the case later this fall, so this isn’t over — it’s paused.
I wrote the essay below while the jury was still out, thinking about what a verdict either way would mean for how we understand postpartum psychosis. What happened instead is harder to sit with. Eleven people, nine of them women, apparently heard the same evidence and reached the same conclusion. One man did not, and by Clancy’s own defense’s account, did not get there by following the law he was instructed to follow. That’s not closure. That’s a woman still waiting, again, for a system that was already struggling to hold her illness to actually see it clearly.
Everything the piece below argues — about diagnosis, about care, about how we see mothers in crisis — still stands. If anything, it matters more now that this will happen again. Read my essay here: https://www.maternalwellness.org/blog/what-lindsay-clancys-trial-is-teaching-us
MATERNAL WELLNESS CENTER
