Dr. Phil McGraw on Saturday weighed in on the Lindsay Clancy trial, one day after the judge declared a mistrial when the jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the killings of her three children.
The defense team of the mother who admitted to strangling her three children to death in 2023 claims the 36-year-old was suffering from postpartum psychosis and wasn’t in control of her actions when she killed her children.
McGraw told Fox News anchor Aishah Hasnie on “Fox News Live” Saturday that Clancy’s children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — “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.”
He said it also concerns him when mental illness gets depicted in the courtroom, it becomes “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 there eventually will be “accountability” in the case. Even if she’s not found criminally responsible, “she’s not going home.”
“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,” he said.
“I think people underestimate the power of psychosis in taking over someone’s life. It’s not an excuse, but, for example, if she had a brain tumor you could see on an X-ray, people would go ‘OK, I get that.’ And when you have what took place here, it could be just as powerful as someone whose brain is hijacked by a tumor.
“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.”
The prosecution made a “pretty clunky presentation,” McGraw said, adding that he felt they got their act together “in the end.”
“I’ve spent a lot of my professional career working in trial sciences and dealing with juries and juries looking for a coherent explanation,” he explained.
He said the defense’s explanation was “much more understandable and much more coherent than what the prosecution did.
McGraw also worried that the case could cause a “copycat” effect.
