Fox Analyst Declares Jury Will Find Lindsey Clancy Defense ‘Harder to Accept’

The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s trial may find her defense “harder to accept,” said Fox analyst and NYU clinical professor of medicine Marc Siegel on Thursday.

The 12-member jury began deliberations Thursday afternoon after weeks of testimony. Clancy, who has admitted to killing her three young children, did not take the stand.

Clancy and her legal team have claimed she experienced a single command hallucination the day she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines a command hallucination as “auditory hallucinations that instruct a patient to act in specific ways; these commands can range in seriousness from innocuous to life-threatening.”

Experiencing one such hallucination ahead of a life-threatening event is rare, Siegel noted. After he was asked if the jury will struggle with that part of Clancy’s defense, Siegel replied, “We’re going to find out.”

He also said:

That expert also testified in the Andrea Yates trial, and she was reporting those command hallucinations for weeks and weeks before drowning her children, and this was one event. We have to believe it was a single command hallucination, which can occur. It’s not impossible. But to your point, I think it’s going to be hard for the jury to accept that Lindsay was basically severely depressed, trying to function, going to different doctors, and then suddenly had this happen. It’s possible, but certainly harder to accept.

Yates killed her five children in June 2001.

The Houston woman, whose case did not garner the outcry of sympathy that Clancy’s has, showed signs of postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression, and schizophrenia for years before she killed Noah, Mary, John, Luke, and Paul Yates. She was initially convicted of capital murder without the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 40 years.

In 2006, Yates had a retrial and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She is currently living at Kerrville State Hospital in Texas.

Watch the above via Fox News.

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