THE judge in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has slammed her lawyer’s attempt at adding someone to the witness list last minute, but there is still a chance the TikToker could be called.
Lindsay, 36, is on trial after she strangled her three children with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts home on January 24, 2023.
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The former labor and delivery nurse has since pleaded not guilty to three murder charges in connection to the deaths of her children: five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan.
Lindsay has admitted to the killings, but her lawyer plans to argue she is not criminally responsible for murder because she was suffering from undiagnosed postpartum psychosis.
On the night of January 24, 2023, Lindsay also crushed up pills, cut her wrists and neck with a knife from her kitchen and jumped out of her second-story bedroom window, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down after strangling her kids.
Her trial kicked off on July 20, and since then there has been testimony from her then-husband Patrick Clancy, first responders who responded to her home on the fateful night, medical staff who treated Lindsay and her children afterward, friends and family.
Medical professionals who treated Lindsay in the months before her kids’ deaths have also taken the stand.
One of which was a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, where Lindsay checked herself in for inpatient stay on December 31, 2022.
Lindsay’s stay was also brought up during Patrick’s testimony, where Lindsay’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington said “the prosecutor made it out on direct exam that McLean is some kind of a five-star institution.”
Now Reddington wants to call a woman who has shared several TikToks about what it was like working at McLean Hospital.
Reddington wants Emily Thorndike, who worked at the hospital for seven years as a mental health specialist but left one year before Lindsay was admitted, to testify about hospital staffing around the holidays.
Thorndike, now an independent clinical social worker, is “available, ready, willing and able to testify about an employee’s opinion as to what a woeful environment McLean offers, especially on holidays … nobody was there,” Reddington told Judge William Sullivan.
Lindsay checked into the hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts on New Year’s Eve in 2022, and checked out on January 5.
“[Jurors] are left with the impression that McLean was this wonderful place and [Lindsay] didn’t have any interest in utilizing what was available to her,” Reddington said in court on Tuesday.
Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham argued against adding Thorndike as a witness, noting how she didn’t work at the hospital while Lindsay was a patient and because she’s been following the case online.
Buckingham also called out the late notice and how Thorndike thinks the case is “an abomination.”
“I can’t imagine that witness would be allowed to give her review of McLean,” Judge Sullivan said.
“This is not TripAdvisor. I wouldn’t allow that.”
“It seems to me it would be a very simple solution to get the staffing records or somebody at McLean who can testify to this,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan took the matter under advisement, and said he might allow some questioning of Thorndike about what staffing was like on holidays without the jury present to see if she would be allowed to testify.
In his motion, Reddington wrote that Thorndike was “incensed” over Patrick’s cross-examination, where the prosecutor “intimated that McLean Hospital was one of the best hospitals in the country and that Lindsay Clancy was offered a number of therapeutic and counselling type interventions while at McLean …”
Reddington said Thorndike wants to testify about the facts of staffing and “the repeated use of clay, coloring books and purported group therapy sessions, supervised by unqualified individuals who have no psychiatric or social work experience.”
Thorndike wanted to “talk about the prosecution lies” in a TikTok post on July 29.
She claimed there are around 23 patients at the facility at a time, and there is usually one doctor assigned to three to four patients, but on holidays, one doctor tends to all of the patients.
The prosecutor asked Patrick if he was aware one-on-one therapy was offered at the hospital’s unit, which Thorndike claims is not true.
Thorndike claimed these meetings were “check-ins” where workers would ask patients how they were doing, what they ate that day, if they talked to their family and what their treatment plan is.
She also shut down the prosecution’s claims that Lindsay saw her doctor every day she was there, claiming Lindsay wouldn’t have seen “her” doctor at the facility until the Tuesday that she was there because she came in on a weekend and that Monday was a holiday.
“McLean Hospital is committed to providing high-quality mental health care for individuals and families across the lifespan through inpatient, residential, and outpatient services,” a hospital spokesperson said in a statement to The U.S. Sun.
