South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace is calling for Lindsay Clancy to face the death penalty, by public execution, after a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial in the case of a mother who strangled her three children.
Mace made the remarks to TMZ on Monday, days after a jury of nine women and three men deadlocked following nearly six weeks of trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Clancy, 36, has never denied killing five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan at the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. She used exercise bands to strangle all three before attempting suicide.
The question at trial was not whether Clancy killed her children but whether she understood what she was doing. Her defense team argued she was in the grip of a drug-induced psychosis brought on by postpartum depression and a cocktail of prescribed medications. Prosecutors rejected that framing entirely. Now, with the case in limbo and a retrial possible, Mace is injecting herself into the debate with the bluntest language a sitting member of Congress has used about the case.
The congresswoman did not hedge. The Daily Mail reported Mace's full remarks, which went beyond a generic call for harsh sentencing.
"Her children are dead, she should be dead too. She should get the death penalty. It should be public, it should be a public execution."
Mace said the method was irrelevant to her.
"It could be by firearm, it could be electric chair, I don't really care."
She framed the demand as a deterrent, saying a public execution would serve as a "warning to women everywhere that you don't kill your kids." Mace added that Clancy "deserves nothing less."
The remarks carry no legal weight. Massachusetts abolished the death penalty in 1984, and Clancy faces state charges, not federal ones. A congresswoman from South Carolina has no jurisdiction over a Massachusetts murder case. But Mace's comments reflect a visceral frustration shared by many Americans watching a mother who admitted to killing three small children mount an insanity defense and walk away from trial without a verdict.
The trial collapsed because a single juror refused to join the other eleven. National Review reported that eleven jurors voted to convict, but the holdout cited concerns about bias against people with mental illness. Judge William Sullivan declared the mistrial after seven days of deliberation failed to produce a unanimous verdict.
Prosecutors had argued throughout the trial that Clancy acted with intention and clarity. They told the jury she "deliberately and meticulously" strangled her children and "acted intentionally, rationally, and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal." The prosecution's theory left no room for the idea that Clancy was disconnected from reality.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington painted a different picture. He argued Clancy had been prescribed twelve different medications and that the drugs "turn[ed] her into a zombie," triggering both homicidal and suicidal thoughts. Reddington contended his client was suffering from postpartum psychosis so severe that she lost all contact with reality when she killed her children.
The mistrial left the case unresolved, with neither side able to claim a definitive outcome.
Rather than wait for a retrial, Reddington filed a motion on Thursday asking Judge Sullivan to enter a finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. The motion argued prosecutors failed to present sufficient evidence that Clancy was criminally responsible for her actions. Sullivan had already denied two similar motions during the course of the trial.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz spoke to reporters on Friday and gave no indication he was ready to let the case go. He has not yet said whether his office will retry Clancy, but his remarks left little doubt about where he stands.
"We're here at this courthouse today because those children are not."
Cruz said one of a prosecutor's most important functions was to "speak for the victims who are no longer here." The defense motion to acquit now sits before Sullivan, with a court hearing scheduled for September 29 at Plymouth Superior Court.
Reddington also took the unusual step of appealing directly to President Trump for a pardon. That request faces an obvious legal barrier: Trump does not have the authority to pardon anyone convicted under state law. The pardon power extends only to federal offenses. Clancy's charges are entirely a Massachusetts matter.
Trump addressed the case when reporters asked him about it. He did not commit to any action but made clear he viewed Clancy's conduct with disgust.
"Look, Clancy did a horrible, horrible thing. Can't be worse, but you'll find out what the price to pay is. There'll be a price."
The president added that "it's going to be a mental institution or jail or something," acknowledging the case would likely proceed through the courts. He called the situation "too bad" and noted the likelihood of another trial. Trump has since declined to intervene, recognizing the limits of federal authority over state prosecutions.
Clancy remains held at an unspecified psychiatric facility while the legal process grinds forward. She will stay there at least until the September 29 hearing, when both sides are expected to address Reddington's latest motion and map out next steps.
The facts of January 24, 2023, are not in dispute. Clancy strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan with exercise bands inside the family's Duxbury home, then tried to take her own life. Three children, ages five, three, and eight months, died at the hands of their mother. The only question the legal system has been asked to resolve is whether Clancy's mental state at the time shields her from criminal punishment.
That question has produced sharp disagreement. The defense insists Clancy was so heavily medicated and so deep in postpartum psychosis that she could not form criminal intent. Prosecutors counter that her actions were deliberate, methodical, and purposeful. Eleven jurors sided with the prosecution. One did not. And so the case starts over.
Cases like this one test the boundaries of the insanity defense in ways that unsettle the public. A recent ruling in New York found a mother not criminally responsible for killing two young children after a judge accepted a postpartum psychosis defense. The outcomes vary by jurisdiction, by judge, and by jury, but the pattern raises a consistent concern: when does a legitimate medical defense become a legal escape hatch?
Mace's call for a public execution is not a serious legal proposal. Massachusetts does not have the death penalty, and no sitting congresswoman can order a state court to impose one. But her remarks tap into something real: the fury of ordinary people watching a system that spent six weeks in trial, heard from a mother who admitted killing three babies, and produced no verdict at all.
Whether Plymouth County retries the case, whether Sullivan grants the defense motion, and whether Clancy ever faces a jury again are all open questions. The president himself has acknowledged the gravity of what Clancy did, even as he recognizes the limits of his own authority.
Three children are dead. Their mother is alive, housed in a psychiatric facility, and represented by a lawyer asking a judge to declare her not guilty. If the system cannot deliver accountability for that, the public's faith in it will keep eroding, and no amount of legal nuance will bring it back.
