386. The Lindsay Clancy Trial Part 14

The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking. 48 hours before the trail goes cold. From A&E and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous True Crime series, The First 48. I'm Carter Roy. Every Thursday, I revisit a landmark homicide investigation in depth with long-form storytelling built for your ears. Listen to and follow The First 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are The Prosecutors. Today, on The Prosecutors, the Commonwealth and Lindsey Clancy Cays continues its rebuttal. Hello, everybody and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett, and I'm joined as always by my mortally sinful co-host, Alice. Brett, we've been here if you're going to come here once. I've been here before. If you've already been here once, you had to take your one shot. You can't have two shots at this. And that's the problem. I don't know that I've ever seen a case where a mortal sin was brought up once, but twice. That has to be record. It has to be record. It has to be a father. Bob Appearance. We've had a clergy person testify. Do you think this is secretly like the church's conversion method or something? I don't know. We got Roman Catholicism coming up all the time. We got people alleging whether they're just committed or lapsed. I mean, what is happening? Are we in religious court here? No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition, so maybe that's what's happening. Maybe that's what's happening. We're having a little bit of an inquisition in this trial, but I don't know, guys, this trial, it was about this trial started off, you know, pretty standard. There were some mistakes by both sides and things were happening, but it was a normal trial. Last three, four, maybe longer, really since the defense case started. The second half of the defense is case. It's gotten so weird on so many levels. So many weird things have happened basically since the Commonwealth rested and it continued today. I mean, you know, last time we spoke, we were talking about how this would be the last day of trial and we'll be doing closing arguments tomorrow. No, no. To be fair, I was like, I think we're going to go to verdict Thursday, which we can still reach because of the Lunar Clips that work. We're going to see where we are, which is like the Eastern half of the United States. But indeed, today was not the last day and it was a, it was a spicy day. It was a spicy day and it was a weird day and it was a, I don't know, like there was one point where I had to stop taking notes and it was also, I will say it was also a clarifying day, though. I don't know why we wait until day 18 and 19 to make sense of all of these 7,000 pages of medical records. I did think today was incredibly clarifying for me and this is what we wanted all along. I'm not a medical professional. I want someone to explain to me what all of these things mean in the psychiatric sense. And so let's just get right back into that. We left off with Dr. Mac and we speculated that Reddington was spending so much time on the DSM because he was trying to run out the clock and you know, we started back and wouldn't you know it? He didn't immediately go into more questioning about the DSM. It was weird. It was if he didn't need to talk about that anymore and he immediately went to another topic. I thought that was interesting, but maybe not surprising. Was that like a very humble, not humble way of saying I told you so, Brett? Oh, I mean, I'm cheap. Look, we get enough stuff wrong that when we get it right, I'm going to hammer that. Should be totally fair, the DSM, although it doesn't actually help him, did set up the most bizarre line of back and forth cross I've ever seen in my life. So for what it's worth, the DSM did set up the most bizarre cross I've seen in a long time. Yes, there was a lot of weirdness in this cross, but it continued and so it started off. He finally started to do the kind of things I think you should do on cross as we've said. You burn a maternal. I mean, one of the two, right? And one way you can burn somebody is you can attack their credentials. And so, you know, Mac, he's testifying in this hearing to determine whether or not she's mentally competent to commit this crime. He's only done that one or two times. This is probably his third time he's done that. Now, he has testified a lot. He's testified in a lot of different cases and a lot of different mental issues, but on this very narrow specific thing, he's only done that one or two times. So I mean, that's less than 10, it's more than zero, but it at least sort of gets at, he's not as experienced as testifying. Not that that necessarily means anything other than he just hasn't testified that much. And this is fair to point out because you'll notice that now Dr. Mac really was fighting him the whole time because he they, they were done with each other, they were done with each other from Friday. And by the way, he's testifying by zoom. I'm not surprised. It made it so much worse. It made it so much worse because they're not in the same room together. Likely, it's because he had to go back home because they did not expect to go through the weekend. It's expensive to stay there. He has other clients, all those sorts of things. So understandable that he's by zoom, but it did make it worse. And they already hated each other from the cross on Friday. And it made today so much worse though because they were just going at each other. And it was kind of not lost in translation, but more difficult to follow within the zoom. Well, yeah. And what's eventually going to happen, we'll note when we get to this, is eventually I'm not going to use the term someone used to describe it in the chat, which was absolutely accurate. But you got these two guys trying to show which ones, the more dominant one in this. They were peacocking, shall we say? There you go. We'll use that. That's a good term. And it became absolutely useless for the jury. So basically you had the people who are firmly in the Lindsey plancy camp, we're like, you go Reddington, you get him. And the people who were against Lindsey were like, Max standing up. He's pushing back. He's not taking this. He's not going to answer his questions. Reddington's being such a jerk, complete waste of time. For the actual jury, he's trying to figure this out just a couple of ways to time. And this went on for like 45 minutes at one point like at one point, I just stopped taking notes because I was like, this is a complete waste of time. But we'll get to that in a second. So they talk about how much he's testified. We go back to Park Deats because he's still trying to make something out of that. Sometimes he testifies because of referrals from Park Deats, sometimes to other entities. It seems like what happens is Deats basically gets requests from various entities they need an expert and he reaches out to, like it's not like they got works for Park Deats, but he's like, oh, you need someone to do this. This guy's good. I refer him to you and they probably get it cut. It's like a finders fee, basically, I think is what goes on there. And then we go through some examples and this is always a good thing to do with experts. Because if experts testify long enough, eventually they're either going to have their opinion question or they're going to be excluded as an expert by a court. It's not that unusual happens all the time. But for someone who's a juror or just a casual court watcher, it may seem much more significant. So it's always good to point out those things and he had a few that he goes through where he wasn't allowed to testify. And one in particular, he points to, is this 11th Circuit Case out of Florida. And I think he went after this because he wanted to make him seem like a bad guy in addition to, like, he's not qualified because the case was all about temporary aid to needy families. Florida passed a law that said, if you're going to receive this, you have to be drug tested, essentially. And that was challenged in court as a, you know, this is getting into sort of civil stuff. But essentially, there's no rational basis for this or it might have been a strict scrutiny. I'm not exactly sure what the standard was, but nevertheless, you can challenge it and say, you're making these people do this. There's not a strong reason to do it. Therefore, you shouldn't be able to do it sort of challenge that you'll have in cases like that. So oftentimes, experts are hired in those cases to come in. So he was hired basically, as you may recall from Friday, he is an expert on drug usage, drug addiction, particularly with adolescents. He's done a lot of research and studies on that. He's brought in to basically say what the population, people who typically are on these kind of things, what the drug usage rate is. If it's high, then maybe it's more rational to have people drug tested. If it's very low, then it seems like it's not rational, court might strike it down. So he comes in, but he only has, the studies are nationwide studies that have been done on this. There's no Florida specific study. So he gives the nationwide data and eventually that gets struck on the basis that because he didn't have Florida specific data, he was not able to offer an opinion on that. That's going to get explained later more fully. For the time, Reddington does the thing you should do, which is just like, you were in a qualified expert, they found you weren't qualified, didn't they? And it makes it sound like, he's not really an expert. He must not actually be qualified to even talk about this. Thought that was pretty effective. attack, got cleaned up some on cross, but nevertheless, might be the kind of thing that would make a juror, the doubt is expertise, much more than the stuff Reddington was doing on Friday. And just to like show you why it's slightly different. So being disqualified as an expert is something usually very narrow. And unless it's because you're just like completely not qualified, the opinion will say so. It'll say something like, he doesn't know enough about Florida law, what he's offering nationwide. It's not relevant for this case. If you say have a giglio challenge for a witness, giglio, of course, is there is a law enforcement officer who is testifying who has previously been found to have credibility issues. Like, they lied. They planted evidence. That sort of thing. Basically across the board, if there's a giglio challenge, that's going to look pretty bad. And if you've been found to be, you know, discredited by a court of law, let's say you were sanctioned or kicked off a case because the judge found that you planted evidence. For example, that's going to be bad across the board. And that will absolutely affect your credibility as a witness, whereas exclusion for a witness in a specific civil case on Florida law doesn't necessarily mean he's a quack expert. And one way we know he's qualified to be testifying about the subject matter he's testifying now is he's testifying about the subject matter he's testifying to now. If he weren't qualified to talk about this, Reddington could challenge him. If you ever seen Mucko's in Vinnie, it's exactly that. He could have gone after him and had him eliminated as a witness or gone after his credentials to testify here. It's just a completely different situation. And look, a lot of cross examination is playing to ignorance. It really is. Like you're hoping the jury is ignorant. You're hoping that the prosecution can't clear it up and you're kind of making fake points for effect. And that can be very powerful in a law of situations, particularly if the prosecution doesn't clear it up. It happens a lot. I mean, we've seen, for instance, the whole three-year delay in the government talking to them. I mean, I've seen so many people on Twitter who were shocked, but I can't believe it took them so long. Well, Reddington knows that's a purely an effect of the law and the fact that until he notices that there's going to be this question that they can't have a doctor talk to Lindsey, he knows that, but he's using that ignorance to his advantage and you see that a lot. And you know, it's going to happen again later on. In fact, there's one huge chuck of this that Alice was just talking about where Mac is making a point about post-partum psychosis and post-partum depression that they're not syndromes independent of themselves. It's a descriptor of a syndrome. And Reddington knows what he's trying to say, but nevertheless keeps acting like, so you're saying there isn't such thing as post-partum depression, there isn't such thing as post-partum psychosis. And this guy is trying to talk about the DSM and what the science says and what the sort of technical standard is, Reddington's playing off that emotion and off, that ignorance of exactly what's going on here to try and score points. And that's what happens across examination. I'm not criticizing him for it. It's just something that happens a lot and you see it a lot in these cases. So they talk about that whole whether or not he was qualified thing, then we go into yet another one of those that I just mentioned, the fact that it had been three years since the incident when he talked to him, which is a legitimate criticism just pure timing. You know, been so long, does that affect your ability to do this? Can you really say how she felt? Don't memories change. There was a way to attack this. He doesn't really go into any of that. He just makes it seem like, you know, why this extreme delay. He notes that he'd reviewed records before he spoke to Lindsay, including defense reports that had been prepared, and that he had had a brief conversation with the government. And he uses this to sort of lead into confirmation bias. And he says like you're hoping to help the Commonwealth when you come in and he says no, he mentions that they interviewed her in a locked room, which is, I don't know why that's surprising. So a little bit different from testimony yesterday, yesterday we had him, I don't know if he was conducting one of the exams for an hour and a half. And now it's a four to five hour interview, not a huge discrepancy, but he's spent about four to five hours with her. She was polite and affable. Dr. Kirk, whatever his last name is, this comes up to, he does some psychological testing. Reddington gets into this whole thing about what Kirk's last name is and how you pronounce it. I don't know why. I don't know why this was significant. This is not someone that Dr. Mack had ever worked with before. He has sort of a strange last name. I don't know. The weird gotcha, it didn't really make sense to me, but he talks about that. You know, at one point, he asks him where they stayed. He's like, did you stay in a fan? And at the moment, the parking lot to walk in together, it was very bizarre. And he's like, I stayed at a house. I don't know what he was going for there. I almost think there's some weird like tick-tock conspiracy that he stayed with Patrick or something. Like, I don't know what it is. But he asked those questions. It was a very strange period. At the other point, he got mad at him for smiling. I guess he was smiling and he was like, this is not a smiling matter. This is a murder case. I don't know if it's very strange. He did that too. They talked about the MMPI and the K-scale. The MMPI is not designed as a lie detector. The K-scale, because Rengton likes to call it the lie scale. The K-scale is what you use to determine if the MMPI is usable. Rengton wants him to say it's about lying, he's saying, look, it could be lying or it could be that the person's mental state, even if it's subconscious, prevents them from providing you usable information on MMPI. And so therefore, you kind of have to throw it out. And there's no indication that Lindsay was manipulating the MMPI and it was a valid test. Okay. So then they now talk about how Nurse Jalata thought Lindsay could be suffering from bipolar 2. And of course, this is relevant because if you do have bipolar, there's a tendency to avoid SSRIs. Though Dr. Matt said that this concern has actually been reduced over the last decade or so. So it's not like you see there's a potential bipolar and you run from SSRIs. There's a lot more understanding of it now. Rengton has Dr. Matt redefine Mania. Again, Matt notes that they've already talked about this, but Rengton wants him to do it again. So he does. He says, there's these symptoms that you look at. There's flight of ideas. There's destructibility, risky activity, rapid or pressured speech, grandiosity, excessive degree of goal, directed behavior. But what you need within this, you need a major depressive episode and a hypomanic episode, which is similar, but lesser than bipolar 1 than for 2. And that's why he thought she had bipolar 2 because she did not have the more severe. Basically my understanding of bipolar 2 is just like it's a lesser degree of the bipolar, not quite to the symptomatic level of bipolar 1. Then again, this is good. I think this is good for the defense, but he has Dr. McRapitum his diagnosis that there is a major depressive order, which was she had a major depressive episode, which was a part of a major depressive disorder, but she retained capacity. He notes that that other doctor that he interviewed her with Dr. Kirk thinks it's also bipolar 2. Now Dr. Resnick also thinks bipolar 2, but it's Dr. Spanelli who says Lindsay actually has bipolar 1. Which I think, you know, he didn't call Dr. Spanelli. She was the one he didn't call. And one of the reasons people think he didn't call Dr. Spanelli is because of her Facebook press. It's been very friendly to Lindsay. Honestly, I think anybody saying that Lindsay has bipolar 1 is clearly biased and shouldn't even be considered. I think bipolar 2 is a possibility. It's a very interesting to hear Dr. Kirk, whatever his name is. Talk about that. Later on in the day, she obviously does not have bipolar 1. There's no way she has bipolar 1, but bipolar 2 is a real possibility. And I thought this was fine. This was a good thing for Reddington. The thing about Reddington, there are good things in his cross-examination, but he either has forgotten or because it's a big case in some television and he's playing to the TikTok and the YouTube. Shorter is often better because you can get your hits in and you can really make those points and you make them stick and then you move on. It is a legitimate point to make that one of the doctors who saw Lindsay says she's bipolar and that this guy didn't. That's legitimate. That's interesting. But a lot of this other stuff is just strange and I don't think he hit the way he wanted to. And once again, there are plenty of things he did that played in the choir. There were members of the Lindsay Clancy choir who were singing along with him while he was doing it. That's fine, but unless you've already won, which maybe he has, that's not going to convince a jury. You really need to be thinking not about the people who already agree with you, but maybe the people in the jury who don't. And I feel like the longer this trial has gotten, the more Reddington has been preaching to the choir and less trying to convert law so, so that's sort of where we're at. So then Reddington goes on to her time at Tootsbury, so that he got to get into the hole. You're only examining her three years later. But Dr. Max says she has not demonstrated any signs of mania at Tootsbury. And Reddington goes through how she hasn't had any problems for three years. And he says it's because of the medication, though obviously there is the other side of that argument, which is, of course, that she either never had it or just isn't sick. To be fair, he's the one who also pushed this whole litany of medication that she was on before. So, you know, as I was listening to this today, and I don't remember if we've talked about this, but one of the weird things just looking back on the defense case, there was so much focus on the failure of the medical community over prescribing of medication. You know, that point where he accuses Dr. Tufts of pushing her over the edge by giving her a very minor increase in amitriptyline to a very low dosage. I mean, he said all those things. Then we had the defense case. And unless I'm just forgetting, I don't remember any witness that testified to this was likely or could have been medication induced. I mean, there was nothing about that. We had an emergency room doctor who talked about her spinal injury. We had the doctor who talked about how she must have fallen on her head. Then we had the doctors who just talked about psychosis and how she was in psychosis. But there was never any significant testimony about the drugs. And just as I was listening to this cross today, I was thinking about that. Like how strange it is that that was such a big part of everything he did in the cross of the state's witnesses and everything he said in the opening. But then he never actually called a witness to testify to that. And he never really even asked his own witnesses about how the medication could have been involved. Like there was no defense witness who said definitively, yeah, SSRI with her condition. Man, no wonder she had all these problems. Like he didn't have that. And just looking back on it today, I was just thinking about how strange that was. - Well, I was thinking also because he knows what his experts are going to say. He may have tried to go that route. And no one was going to say what he was going to say because the reality is all of them would say, yeah, of course, a therapeutic level is going to take three to four weeks. She took three to four days, perhaps. And the records are clear here. She didn't take enough to get to where she needed or whatnot. So I think he did explore that. And he knew his experts weren't going to give him the answers that he needed. Now, he should have abandoned this earlier on. But I guess if your goal in the defense is simply to poke holes and create reasonable doubt, then so all the doubt you want, even if your actual case is not going to include evidence of medication-induced psychosis. - So we go through the zoo loft, as I said, we go through the zoo loft, the 25 milligrams to 50 milligrams. She could not sleep after that. She desperately wanted to sleep after that. And Dr. Mac is obviously someone sympathetic to Lindsay and talks about this, talks about her depression. He gets asked about there's some Massachusetts funding, I guess, for researching and treating postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. And he talks about that for a little while. He doesn't know anything about the funding. And then we get into this weird back and forth about depression. Because Mac has already said she is severely depressed and Reddington keeps asking him about postpartum depression and keeps going through the symptoms of postpartum depression. And he keeps explaining, yes, she has all those symptoms and the problem here and the reason this becomes an issue. - So Mac, he follows the DSM-5, that's what he does. He follows the DSM-5, he's not following whatever they say in Europe or whatever they say at the WHO. And the DSM-5. - Because he's a psychiatrist here in the United States and that's relevant here. 'Cause I did see a lot of people say like, how could you know how he's heartless and whatnot. Just like lawyers, we can't go out on the limit just like change the law if we decide to. We actually have to take an oath and we follow the model rules of ethics. He is governed by a body that he is a member of in order to practice here in the United States. So I just want to note that, there's a lot of people who are just out there being like, he's heartless. No, this is actually the guide he has to go by. - And he's saying that God says, 12 weeks, eight weeks, four weeks? I can't even remember what it is anymore. It's a relatively short period of time. It's not long at all. - It was shorter than I thought. - Yeah, it really is. And honestly, probably wrong. But that is what it says. So what he's trying to say to Reddington is, she could be depressed, she could be psychotic. It's not postpartum psychosis or postpartum depression because that's a modifier of the main syndrome. And if it occurs in that period, and that's what you would say it was, but since it didn't occur in that period, that's not what you would say it was. And he's trying to explain this to Reddington. At which point, the judge who just cannot keep himself out of this trial, no judge should be as involved in this trial as he is. And I will tell you, Alessana have tried cases, we've sat through trials. I've never seen a judge get us involved. Half the time, I swear they're asleep. Half the time up there. You know, they just popped in. - We're scrolling Facebook. - Yeah. From there to that. - That's the only time. But this guy is so involved. And whenever Reddington gets upset, the guy's trying to answer the question. Reddington, one of the things he does, which is a pretty common technique, he asks an open-ended question. The witness starts to answer. And then he says, it's yes or no question. Give me a yes or no. Now, even real yes or no questions, often can't be answered yes or no. Because the question itself can have a false premise. If the question itself is based on the false premise, you can't say yes or no. That's not the way it works. And particularly with these experts, they're not gonna do that. You can often trick regular witnesses into giving you a yes or no answer to a broken question. But experts don't tend to do that. So he's pushing back on the question. Reddington's interrupting him. And the judge, rather than telling Reddington to let him answer the question, let him finish. Instead of doing that, he's jumping on the witness. So at one point, at this point, while they're arguing about this, he basically tells the witness, if you need to answer the question, if you can't answer it the way it's phrased, then say you can't answer it. And Max, like, oh, you want me to do that? Then that's what I'm gonna do. And so for the next few minutes, it's just Reddington asking a question and Max saying, I can't answer that the way it's phrased. And it just goes back and forth. And Reddington's getting more irritated. Max getting more obstinate. This is becoming an employee waste of our time. - The judge is just like foaming at the man. And here's the thing. I think he tried to catch himself, but he wasn't fast enough. It was like when I know I use my toddlers, because you know what, when there's toddler-like behavior, I'm just gonna use a toddler example. It's like when I have a lot of boys, I have three boys, and they don't care. They just sniff out trouble and they want to go with it, right? So if one of my kids starts dogpiling on one of my other sons or dad or something or me, doesn't matter the situation, doesn't matter if it's happy or sad. All the other boys run into the room. They hear that something's going on and they jump on top with them. And the dog pile begins. That's literally what happened. Like as soon as they started to be tension or talking between Reddington and Mack, the judge couldn't help himself and would just jump in on Reddington's side because there was one time where Mack was speaking and he was in the right trying to, you don't talk over the witness because he asked him a valid question. He barely got two words out and Reddington didn't care 'cause it was all performative. And he said, he started jumping and the judge jumped in and he said, and he caught himself because he realized he should not have jumped in on this fight and said, well, are you finished talking yet? To Dr. Mack, which is not how you talk to a witness, whatsoever, the appropriate almost always across the board is going to be pleased that the witness finished. Next time, witness please don't talk over the attorney. And I could see him catch himself almost sheepishly but not enough to actually change his behavior. It was just dog pile behavior except always on the side of Reddington which is really inappropriate. - And it could affect the case. I mean, you don't know how the jury's seeing this. The jury often sees the judge as sort of the ultimate father figure in the room, the person who takes care of them and is kind to them and protects them. And so when he's doing that, and that's why you should only do it in an extreme situation. You know, as a judge, you have to keep your cool. And even if you are reprimanding the witness, you have to do it in a very neutral way so that the jury doesn't know. It's the same reason you see all these sidebars. I mean, the whole point of all these sidebars is to prevent the jury from, you know, seeing a lot of the stuff they can go on between the judge and various attorneys, reprimanding attorneys. I mean, I've seen sidebars where attorneys just got absolutely chewed out. But the judge isn't gonna show that kind of hostility in open court in front of the jury because he doesn't want the jury to think, oh, that judge doesn't like that lawyer, so I shouldn't like him either. That's just a really important thing to do. And I don't care what your view is on this case. This judge is doing a poor job in maintaining that neutrality and that objectivity. And frankly, even if you think he's right, even if you think the substance of what the judge is doing is correct, you think Mac talks too long and he needs to say, even if you believe that, the judge should not be handling it the way he is because he's sending signals to the jury and it's just a problem. And so they argued about this for a while. It's also funny because Reddington is constantly interrupting him and constantly interrupted his own witnesses. And then like repeatedly objects when the Commonwealth just starts to ask a follow-up question on various things with their witnesses. It's funny that he does that. So they go back through Lindsay's medical history, what she told her furious. Doctors, once again, now we get to psychosis. So we did this with depression and postpartum depression. Now we're gonna do it with psychosis. So Reddington keeps wanted to talk about postpartum psychosis. And Mac wants to keep talking about just psychosis. And Mac points out that the illness of postpartum psychosis has been proposed for the DSM, but it hasn't been approved by the APA, he was the one who makes all these decisions. Reddington then proceeds to start asking him a series of hypothetical questions. The doctor starts answering them hypothetically at which point Reddington jumps in and says it's not a hypothetical. I actually want to talk about Lindsay Clancy. And so then it's just once again, the whole thing is chaotic. The Commonwealth is objecting at various points. They're all being over. rule, you can tell the Commonwealth's getting very irritated with the judge, but that's what's happening. And then we get into this loop where he's asking questions about postpartum psychosis. Mack is telling him that postpartum psychosis is not yet a defined illness. Reddington refuses to just ask questions about psychosis. He insists he's going to call it postpartum psychosis. Mack refuses to answer questions about postpartum psychosis based on what the judge had said earlier. So he's just like, "Sorry, I can't answer the question as you defined it." Basically, if they ever just both decided, "Fine, I'm just going to answer your question." Let's just talk about psychosis and I'll just talk about psychosis later on that we're in the postpartum period. Exactly. But that wasn't the point. It was not about getting to any truth. It was all about honestly performance and Reddington making Mack look bad because, like we said, he had a very damning expert testimony against the defense's narrative. You know that feeling when you finally clean out a junk drawer that's been bothering you for months? That's what switching to Gusto felt like for my business. Payroll, HR benefits, all the admin chaos that has been piling up, finally organized into one place. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. They make it so easy with automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. They also have unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price, no hidden fees, no surprises. Try Gusto today at Gusto.com/Prosacuters and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at Gusto.com/Prosacuters. One more time, Gusto.com/Prosacuters. Do you ever finish lunch and find yourself reaching for a snack an hour later? Or notice cravings take over even when you're trying to eat healthy? That's exactly the problem Pendulum Metabolic Daily was designed to help solve. Pendulum Metabolic Daily is a science-backed probiotic design to support your body's natural GLP1 response, help you feel fuller longer, experience fewer cravings and make it easier to stay on track with your health goals. Just one capsule a day with food. Some customers report noticing fewer cravings and more energy in as little as a week, though individual results can vary. Metabolic Daily is a five-strain probiotic, not just one ingredient doing the work, but a system that supports your metabolism, helps keep your energy steady and helps cut down on sugar cravings. The key ingredient is agar mancha, a gut bacterium that helps signal your body to produce more of its natural GLP1 after eating. That's a hormone that helps regulate appetite and feeling full. Right now, podcast listeners can save up to 48% off their first order at PendulumLife.com/Prosacuters. Then, Renington makes what I thought was a positive turn. He starts to try and use the doctor to support his position. He asks him about blood tests and the doctor says, "Yes, that's going to be helpful in those circumstances." There are no blood tests in this case, obviously. He talks about thyroid tests and he says, "Yes, that's going to be important as well." But just as he starts to ask those questions to kind of turn him and get positive things, he asks some questions, the doctor asks it in some way he didn't like it and he's like, "Fine, I don't care, I'm done." And he sits down. He literally says, "I don't care." I don't care. And sits down. And that's the end of his cross examination. Which is, I mean, it's unprofessional, but I think it was performative. I mean, I don't know. Maybe the jury is like, "Woohoo, way to go." I would never say something like that in court. Let's say that. But again, it's never been about Dr. Max answers or even about the questions. He needed to make enough smoke and mirrors because the testimony was really bad for his client. And so the prosecution, of course, gets a redirect. And one of the things on cross that Dr. Max was hammered on was that he didn't do the right investigating. He didn't do this. He did this three years later. There's so much he didn't know. And this is, if you were thinking this way to go because you're thinking it right, the prosecution asked Dr. Max, "Do you see yourself as an investigator in this role?" And the answer is no. He's an evaluator. He's not a law enforcement investigator. He's an independent contractor who works through park deets. So they basically establish like park deets connects you to experts you need because there's not some massive listserv where you can just write out into the void. I need an expert on TANF in Florida. They think about, you know, what CVs they have in front of them and they think, "Okay, yeah. We have a few people who know this and they will individually reach out to the people who they think will be a good fit for a case." It's a referral. We do this in the law. We do this in all sorts of different aspects. I get most of my experts for my cases through some sort of referral process like this because I, myself, may not know who to go to for a very niche area of expertise. And so he does not work for park deets, I guess deets, he's an independent contractor. Then they discuss his interview with Lindsey. Reddington had made this whole thing like he talked for three to four hours and never even gave her a break. And he says, "Unread direct?" Yeah, we made it very clear that we could take a break at any time. We were there to serve her and that they even offered several times to take a break. And each time Lindsey was the one who declined taking a break. And this whole interview was recorded. They had two videographers in the room. It wasn't just the two doctors. It was the two videographers. They had, you know, she was on one-to-one ratio with staff at Tukesbury and that one-to-one staff member was somewhere, not in the room, but close by in case she needed help. And they recorded this. So if you think that there was something untoward, judge, we have all of it here. And the prosecution offers the recorded interview video into evidence. And there's a sidebar because there's an objection. And they don't get it in. I'm actually not sure if it came in or not. They just started asking questions and I assumed it didn't because they didn't- They didn't play it. They didn't play it and they also didn't, I mean, I guess they could have let it in and not said on the record, this is Commonwealth's Exhibit 583 or whatever. So I just assumed it didn't come in, but if I'm the juror, I'd be like, okay, I want to see this interview. Why are we keeping it out? So the prosecution isn't trying to keep it out. Now they then ask about the LeBron case. That's the Florida TANF case that we were talking about and where the judge excluded him as an expert because he did not fit the criteria for what they needed in that case. He said that he made a report and there was a summary judgment argument about him. Ultimately, the court concluded that he was not a qualified expert in that case because the information he was aware of regarding the rate of substance abuse was nationwide and not specific to Florida. And the law being challenged was a Florida law, not a nationwide law. So that is to clear- I don't know. The thing is, it's completely fair on cross-examination to bring up any time you've been disqualified as an expert and it is pretty nuanced that even though this is cleared up, I'm not sure that the lager who doesn't understand how expert testimony works in the legal field would really understand. For what it's worth because it's a Florida case, it's a civil case. Even if they didn't understand the nuance, I don't think it had that much of an impact on his reputation especially because his testimony did speak for itself and it made sense to me. But we'll see. We'll see what the jury has to say about him. When they talk about the specifiers in the DSM, so we do come back to the DSM eventually. And we highlight specific details of the condition and the classification refers to the larger presenting symptoms that someone can have. Someone can have a severe mood disorder and then one can add on the specifier of postpartum on set, but it's not postpartum psychosis. Now Lindsay does have a major depressive disorder. He used the diagnostic criteria from the DSM to come to that conclusion about that major depressive disorder. And they go through the nine symptoms that are indicative of the major depressive disorder. Over a two week period, you have anadonia, depressed mood, feelings of guilt, worthlessness, thinking about suicide, problems with sleep, eating, energy, and psychomotor activity, slowing and then concentration. And he says, I go by the DSM guide, as I think you have to, or that's how you make diagnoses in the psychiatric field, went by these symptoms. And that's how I came out with a major depressive disorder, which again, I think helps. The defense, it is a mental defect. It's a mental diagnosis. That could be a mental defect. That you can absolutely argue that it is in a legal sense, a mental defect. And look, the big problem for Reddington is, the doctor will say that she had a major depressive disorder, but he's not going to say she was psychotic. So rather than fight there, he just pulls this medicine isn't a weird place right now with postpartum psychosis. It's not part of the DSM yet. It's not identified. Define. and disease, it's not really what I'm going to syndrome, maybe, it's not, it's not one of those. - Psychosis is. - Psychosis is. - And psychosis is always serious 'cause he tried to make the whole thing like, he kept saying like, if you don't believe in postpartum psychosis, you don't think it's serious. He's like, psychosis is always serious. It doesn't matter whether it's in the postpartum period or not, it is a very serious thing. And so he kept trying to minimize or make him feel like a heartless person who didn't believe in psychosis or minimize what psychosis was. And that's not what Dr. Mack was saying. - I mean, basically we're talking about two different things. They weren't even on the same planet discussing this. And that part, you just never know how the jury is gonna take it. - I don't, I actually have no idea how to do it. - I have no idea either. It could be bad for either side. There could be some juror who's like, man, that Dr. Mack. - He just fought tooth and nail. He certainly doesn't care about it. - He doesn't even believe in psychosis. - He doesn't even know what postpartum means. - Yeah, exactly. - He doesn't know what an episiotomy is. - Exactly, yeah, they had that whole weirdness. - Okay, so. - There were so much weirdness in this. - Okay, so the whole, and I think this is worth mentioning because this was a tactic to show how he doesn't know anything. He's a doctor of psychiatry. He's not a gynecologist or an OB-GYN. Women, you probably know what an episiotomy is. A episiotomy is in advance while you're having a baby, the vaginal way, instead of waiting for your tear, a doctor may choose to cut you to avoid tearing, but you are sewn up after the fact in order to fix, I guess, what was cut. He called it a tear. Now, you can understand how someone who does not, honestly, the layperson can say that they're like similar things. So one is obviously doctor initiated, and the other one is, I guess, naturally occurring, but both of them are painful, and both of them require some sort of medical intervention to fix the woman after labor and delivery. And I don't think it makes him a not qualified psychiatrist that he called an episiotomy, which honestly in a lay term is a type of tear, in the sense that you cut it. Yes, I know it's not because a tear is natural tear, and people actually say it's easier to heal if you don't cut it. But the point being, there was trauma during the birth that required some sort of medical intervention that made healing more painful than if there were not a cut slash tear. Had nothing to do with his opinion, but the point was to show that he's a quack doctor who doesn't even know anything about Florida taniflaw. He's been disqualified and expert, doesn't even know what an episiotomy is. And the right ladies don't fall for that, but that's what he was attempting to do. Yeah, the whole point was there was trauma during the birth. That was the point, and that's why I was significant because it might affect her mental state afterwards. But once again, Reddington is playing a game here, and it's just a common game you see. But I always hope that when you guys watch these trials with us, you start to see the strategies and you see the tricks, so you're a wiser trial watcher next time. So when you see a prosecutor or a defense attorney doing this kind of stuff on cross, you recognize it. Oh, I see what he's doing. You know, I get that. And that way you can, the things that matter and the things that don't. And look, I'll just say this. Reddington's cross may have been really effective. It may have not. I don't know. But one thing I can say for certain about his cross is one thing that I thought the Commonwealth did really well. It wasn't that they just mocked the defense experts and made them all seem stupid. And since they made them seem stupid, I bet that Jerry won't even consider what they said. What they did a really good job of was making their points through his experts, getting in the information about the way she behaves at the hospital she's currently at. The fact that you would expect to see a person who is involved in death of their children to be very emotional on anniversaries on birthdays, and she's not. You know, that kind of stuff, getting that in through cross, that is very effective, in my opinion, because you're getting your facts and your proof and your evidence in through the mouth of the defense witness. And I always just, I just think that's a much more effective cross examination than just trying to tear them down. For what it's worth, I don't know if this landed with anyone else, but since they seem to be trying to play the like getting sympathy from women card, what I heard that the birth trauma was a pieziotomy, rather than like, there are different degrees, of course, of tears, but the fact that it's an pieziotomy rather than a tear because there's different degrees of tears, there are like, I forget which level it goes to, but like a fourth degree tear, or I can't remember if it's the opposite, like really bad tears are truly, like, I think horrendous. You go like, there could be internal organ stuff happening, you go to physical therapy, it's horrible. A pieziotomy is because their doctor initiated, there's usually not different levels. Not that it doesn't hurt, but I think the vast majority of labor and deliveries end up in a pieziotomy or tear, where it is not to minimize the trauma that it is, but the way they've been talking about the birth trauma to justify how she said things like, he's the most difficult child or whatnot, and kind of justifying her anxiety or lack of ability to bond with her child in my mind as someone who's had a lot of babies was like, oh, that's the trauma they're talking about? Not minimizing it, but I thought you were gonna tell me like something horrendous, like she needed for blood transfusions. - It almost died, yeah. - She almost died, she fell into a coma, these things happened to women, by the way, that she fell into a coma, the child's heart rate, you know, completely dropped, they had to do an emergency so actually all these things, like, they thought they were gonna lose her, they thought they were gonna lose the baby, the way they've talked about the trauma in order to justify the way she has been acting, was surprising to me. So when the word "apesia" to me was used, I was like, say again, that's the trauma we're talking about. Okay, I'm not saying he's not traumatic, I'm saying the way you've been talking about it has been very different. And then I would think many women who've experienced the same will say, "Huh, hadn't "apesia" about "automy." I've not done what she's done to her three children. So I will say that is, you never know how the jury is going to take these things, but I will say, as a woman who heard that, I'm glad that they said that out loud. I'm kind of glad they had this fight, 'cause I wanted to know that it was an "apesia" to me, and not some other birth trauma. - So the next person to testify was Dr. Kirk, and that's what we're gonna call him, Hyal Brun, I guess? - Dr. Kirk. - We're gonna call him Dr. Kirk. - And I'll say this about Dr. Kirk. Dr. Kirk does the thing that I just love. And I don't know if this is just me being weird, but he answers every question, by taking off his glasses and holding them. And I'm like, that's a psychologist. That's why psychologists talk. They take off their glasses and they hold them, while they answer their question. I don't know why, I just really like that. He also has a really nice voice. He seems to very sort of like, I could go to therapy with Dr. Kirk. He's, he just, - Very calm. - He has a fantastic effect. I actually took him off of 1.5, 'cause I was like, I like the way you talk. - Yeah, I like the way you talk. So he's a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. The previous witness was a psychiatrist. He is the chair, or he used to be the chair, may still be the chair of the Department of Psychology, Drexel, someone who was watching on Patreon, actually said that they took glasses with him. So I thought that was fun. He runs two clinics there. One is for courts and attorneys, helping attorneys and helping courts make determinations about these types of issues. The other one was really interesting. It's a reentry clinic for people re-entering, returning from federal prison, from mental health court, or people who've been exonerated after innocence claims. He helps them reintegrate into society. So that was really - That was amazing. - Yeah, he's also a forensic psychologist. A new Alice would like this. He got his doctorate from the University of Texas in 1980. And he had a postdoc on forensic psychology, which is, we've said, is the interaction between psychology and the law. He is licensed in Pennsylvania, and through this reciprocal program, he can practice in any state. 'Cause remember, I guess he can't prescribe medication. So maybe there aren't as many limitations on practicing in multiple states. After you have a license in one, is there are for psychiatrist? He is board certified at like the highest possible level. He's published 240 articles or books on abnormal behavior, including on forensic mental health assessment and risk assessment, which is particularly relevant to our case. He would not call someone a patient that he is assessing and he explained why. And remember, this goes back to Dr. Zyzel. When you're working as a therapist, you're working to help someone improve. And when you're doing an assessment, you're trying to reach some sort of truth. And you want to be independent and the two can conflict. As a therapist, you just want to help somebody. As a forensic evaluator, you want to be as thorough and accurate as possible. And your final conclusion may not help the person that you're working with. So if you've built this sort of personal bond with someone, and then you're asked to give a determination that could put them in prison for the rest of their lives. I mean, it's not hard to see why maybe that overlap shouldn't happen. Dr. Zyzel is sitting next to Lindsay's mom every single day of trial. I don't know if the jury sees that, but it just screams, "I'm not an unbiased guy. I'm on her team." And that lessons the effect of his testimony. And he says he would not conduct a forensic evaluation on the patient for that very reason. It can cause a conflict of interest. - This is very effective, again, we're trying to show that he's not just a hack or confirmation bias being brought in here. He says that he actually testifies 75% of the time for the defense in a case. And he testifies for the prosecution or by order of the court, 25% of the time. So in other words, he's actually more defense heavy if you're looking at his resume. And he has to tell the person who's hiring him [BLANK_AUDIO] can't just support their position because they ask them about, you know, is there some sort of retention bias? What the person who's paying your bills, right? Are you just trying to please them? Is that what's going on? While anyone can appreciate that that may be the case, I believe him when he said, yes, that is something you have to protect against, but you always have to be thorough and impartial. And sometimes that means it favors the party that hired them, but sometimes it means that my opinion doesn't agree with their side. And we do know that retention bias is a real thing, but it's something that I work hard against because that is my job to get to the psychology of what's happening here. And of course, you're going to want to help the person who's hiring you. And they also talk about confirmation bias. He's acknowledging these are all real things that someone may come in with and you have to take measures to protect against it. He says that as someone who doesn't specialize, it actually gives him an advantage as he's not looking for a particular kind of disease or defect. He is there to make that forensic psychologist conclusion. And he's even had to tell people, you're not going to like what I'm about to say. And that means, by the way, you don't keep getting paid, but that's what he does. Now, he's also been the president of the American Board of Forensic Psychology, which is a big deal. There are few at his level who are board certified and to be the president of all of this means he's among the best of the best in his field. Now, he did meet with Lindsay Clancy. And in order to do so, he reviewed a large number of records. He also conducted collateral interviews of people around her in order to make his analysis. He's been reviewing these documents since 2025. And then in 2026, is when he spent three days with her, along with, of course, Dr. Aver Mack. Two of those days, they were together. And I think he met with her by himself one of those days. Now, she did the psychological testing with him on the second day. And he also, of course, reviewed her cell phone records, video footage, defense, expert reports, digital records, medical records, police records, interviews, and grand jury proceedings. He said that he spent about 180 hours, most of them reviewing records in her case. Ten and a half of those hours were interviewing her specifically. And she also, I think an hour and a half or so, interviewing both Patrick and Patrick's mother. He did ask to interview her sister and she declined. Then he met Lindsay with Dr. Mack. The questions are going to be similar, so they met with her together. Now, a capture from having to go through this interview process twice, so they were trying to do it to kind of respect her, right? If these are the similar questions, they can both be in the room. But each of them came up with their own report and review and analysis of what it meant. So even though they were asking similar questions in the same room, they were not working together. They just needed the same information, but they took that information and made their own independent assessments. And it turns out they really did that because they ended up not agreeing on the diagnosis. And, you know, it's funny because I wondered why they met with her together. And then as soon as he said that, I was like, oh, yeah, of course, you don't have to have somebody go back through the death of their three children at their own hands any more times than you have to, particularly if there's a possibility you're going to say that she was under psychosis at the time and had no control of herself. And it's just torturing the poor woman. So yeah, doing it together makes perfect sense. And there's really no reason not to do it together. Reddington made an issue out of that. And I was kind of like, this was me. This was me falling into the ignorance trap because I was like, huh, I wonder, is that inappropriate? I mean, should they be doing that together? I don't know. But then he explained it. I was like, oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense. So okay, they talked about how she had a limited history, limited mental health history before this. Basically, she had some anxiety earlier in life. We've heard about nursing schools. She was afraid of public speaking, things like that and anxiety connected with the birth of her three children, including when returning to work. And this anxiety sort of grew with each child. Now, anxiety isn't necessarily a bad thing, which is something he points out. A certain amount of anxiety is kind of like a certain amount of stress. It can be something that that drives you to do better. And it had been beneficial to her in many ways when she was younger. It pushed her to do well in academics and sports. She was very highly achieving. She was a high accomplishment person. She did great in school and she did great. And I think competitive cheerleading that she was involved at some point. And she really did not experience anxiety that interfered with her functioning before September of 2022. She had no adverse childhood experiences as a child. And of 10 possible indicators of adverse experiences, she had zero. Now, why is this important? I'll tell you one reason I like this guy. And we've talked about this some last time about you really want to witness who says some good things for the other side. You know, that's like something you want to see. This guy also had the natural curiosity you all have that we try and beat out of you, but we all have it, including us. Why? Why did she do that? And this actually became sort of a driving part of his analysis. Why'd she do it? So he's trying to figure it out. And he says it. He's like, we're all wondering, how could someone like her do this? He said that. And we're like, thank you. You're all trying to figure it out. And I thought that was such a powerful moment because you know when he looked at the jury and was like, everybody wants to know why someone who's been perfectly normal would kill their three children, the jury's like, you got to think the jury's like, yeah, finally. Why? So I thought that was really interesting. So he's going through the possibilities. One is maybe she has some underlying abuse that led to this. That's not the case. That is not why she did this zero, though. It seems like she had a great family, great childhood. So he talks about how when Callan was born, about 12 weeks afterwards, she began to feel depressed and anxious. And really what drove that the trigger for that was the thought of going back to work. The fact that Patrick was going to be working more. I mean, he talks about going back to work. He's working from home, but we all know a lot of times you're working from home. You may be in the house, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can help out. Let's think about if you're actually working from home, you're doing work. So she's anxious about going back to work. Remember she'd had those negative experiences with Cora when she went back. It was not something that she looked forward to then. Now she has three kids. Being a parent gets harder at every child you have. That's just the way it is. And he's having this specific issue. Whether it's true or not, I mean, we've talked about how she never told the pediatrician this, but she has consistently told other people that he would not take a bottle. So she was breastfeeding at the time. He wouldn't take a bottle. And she was really concerned that if she left him and she worked nights, what she often had to do. And he wouldn't take a bottle at night. There would be a huge problem and recall when was the big issue with Cora, where she's watching on the camera. Patrick had put her down for sleep and Cora's crying. And she'd cried for 10 minutes. And I guess Patrick was sleep training her. He wasn't going to interrupt. She tried to call him. She couldn't get him. She freaked out so much. She called the cops. Please show up for a welfare check. That happened when she went back to work. So now she's seeing that she's having that concern. And this is the point where that anxiety and that fear about what she's seeing starts to really get to her. And what's again, this guy told the story so well. It was so obviously he had so much command of her to the extent he gets kind of in trouble for it later on, which we'll talk about. But he has so much command of her life and everything going on. And he's telling the story in such a way that you can understand exactly how everything is developing. And I'll say it was a very start contrast to Dr. Zyzel who claimed that he read all these records. But here he's saying he's spent 180 hours minus say about 12 hours. 168 hours revealing the records. It showed he really did know her case forwards and backwards. And not because he had some like personal relationship where he's giving her phone. His phone to her to use to call her husband. So there was a start contrast between Dr. Zyzel's claimed proficiency and knowledge of her diagnoses, I guess, and his. He came off very knowledgeable of these sorts of things. You're listening to this podcast so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with progressive save over $900 on average. They make it super simple. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with coverage options tailored to your choices. Plus you'll see which discounts you may qualify for like the online quote discount or savings for paying in full. In fact, 99% of progressive auto customers earn at least one discount. See if you could save when you switch to progressive. You'll feel good about making a savvy choice. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little extra cashback. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, national average 12 month savings of $946 by new customer surveyed who saved with progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. Running a business means you're always reachable. Until you're not. And the moment you miss that call, that text that follow up, a competitor is the one that picks it up. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity. All your calls, text, and voicemails live in one place, so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. That's why Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, Trusted by over 90,000 businesses who rely. on it to stay reachable and look professional every day. And you can set it up in minutes on any device. Keep your existing number and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com/prosecuters. That's q-u-o.com/prosecuters. She has this anxiety. It's building up. She goes to Dr. Tuffs. She gets zoloft. She delays taking it, but she starts sometime in her October. And as we know, when she takes it, it has the exact opposite effect that you would expect. Her anxiety gets worse. Now the depression comes on as well. And insomnia is hitting. And all these things are starting to combine together to make her mental state worse and worse. By the time she's moving into November, she's having real difficulty with sleep disruption. And since mid-October, she's come to believe that it's the medications themselves that are causing her to have all these issues. By the end of November, she is at the end of her rope. At this point, she's having panic symptoms. She has concern about being addicted to Atevan. She's feeling disconnected and numb. And the inability to sleep is continuing and the effects are piling up and they're starting to combine with each other to make her mental state worse and worse. So then in late November, early December, she starts having horrible intrusive thoughts. These thoughts were about harming herself. And occasionally later on in December, these intrusive thoughts would be also about harming her children. She's saying that her brain is damaged and she needs to kill herself because there's no fixing it. She did not describe these intrusive thoughts as auditory hallucinations. They were her own thoughts. Because if it's coming from the outside, then it can be a psychotic symptom. But intrusive thoughts are different and have different implications. I thought this was really important, especially because we talked earlier about how the defense expert was essentially rewriting the records, making the intrusive thoughts the voices. And he is explaining the medical difference between intrusive thoughts and an outside psychotic symptom, which is a voice. The way she describes these thoughts, these suicidal ideations, even harming her children, ideations are intrusive thoughts. Now, she says that she gets worse throughout December. And so she goes to women and infants in Rhode Island on December 20th. Now, she did not meet the criteria then because she was, even though she was having general anxiety and depression, these are not postpartum issues. Now, he read all the women and infants records that go through these. They actually offered her three other programs while she was there. And she said she would discuss it with her provider. So this was not a situation where they're like, you look fine, lady. You don't need us. Get out of here, which is, of course, the defense is narrative that she's being turned away. She's being failed by the medical profession. He says, no, no, she didn't meet the criteria for women and infants, but they gave her other options that would better fit what she's going through. And she says, I need to consider this with my provider. These programs for general mental health programs, rather than postpartum specific. And there's no evidence, of course, that she actually did speak to her provider about these other programs that women and infants offered her. And look, I think this is just further proof of what we've been saying for a long time. The narrative that we were sold and that we did some of the selling in the beginning of this, it just isn't true. Did the medical system fail Lindsay in some big way? I think it's possible that you can conceptualize that as Lindsay had a very specific problem. One that was much more difficult to treat than maybe your typical person. We're going to see some testimony about that from Dr. Kirk later on. And because of that, and because the medical system, much like the legal system, we talk about this. Legal systems designed to help most people to solve most problems. When you get cases like this and some other really difficult cases, that's when things start to break down. So you see women and infants, tough lot plays. They're not just turning her way like it's been described. They have a very specific way of looking at postpartum issues. I bet I'm going to go out on a limb and say they probably follow the DSM and they were like, you're six months, seven months out. So you're not postpartum. That's not the problem. We have these other programs that aren't directly tied to that though that could help you. And I think Lindsay's thinking this is postpartum. And frankly, maybe she's right. Maybe the DSM needs to change. Maybe we need to push that time back to a year. I mean, who cares? That's fine. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if it takes a year to get over a lot of these issues. But in any event, I think she's thinking this is a postpartum issue. They're telling me you won't care for me that way. And she's not seeing the sort of doctor Mac thing, which is, hey, depression, depression, depression, it may help us to know what causes it. Maybe it causes us to treat it a little bit differently. But one thing I've learned from this trial is it seems like the drugs are basically the same. I assumed if it was a postpartum issue, there'd be some like hormone therapy or something like that. If that's true, nobody's testified to it. Nobody said they should have given her a progesterone or something. And then that would have really helped. It's just, no, you give people standard depression medications. You treat it just like you treat another depression. And I think in her mind, she didn't want to do the general stuff. Her anxiety is affecting her. So that's preventing her from taking advantage of some of these opportunities. And you just have this train wreck of a situation where the medical system's a little too rigid. She's a little too rigid. And she's super anxious. And that's making it harder for her to accept help. And all this is coming together into this disaster that we're going to see, but it's not the simplistic black and white. The medical system failed her. American health care is broken. All of these doctors are incompetent. It wasn't that. It's a much more complicated situation than that with a lot of different factors that led to where we are. So then he talks about her going to McLean and the suicidal thinking ideations that she had. Now her admission is listed as postpartum depression and major depressive disorder. And the primary concern listed was insomnia. Being hospitalized made her more suicidal, she said, but she would not commit suicide because of her children and mother. What we now know are called protective factors. She had no delusions, no hallucinations, no continuing suicidal or homicidal thinking. And she was cooperative and pleasant when she was discharged. She said that when she left McLean, she had a shred of hope because she was off of the seroquial, but the suicidal thoughts returned about one week later. And she believed the symptoms she was experiencing after Zoloft were worse with the insomnia being a new symptom. The medication did not make her better. It actually made her worse. So she did not have a cognitive behavioral therapist, which it seemed like she needed. There was one area where she didn't get some help that probably would have been helpful. She was really focused on medication resolving the issues and different medications it might help. That's evidenced by her searches. I mean, she's really looking into this. She's trying to figure out what pill will fix her and she even says that I just want to be able to take some medication and be myself again. I just want to fix this problem. Of course, the issue with that is this is again where on the one hand, she's looking for the medication to help her. On the other hand, she's afraid of the medication and she's afraid of taking it. And I'm not going to say that the symptom she was having, raw fake or they're all in her head, but I certainly think her anxiety was making her believe that the symptoms were maybe worse. The side effects were worse. This anxiety is the driver of this and sort of ramping up everything and making it worse. She had a lot of providers that have given her multiple diagnoses both before and after the event. We've had bipolar. We've had bipolar too. We've had general anxiety disorder. We've had this pressive disorder. We've had postpartum depression. We've had postpartum psychosis. We've had complicating factors that go along with that. You know, she has the anxiety and she's not sleeping. She's worried about leaving her baby and she's having a poor reaction to medication. She'd always been able to use exercise as something that would help her, but she had stopped by October, which was a difficult thing for her to handle. And even though she tried to return to exercise in December and January, it just wasn't really working out and everything is compounding. I think it was just depression. The depression kept her from exercising, not exercising, made the depression worse. Depression is just a spiral. That's the way it works. It makes you not want to do anything, not do anything, makes you feel worse, which makes you not do anything. You know, just like spirals out of control. I think that's it. I think she just was depressed. Okay. So now they ask about his diagnosis. Remember, Dr. Max said, "major depressive disorder with an associated anxiety disorder." He diagnosis over bipolar too. And this was a really interesting part of this testimony because he talked about how hard it was to get there. And I thought there was some real one thing people said about Dr. Max is he seemed like he was arrogant. I didn't really get that. I just got this dude's really smart and doesn't really interact with people well. That was what I got from Dr. Max. But this guy, I thought this really showed some humility because he basically says, "I got to bipolar too, but it wasn't necessarily because of anything I was able to see." You got to have this identifiable mood swing to get to bipolar too. Bipolar one, remember, has the mania, the severe mania. Bipolar two is a little more subtle. She certainly had the period of depression. No question about that. We can all agree on that. But it's really hard to find the manic episodes. you know, it's a great day. and we talked about this a lot, things like feeling good and exercising for someone who exercise before don't really get you there. And at the end of the day, what convinced him wasn't his own genius. It was that she had been at Tukesbury for three and a half years. They diagnosed her in bipolar two. They are treating her as if she has bipolar two. And the medication she's been getting, which they have had to take really great care to just get perfectly right for her. Seems to be helping her. To the point that when she tried to go off with some of these medications, she had some of the same issues as she'd had before. So based on this, that whatever they're doing seems to be helping. He's like, I don't know what the manic episode was, but I'm going to agree with bipolar two. And they talk about some of the things that have been thrown out there like cleaning out the garage. And he's like, that's not manic. And he talked to both Lindsay and Patrick about it. Neither one of them thought it was manic. They were like, no, we were just cleaning out the garage. And her running, which was something she'd always done and loved doing, was not manic. So you don't really have the things you need. He talked about how bipolar, you know, it's not something you have when your child typically comes on in your 20s or 30s. So it certainly is something that maybe this was just what uncovered her bipolar two. Yeah, I thought that was a really enlightening way to diagnose her because he was saying, I'm not going to ignore, you know, like how she's been treated for the last three and a half years. Like, even though I don't see these symptoms, I'm not seeing these check boxes that you need in order to make that diagnosis. I'm looking at the way we're getting here. Like she is being treated for bipolar two. It seems to be working. When we stop treating her as bipolar two, problems seem to arise. And therefore, like working backwards. Now, then this is the right way to go about the ultimate question that the jury is going to be posed, whether she's criminally responsible. Finally, I will say after all of these experts, I finally was able to understand how this medical knowledge fits into criminal responsibility because then they look at the criminal responsibility evaluation that he did. He says that in order to do this evaluation, you have to look very carefully at the standard and the jurisdiction. We've said this before. Most jurisdictions do something like MacNaughton test, not Massachusetts. He describes in detail the Massachusetts standard. He says you have to look to the defect. You have to look to the symptoms of that defect and see how those symptoms affect the capacity to know something is wrong and to control behavior. So he did a number of tests and he wanted to check the responses. How accurate is someone? Are they malingering? Are they distorting their own responses? Are they minimizing? These are all really important to know how trustworthy, or how much weight you can put into this test, like the MMPI. And he also says he's looking for delusions, mental disorganizations, those sorts of things within the MMPI. Now he says that the symptoms were around January 24th and he wanted to know how depressed she was and how much she was doing the suicidal thinking. He says it's always a challenge when it's been a while since the event. He recognizes that he's looking at this three years later and she did show a slight tendency to under-report. But I've won to one suicide precaution since she came to spary. She was at risk and remains at risk of suicide and that he acknowledges that she had a very serious suicide attempt on January 24th, which again is something that has not been the prosecution's narrative and now they have two experts who not only say she was definitely depressed, like definitely had something she was struggling with mentally before January 24th and definitely tried to kill herself on January 24th and I believed these experts. So I hope the prosecution is rewriting their closing arguments to embrace the fact that she did want to kill herself and in doing so she wanted to take others down with her. So I thought this was very compelling the way you could see his internal struggle at having to do these difficult evaluations that are not black and white. - And it's hard to overstate how much I think the prosecution undermined their own case. But from the opening throughout, acting as if this was not a serious suicide attempt. Because now the jury is hearing these experts say the opposite and you gotta wonder how that makes them view the commas okay. And if we get to closing and they make those same arguments about her suicide attempt, I just think they will blow up their own case because I think their best hope, their only hope, is that the jury hears these experts and thinks, wow, I get it now, okay, I can see it, she's guilty. That's their only hope. So they don't need to undermine them in closing and what does that see what they do? - Then he said she enters January. She's completely hopeless and she has this idea that something is wrong with her mind. Remember she said her brain was broken, she's depressed, she has problems concentrating and she has elevated on importance and control of her thoughts. It's always been important for her to work hard and to control what's going on with her mind and with her life. This connects back to kind of his evaluation of what her childhood was like. She was hard working. She was good at what she did. I think the prosecution read this part of the report and like took it too far, was like, she's a control freak and that's why she's like, that's the same thing. So what he's saying at all, he's not criticizing her for being controlling. He's explaining that we're trying to make sense of how seemingly a regular person with no childhood trauma and no like diagnoses before this time can do something so horrific and just off the charts. This is not even close to the bell curve. How do we get there? He's trying to make sense of how we arrive. He's trying to get to the Y and he's not blaming her for being a control freak, which I think the prosecution just ran with inappropriately. Maybe they haven't talked to him before they read his report. I don't know, but hearing him explain it, I understood where he was coming from. It wasn't the control that caused her to kill the kids. Rather, it's compounding all of these kind of your run of the male depression into something bigger in her own mind. So while a lot of people may be diagnosed with depression in the postpartum era or otherwise, he's saying what is a very common diagnosis in her mind was enlarged into this wildly dramatic thing because of predisposition she had about what type of person she was. I think this is really important 'cause it was a light bulb for me. I know we're all talking about Helen Z. Clancy is off the charts. She's this, she's that, she's failed by the medical system. She's won an Amelia, no one does. I think what Dr. Kirk, Hilberg, whatever is saying is she couldn't be more regular. We unfortunately see this all the time. None of those people kill their children. And so he goes into the testing results on those voices and it demonstrated that if she heard voices, she only heard voices on the day of the murders, January 24th. He's also interested in motive, we already know this, and given how out of character this is. They didn't even use corporal punishment. Like they didn't spank their kids. They didn't, you know, this is not like an escalation of the way they normally act as she got out of control and saw red that day. That's not what this is. So he really wanted to figure out why. - He basically said, look, most of the typical reasons people kill people don't fit here. He's an expert on why people kill people. He went through various things, it's not that. He said there's basically two possible ways this happened. And we talked about this before, how really think the prosecution needed to pick an argument and stick with it and if it fails, it fails. Well, he's doing it. Him and Dr. Mack, they're fine with like saying, this is the way she's guilty, it's one of two things. The first one, she's not guilty if it's the first one. She had acute psychosis with command hallucinations. That's one possibility. The other possibility, she has a serious suicide attempt and she wanted to have the kids with her so they would not suffer without her. And he says, the evidence supports the second, not the first. And I'll just say this, these last two witnesses have been just so clarifying because I feel like we've all been grasping in the dark for this and we've sort of danced around these possibilities. Is it just a taster suicide? This is a murder suicide going wrong, type thing. And now finally hearing some medical experts give some theories on this. I don't know, it was just so enlightening. So he says, the evidence for the first is basically what she said. This voice that said, this is your last chance. Kill the kids so you can kill yourself. If this actually happened, that would be evidence of psychosis. It's also possible if she really didn't think others might know her thoughts, that could be a symptom as well. We talked about that a lot with Dr. Mack. He talked about it a little bit as well. There's this question about this, one possible incident that happened with her mom, but she was doing reality testing. So that doesn't really get there for this thought broadcasting problem. The second possible symptom would be a delusional belief that her place were going to take her children. But once again, much like Dr. Mack said, this isn't actually paranoid or delusional. A delusion is a fixed false belief. He notes that he's a mandatory reporter. If she told him, I'm going to hurt my kids, he would have to report it. She's a labor and delivery nurse. She's probably a mandatory reporter as well. And she certainly knows what it is. So it's not irrational for her at all to be concerned that someone might take care of her. her kids away if she has a severe enough mental issue. He talks about how the psychosis theory is appealing. He kind of want to believe it because it explains why she would do something that was so out of character. Once again, as we said before we even got into all these people, a really good expert witness is one that acknowledges the other side and acknowledges positive things for the other side and reasons to agree with the other side because you hear them and you're like, "This guy seems like he's really trying to get to the bottom of this." You know, he's not just disregarding the other side. He's actually considering. He says psychosis is appealing, not only is it possible, it's appealing. The problem is, even though it's appealing, the way she described what was happening doesn't actually fit with psychosis. One thing is she's hearing this voice that she's never heard before, that she's never heard since and that in fact she only experienced for the 18 minutes it took to kill the children. In quotes, I have this in quotes because he said to put it mildly, that would be very unusual. He didn't say, "That's impossible," because the experts don't say that. But he certainly, if that happened, this is like a watershed case because it just doesn't happen that often. When he put the timestamp on it, the 18 minute thing, it was so visceral because he can back it up with all the research he has on auditory hallucinations. That 18 minutes, the prosecution should be pounding that in their closing because it certainly stood out. He also said in his experience, "One thing you have to be really careful about is when someone claims that the definitive symptom, the thing that caused them to commit the crime, only happened during the criminal offense." That's the only time it ever happened. It's literally what she says. There's a very convenient way to limit culpability, and look, as we've talked about. What did I say? That someone probably blasts me online when I said, "Permission structure to kill your children as soon as you get any sort of diagnosis." I know. I know it's going to rub people the wrong way, but look, Dr. Kirk said it himself. It's to limit culpability. I'm not saying it happens in every circumstance, but is that the slippery slope we want here? Look, I mean, the first time she said this is to a religious figure, not really the person you want to, you know, you're talking to a priest or something. You probably want to give some reason why you killed three kids. The second time she talks about it, she's talking about it to Patrick who she's worried about having a relationship with and where are they, where they at in their relationship. Makes perfect sense that she would want to try and conceptualize this in a way. Once again, even if she wasn't psychosis, to explain it to people how it happened, she heard a voice. I don't know. I mean, just everything he said about this really made sense to me. So then they discuss whether what she was experiencing was postpartum. He says, "Look, calendar eight months old. Eight months away from having given birth is, you know, it's not completely impossible, but the farther away you get from when you gave birth, the less likely your issues are attributable to being postpartum." Now she did have inconsistencies in her account of the voice. So first, she told him that this is your last chance, right? Kill the kids so you can kill yourself, repeated this over and over. But she told another doctor that the voice that the children will suffer without you. This is important because it suggests inaccuracy, so which version of events happened? They can't both be true. The more inconsistencies there are, the more likely it is to be problematic. Now, he's researched on malingered hallucinations, in other words, people lying about hallucinations. And usually, real hallucinations have related delusions. But she, then we've talked about this before, right? Like, kill your children. And then the delusion that goes along with that is, your child is a devil reincarnated, right? That's the associated delusion. But she did not report any sort of delusions to go with this. And a genuine hallucination tends to come and go. It's not like a persistent thing. You hear it, and then you're fine, and then you hear it, and it comes and goes. But she didn't have that. In fact, she reported that she'd never heard this voice before. It was an unfamiliar male voice, but it was clear, and it was commanding. Heard it for 18 minutes, and she's never heard it since. That doesn't fit the hallucinations that he has studied. Now, she reported that she didn't have any control over the voice or her reactions because, guess what? She has to do that under the McCool standard to qualify for this insanity defense. He says, that's really not common. Typically, you find someone trying to fight those voices, for example. Block themselves in a room, throw away the key, covering their ears. No, no, no, no, no, checking themselves into a hospital, right? None of that happened. She'd never heard the voice for those 18 minutes she became that puppet is what she reports. She also says that what she claims to hear, that single male voice, who she did not recognize, was unusual. Usually it's someone familiar, and that typically, like I said, when people hear their auditory hallucinations that do try to resist it, or they try to cope with it in some way, and people who inactually describe hearing voices report no efforts to resist, which is, of course, what we see in Lindsay's case. So I have these running list of pieces that I've always been hunting forever, because they're just at such high prices, I can't quite bring myself to buy them, whether it's just the perfect dress from Tucker Nuck, or honestly, these football jerseys that my kids want, but they're so expensive. I think, and I think, and then all of a sudden, they're gone from online. I can't find them anywhere until I've found them on Poshmark for way less than what I could get them for anywhere else. I have to tell you guys about Poshmark because I love it. Poshmark is the leading fashion resell marketplace, shaped by real people, and real style. Millions of new and pre-loved items from daily wardrobe staples to vintage and luxury fashion, archive worthy pieces you thought you missed forever, to current essentials, and one of a kind vintage finds, it's all there. And when you're ready for a closet refresh, you can even earn money by selling the pieces you're ready to part with, reaching more than 80 million users on the platform. Recently, I had this beautiful leather bag that I've been looking for for so long, but I could not stomach the full price, and I kept looking, and I finally got online, and I saw it. Oh my goodness, it was the most beautiful bag, and I'm so glad I found it on Poshmark for a fraction of the price, it was still being sold in stores. You can find out what I'm talking about at Poshmark. New deals and styles are listed every day, so don't wait, download the Poshmark app, and use code prosecutors when you sign up to get $10 off your first purchase. Or shop now at poshmark.com/pricetors, and get $10 off your first purchase. S-P-O-S-H-M-A-R-K dot com slash prosecutors. Alright ladies, can we normalize the fact that your period deserves better than dry toilet paper? If you've ever wished you could take a shower in the three minutes you've got between Zoom calls, get a Tushy Bade, quick, gentle refreshing, and exactly what you want when you're not feeling your best. And let's just say, it's also awesome for new moms because you can really take care of yourself while you have a newborn with a Tushy Bade. I got the Tushy Bade and I thought, what am I going to do with a Bade and now I cannot live without it. It was so easy to install it. It looks just like it's part of my bathroom. You can't even tell there's something extra, but when you sit down, it is like being at a spa because the cleaning experience is way better compared to traditional toilet paper. I can't believe I ever didn't have the Tushy Bade. Tushy Bade transforms your bathroom wellness for life, gut to butt to bowl, a game changer for periods postpartum recover, IBS constipation, or just feeling fresh in seconds after a workout. Tushy brings the comfort of clean, instantly warm water to your everyday routine. Give your body the care it deserves. For a limited time, our listeners get 10% off their first Bade order when you use code prosecutors at checkout. That's 10% off your first Bade order at HelloTushy.com with promo code. And what he says, and this was edifying because we literally said this last episode, is that this isn't really a voice. It's much more consistent with an intrusive thought. And in fact, it's more consistent with the intrusive thought she had already had. She had had thoughts about harming herself for a while. She had possibly had thoughts of hurting the kids, that's a little unclear. And if these were intrusive thoughts, they were consistent with what she'd been experiencing for months. And I think it is worth noting, and no one said this explicitly, but I kept thinking it. What was one of the protective factors that prevented her from taking her own life? Her kids. It was her mom and her kids. Those were the two things that she said were keeping her from following through on these impulses. And then what do we have? We have her killing the kids and then trying to take her own life. And it really fits with what the doctor is describing as a continuation of her experience for a while that is now reaching the point. She's no longer just thinking about suicide, she now thinks she wants to take her own life. And he also noted, and this is something we talked about. When Patrick got to her, Patrick gets home, he can't find anybody, he finds her in the snow, and the first thing he asked her is, what did you do? And her response was, I tried to kill myself. And if she'd experienced a command hallucination, this is not what she would expect her to say. You would expect her to say something like, I did what I had to do, I did what the voice told me to do. Nothing along those lines, not something so not psychotic, but just an accurate statement of exactly what happened. And also full of self-agency. I tried to kill myself, not something tried to make me kill myself. Right. I was forced to do it. I mean, none of those kind of things. And he also notes, and I thought this was interesting, and could cut either way, frankly. Recovery of memories. So, she initially had said that she was not able to remember what happened. At some point, I guess, very early on in this, she said she couldn't remember. If that were true, if she had genuine memory loss about this, you would not expect her to be able to actually remember in such detail what the voice said. Now, that's also possible out for her. We'll see if Reddington hits on this is why there's some inconsistencies. Because one thing Reddington has not done on any of this, is trying to explain things like that. The inconsistencies between what the voice has said at various times, what she told different people, he's never tried to explain that. He didn't try to explain it with Mac. He just tried to destroy Mac and hope the jury forgot. One problem for him is, when you have an expert who is as good as this guy seems to be, we'll see how it crosses. It's going to make the jury also agree that Mac probably knew what he was talking about on some of this as well. Not sure which diagnosis it is, but these guys seem to be reaching the same, also make conclusion. They're going through this list basically of things about whether she's criminally liable under the Massachusetts standard. They get to the bullet point on whether Lindsay knew what she was doing was illegal or immoral, which is part of the standard. This was really interesting because you would think he would know this so that you wouldn't ask it if he wasn't going to answer it, but he says, "Yeah, I'm going to skip that." I had to kind of rewind and say, "But the Commonwealth doesn't let them go on it. They press him on it so he goes on." He said that Lindsay said what she was doing was just all action. She wasn't really thinking about it. Resonix said she knew it was intellectually wrong, but not morally wrong. She told him that she didn't think about it at all. It's just action. I don't know. What did you think about that? I thought that was really interesting. He doesn't seem like someone and he said at the beginning that he wouldn't testify about something just because it would hurt their side. It did come off as that at first, but I guess in reading what he said, it's that I can't answer that because I don't know. I'm not sure what he meant by that. It was such a bizarre thing. It was a weird little moment. It was a weird bizarre response because I'm not going to go into that or I'm going to skip it. Something like that. Well, a couple of times, and I was a little confused because a couple of times, he would explain multiple bullets at once and they'd get to it and be like, "Well, I've already kind of said bullet three, even I saw my bullet two." So I didn't know if he was trying to say that particular bullet I've already discussed or what. I thought he said, correct me if I don't have something along the lines of like, "Yeah, I'm not going to, I'm going to skip that." Like so it would indicate that I didn't. That's not going to be the bullet. I didn't. Or the issue. I already covered it. And then what he said wasn't like, yes or no, right? It was, she said it was all action, which doesn't answer the question of whether she knew it was moral or immoral. But. Let me just didn't want to answer the moral question. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they. Maybe, honestly, we're going to see this later. Maybe he knew that they needed to stay away from the morality thing and he was trying to keep them out of hot water. I actually. I don't know. I have no idea. That was a strange moment and maybe we'll be enlightened more as things go on because we're about to talk about that. So then they move on to altruistic filicide, which is, of course, killing your kids out of love. She said that it's highly lethal and a serious suicide attempt. And it's preceded by months of thinking about it. She traditionally did not like to leave her children. We know this. And if she had taken her own life, her children would be without her and they would suffer. Now she'd been having these thoughts over a several month period. She said she was in pain and she was suffering and she was doing a little bit better, but she was still desperate. This is all consistent with trying to take her own life. So this is, again, just going with the. She thinks her suicide attempt was a very serious one. She truly wanted to kill herself. So then he explains that once she decided to take her own life, she didn't want to leave her kids behind. She told the kids, "Go to God, baby. Go to God." And in their discussions, this was part of her expectation that she and her children would be together in heaven. At this point, he notes that she was raised a Catholic and that that would not necessarily be consistent with her prior beliefs. The Aster isn't suicide a mortal sin and at that point, we have an objection and we get a sidebar. Now let me just say. And it all happened so quickly. It all happened really fast and we're going to talk about what happened after this. But the weird thing about this, as I'm listening to it, and for the first time, I was like, "Well, that is interesting because this whole notion that in order for her to be culpable, she has to understand it's morally wrong and if she is someone who was raised Catholic and has always had this sort of belief that it's morally wrong to take her own life, it's morally wrong to kill your children, and yet she's saying the kids are going to be in heaven and I'm going to be with him in heaven, this seems like a good thing for the defense. This seems like a point for the defense. This is showing that her moral compass that she's had in the past is now spinning wildly off kilter. That's what I was thinking as he was saying it. I was like, "Okay, this is interesting." And then he gets subjected to and it turns into this whole other different thing. And look, this is why it was really, really stupid of the Commonwealth to ask that question of Patrick's mother about immortal sin. That error is coming home to roost for them because you've asked that, you had the father bob thing. You got it, you probably got reamed out over there because all that happened and as soon as he mentions mortal sin, it's now a compounded problem. If none of that had happened, if we'd never had the father bob thing, if we'd never had the mortal sin thing, maybe he gets subjected, maybe they talk about it, but it is not going to turn into the issue it turns into. And for the first time, unlike the father bob, which was kind of out of left field and also like made no sense during that argument and same with a morality question to Patrick's mom. That didn't make sense. This does make sense in the context of this questioning. They literally jumped the shark and bit off their own argument and probably got reamed out by the judge who probably said, "If I hear those words in my courtroom again, you will be held in contempt, counsel." And that's what I think happened. We're dealing with a not great judge. We're dealing with a judge who is emotional and reactionary. And the fact of the matter is, you can debate this question. You may think it was an inappropriate question, but there is absolutely an argument. This is perfectly legitimate. She called the chaplain to talk about praying with her about her children, to talk about her kids being safe with God. She's the one who did that. Massachusetts, for reasons that are unclear to me, I don't know why it's their standard. I don't know why it's not just can you conform your actions to the law. But in Massachusetts, it's can you conform your actions to the law or can you conform the to morality, whatever that means? Now you can have morality without religion, but for people who are religious, their morality tends to be anchored in their religion. So if she's religious, knowing what her moral views are, informs that question. Correct. And I can already see people like, this is why it was bad to ask Patrick's mother. It doesn't matter whether it is a mortal sin or not under Catholic teaching. It's her belief of it. So asking Patrick's mom didn't matter because she was not on trial for the morality of this action. If she's trying to get generally at like what Catholics believe, we need to get to Lindsay. That's why they burned this question on her and that's why it was stupid. So we're not going to get into like a theological debate about whether it's a mortal sin or not. And like if you take your life, but you know, like only God can be judged, no, no, no, we're not getting to a theological debate. It is what she believed was moral at the time. And he was asking her questions and was evaluating her for morality, which is why this question would have made sense in the context of this direct examination and made no sense in the other context. But what it did was it made the judge real mad at them because he couldn't understand where this context was coming from. And now he's not going to be able to testify about this. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that Reddington asked for a mistrial. Now the reason he did that, two reasons, people were confused by this. Number one, he was not only saying there should be a mistrial. He was saying there should be a mistrial based on intentional misconduct, which means we're done double jeopardy, like no, no other trial, guys, if the prosecution causes it, you don't get a do over because some of you are like, what if you throw the trial, you're losing, so we're going to lose it. No, no, no. Once we have paneled the jury and misconduct causes the mistrial, then we're done. You've lost your chance. Comment on it also. It's a big deal what he's asking for. Yeah, the people who think the Commonwealth did this on purpose in the hopes that they would get a mistrial. That's not how it works. that that's the end of the case. There's no second trial. So certainly he would have argued mistrial with misconduct, prejudice attaches were done, right? I mean, think back, it's not exactly the same situation, but think back to the Alec Baldwin case where they had that issue with the evidence and the way it came in and the way it was disclosed. They didn't just have a mistrial and that was in, and then they tried it again next week. That was the end of the case. And so that's sort of what he's asking for. But the second reason, he knows he's not gonna get that. But the one thing he knows he will get if he does that is a really strong instruction from the judge. Because the judge is incapable of being normal. He's gonna give an instruction that undermines the expert and just the way he talks to the jury after this is over. Sort of like, you know, it makes it sound like the doctor did something wrong and improper. Just the way he even says it, the instruction to them is harmful to that doctor's credibility. And that's what Reddington was hoping for. He was hoping to get something so strong that it would cut off all questioning on this, which could be used for him later 'cause he might have said some good stuff about it. And number two might lead the jury to think, oh, maybe we can't trust this guy at all because the judge said something he said. It was incredibly inappropriate. So I don't know, I even listen to anything he says. That was another part of the strategy. And so that's why I did it. The judge obviously denies the mistrial and does give the instruction to the jury in his typical fiery way to disregard the answer and not to consider it. And then we break for the day. And when we come back tomorrow, we have Dr. Kirk back on the stand. Now I'll say this. Prosecution has to be super careful now. I mean, no more screw ups. If something happens now and it goes sideways, their margin for error is incredibly small. - I don't know if they see it though. And that's what makes me worried. - Yeah, I don't either. I mean, the mortal send part, it's like, do they prep their witnesses or not? - Did they talk to their experts before they did their opening statements? - I don't know. - I don't know. That is a real question. - But the thing is, if they did prep them in the way that you or I would prep them, which is to go through the entire thing and ask them questions and see what they're gonna say, you would think this would have come up. The mortal send part, the discussion of the suicide, her Catholic faith. - Absolutely. - And the other thing, once he even started talking about it, probably you should step in and be like, don't wanna go there, doctor. I don't really wanna get into her religion, but maybe we can talk about her beliefs. Did she tell you that she thought it was wrong? - As she thought it was wrong, to take your own life. Don't even use the mortal send thing. It was wrong to take your own life. Like something like that. - Yeah, exactly, let's rephrase this to get the right way. And here's the other thing. I haven't seen this asked online, but some of you may be thinking, okay, they were like, wow, they realized, the prosecution realizes they're well, we off track, and they found these, you know, Dr. Mack and Dr. Kirk, after the fact, as the case is going on, no, no, guys. First of all, we know that they were retained back in like early 2025. They started talking to them in 2024. You can't have late disclosed experts. These types of expert opinions take a really long time to put together. They didn't find them in the midst of trial and put them on for the rebuttal case. They've been on the case, which is why I'm so confused, because the way you typically work with experts, they are not like your typical witnesses. I might get to meet with a witness twice. Like first time to figure out what they have to say and then prep them for trial. My experts, I spend hours upon hours. Like if that's 180 hours that he spent on reviewing the records, I've spent 20 hours with him, probably. - Oh yeah. - Maybe longer. On the phone with him, as he's writing the report, going through things like, have you considered this expert? What about this? I consult with him on things that are coming in and what other people are telling me. And as the expert opinions are coming in from the defense, we are constantly talking. Like 20 hours, I actually think that's way low. Now that I'm thinking about it, right? It's someone who you work incredibly closely with because they have an expertise that you do not have that is crucial for your case. - It was also interesting that he ordered them to violate the sequestration rules. 'Cause normally you can't talk to your witness while they're on the stand. You can't have a conversation with them in the middle of their testimony. And he's like, you will go to him and you will tell him. Not to say anything about this again. So, I guess they're like, talking to him as afterwards about what he can and can't say. So, I don't know. He was an interesting way to end it. By the way, people in the chat tell me that there was an expert who talked about drugs and I gotta tell you, I don't remember him at all. Like, you talk about, I guess we did an episode and covered his testimony and I still do not remember him. So, I'm gonna have to go back and either watch that again or listen to our episode on it to see how thorough he was. But that's the thing about trials and this happens with Jury's too. You know, Jury's also forget, whatever. And that's why you really wanna eliminate some of these extraneous witnesses that don't matter to keep people focused on what does matter. Either way. All right, well, we're not having closing arguments tomorrow. We lied to you yesterday. I'm sorry, it was our fault. - Our crystal ball was broken, sorry. - Was it Reddington's fault? For going along with that? - We knew that there were gonna be two witnesses though. So, we should have known that there was no way that we would finish with two witnesses today. - Yeah, we should have known. - Two and a half. We should have known. - But I am almost certain that they will finish tomorrow. I gotta imagine he's pretty close. - I think that cross, do you think that, they're not done with direct? - They're not done. - They're not done with direct. So, they're gonna finish up direct. I think that cross, I don't know though, 'cause I think cross may go past lunchtime because they take somebody breaks first of all, but because if Reddington was mad about Mac, he's gonna be so much more mad about Kirk. So. - Reddington needs to focus. He needs to basically say, okay, you say she's bipolar too. Let's talk about SSRs, all it can do. Those are bad things, right? And just get him to agree with him. You agree with me, it was getting worse. You know, she was looking for help and even if people weren't turning away, that's fine. She didn't get the help she needed. She's got the help she needed now, right? Like if she had gotten the help she's getting right now, would she have been better but she didn't get that, did she? You know, there's a way to do this. And then just say, you know, you're telling us that she's in this horrific state, she's depressed, she's bipolar, she's been activated by these drugs. How can your conclusion be that she still has the mental capacity to do this? I mean, just try and like get him as close as you can to you, and then in closing, you can say, that doctor was great. He agreed with us on everything. Right up until the final question, are you so sure he's right? Are you so sure he's right when he gets right up to the edge and then at the last minute says, but despite everything I just testified to, she still was confident. Are you sure enough to find her guilty? Because if you're not, that's a not guilty vote. That's the way I think he has to do it. I don't think it can be this tear down thing. He's been doing with other witnesses. And honestly, I think this guy's gonna handle him if he does that. I think this guy will not have problems with Reddington if Reddington tries the old angry attorney approach, and I'll say this about Reddington. There have been several times where I thought, man, if he does that, it's gonna be a problem, and he doesn't do it. He's pretty good at seeing when he needs to take a different approach. And so we'll see if he does that tomorrow. All right, well, we are nearing the end. We're not there yet, but we're nearing the end. This has been quite a journey that we've all gone through together. I really appreciate all of you for seeking with us through these incredibly long episodes about this really hard trial. I know feelings are really raw. People have really strong emotions, and people are picking sides now. I mean, we've heard enough. We've seen enough that people are starting to decide where they stand on this. Totally respect anybody's opinions on it, and where they fall. We're just gonna see what the jury says at the end. Keep sending us your thoughts, prosecutorspot@proscutorspot for all your social media. The gallery is having all sorts of conversations about this case. Please join the gallery. If you want to watch us record these episodes, denied of all this testimony live, you can do so for as little as $3 a month and join Patreon, or you can get these episodes early and add free, also for $3 a month on Patreon, or on Apple subscriptions. And you can see these videos edited and get a lot of other content on our sub-stacks. You can check that out as well. Look, everything we do is available to you for free eventually. I know times are tough, money's tight, so totally get it if you don't want to do any of that stuff. It's all gonna be on the various public feeds supported by ads, and we have some great sponsors. So it's not the worst thing to listen to the ads. You might get yourself a new blanket, or some new clothes, or a razor. Who knows, which you can find. If you listen to the ads on the prosecutors. All right, I think that's enough of the business as the captain would say. Alice, do you have anything else you want to add before we sign off for today? - So many things, but this has been an almost two-hour-long episode, and we only had really one and a half witnesses. So I will keep it brief, except to just remind everyone, you don't have to be civil to me, I guess, but be civil to each other. I know that we all really started this trial, thinking this was a conversation about medication, about post-partum struggles, and maybe the medical system, things that had gone wrong, is becoming more and more clear in my mind that if we were to hijack this trial to stand in place of having very important conversations about mental health, and specifically in the post-partum era, we will be doing a disservice to that entire field. which an area that I feel very passionately about because Lindsey Clancy is not the martyr that I think the defense wants her to be for postpartum mental health. And that's okay. If that's where you entered into this, that's where I thought we were going when we entered this. To back away from those and look at the evidence in this case and see if this woman is criminally liable for ending the lives for three children. That's what this case is about. This is the beauty of our judicial system. We are trying to case in controversy before us. It can spark fantastic and important conversations we need to be having about mental health and the postpartum time for every woman who has a child. But at the end of the day, if we conflate that with Lindsey Clancy's culpability, I do not think we do justice for the victims or for the important dialogue that needs to happen. And I'll just say this, if this case hangs and they retry this, the retrial will be an absolute circus. You only think Karen Reed was a circus. This case, it didn't start off this way. You know, this case started off I think is a very serious, very thoughtful look at mental health and what happened in this case and whether or not she was culpable. By this point, we have reached circus level atmosphere with all the ridiculous stuff on TikTok, all the conspiracies, and now the crowds of people who don't see this as a trial, they see it as some sort of social event. And if you saw some of the footage from today and some of the reactions of people in the courtroom, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So that's too bad because Alice is right. At the end of the day, this really is about three young lives that were taken and whether or not their mother is criminally responsible for that. That is the question. And the rest of it, the stuff that surrounds it, it may be important, it may be worth discussing, but it is not the heart of this case. All right guys, well we'll be back tomorrow. I am sure for more on this case. But until then, I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. Well, it's just become like, it's as the case is sped up. It's like, we have to do it. Like, you know, we also have to do it this last week because it's like, there's going to probably be a verdict like, you know, maybe by the end of this week. I mean, I actually think jury deliberations are going to take a while. No, I just don't know. I don't know, but I think it is so. I really thought they would finish by the end of the week when I thought we were going to have closing arguments tomorrow. [Music] Yeah, that's okay. If it's if they're as long as the openings, they'll have the case by 11 teams on Wednesday. Do it in 28 words or less. Yeah, exactly. But I hope they're long and they're thorough and they're detailed. They should be fine. [Music] Hello, and welcome to Pluto foe. If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, just stream it for free on Pluto TV. We're all your blockbuster favorites are landing all summer long. Catch anchor man, the legend of Ron Burgundy. Fantastic. The Matrix trilogy. Welcome to the real world. Mean Girls. Side up. Titanic. I'm the key in the world. And so much more. For showtime, express nothing. They're free 24/7. That is so a fact. On Pluto TV, stream now, pay never.