I defended a deranged mom who had killed her baby. The similarities to Lindsay Clancy are chilling… and there’s a horrific video I will never forget

Published: 21:05 EDT, 6 October 2026 | Updated: 21:08 EDT, 6 October 2026

I successfully defended Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who was accused of recklessly choking to death a homeless Jordan Neely on a New York subway in May 2023.

And I spent a good part of a year in rural Alabama defending a man who shot his neighbor on his own front porch at 2am – a case in which the judge had already denied Stand Your Ground immunity. The jury was hung and the DA dropped the murder charge rather than try it again.

But long before the high-profile clients and headline-grabbing lawsuits, I cut my teeth defending the sort of criminal cases few people ever hear of.

These were cases usually involving indigent defendants – people at the edges of society who have nowhere else to turn.

The pay is not great but the work is steady, and the experience second to none. For me, it was an opportunity to help people who could never afford to hire me, and to build my reputation as a trial lawyer.

I had no way of anticipating that my first assignment on the homicide panel would be representing a 27-year-old Bronx woman accused of throwing her six-month-old daughter from the window of their high-rise apartment building in 2015.

When I agreed to take on murder cases, I knew I would see unpleasant things.

Thomas Keniff (center) has experience of a case similar to the tragic story of Lindsay Clancy

Keniff is also known for representing Daniel Penny, a Marine veteran who was accused of recklessly choking to death homeless Jordan Neely on a New York subway

And I was not completely unprepared. Before switching to the defense, I had served as a prosecutor under Jeanine Pirro. I had also served a combat deployment in Iraq with the Army National Guard. But even so, nothing quite prepared me for crime scene photos of a beautiful baby girl lying motionless and unclothed on the pavement below the sixth-floor window through which her mother had tossed her.

It has been many years but those pictures are still vivid in my mind and, I suppose, always will be. There is no silver lining in such imagery, no, ‘Well it could have been worse,’ or ‘At least it wasn’t…’

I tried to find some peace in the fact that the child looked not to have suffered. There was no blood, no gore. It looked like she had simply gone to sleep on the concrete, though I knew she had not.

I first met my client in October 2015, in one of the attorney visitation booths behind the arraignment courtroom, ‘the pens’ as they are commonly referred to.

A black mother of four, now three after the death of her youngest, she was a bit heavyset, 27 years old, although her life struggles had clearly aged her beyond her years. She appeared drained, confused and unable to process what had occurred.

She had no memory of the psychotic episode that ended in her taking the life of the baby girl, who she told me through tears she had struggled with a traumatic labor earlier that year. She would get her first hint about what happened when she appeared before the arraignment judge a few minutes later, yet not perceive the full horror until the psychotropic drugs she was administered at the prison hospital began to restore her mind’s clarity.

A large contingent of my client’s family – sisters, aunts, cousins and those who referred to themselves as her church family – waited inside the courtroom. They called out: ‘We love you,’ ‘God loves you,’ and ‘We’re praying for you’ as she was led away in shackles to the women’s ward at Rikers Island following the proceedings.

Unlike the spectacle outside the Lindsay Clancy courthouse in Massachusetts last month, they weren’t there to empower, raise awareness or rage against indirect encroachments on a woman’s right to choose.

Lindsay Clancy’s case over the death of her three children recently ended in a mistrial

Clancy’s supporters gathered outside the Massachusetts courtroom throughout the trial

It has been said that Lindsay Clancy could not have been psychotic because she was too methodical in her planning to kill her three children

My client’s friends and family were there to show affection for someone they loved. Someone who they believed was not capable of such evil.

The Lindsay Clancy case involved a former Massachusetts labor-and-delivery nurse who was charged with first-degree murder for the strangulation deaths of her three young children – before jumping from a window in a failed suicide attempt that left her permanently paralyzed. Her defense team argued that she was not criminally responsible due to severe postpartum psychosis, while prosecutors countered that the actions were premeditated. The highly publicized trial ended in a mistrial, when the jury deadlocked 11-1, with the majority favoring an acquittal by reason of insanity.

It has been said that Clancy could not have been psychotic because she was too methodical in her planning. It is true that premeditation is often inconsistent with an insanity defense, which hinges on evidence that the accused lacked the mental capacity to appreciate the nature and consequence of their actions.

How can someone like Clancy fail to perceive the consequences of a result she meticulously planned to bring about? It was indeed one of the great weaknesses in the defense, and likely why the case ended in a mistrial rather than a finding of insanity.

Yet not all planning is inconsistent with psychosis, which involves a detachment from reality. Psychotic individuals often perceive a terrifying threat that does not actually exist, and take deliberate, and devastating, actions to protect against it.

In my client’s situation, her psychosis appeared to have been triggered by a self-help book that her adult brother brought home a few days earlier. She was convinced that the book contained an omen and that evil forces were descending upon the tiny apartment she shared with him and her partner and four children.

She also believed, incorrectly, that they were about to be evicted from the only home her children had ever known, and spent the 24 hours preceding her daughter’s death emptying the apartment of its contents and having the pressurized partition that separated the living space demolished.

My client’s auditory and visual hallucinations convinced her that she and her children could no longer stay in the apartment, and she was frantically packing for their departure, but it was too late. The devil, she believed, had now entered the home.

The terrified neighbors across the courtyard watched as my client stood naked, screaming for help, as she extended her arms to hold her baby outside the window, determined to save her from the perceived evil inside.

Her other children screamed for help as well, whether from the evil forces their mother convinced them was inside the home, or from their mother herself. In that moment, my client perceived a choice. Allow the devil to take custody of her baby or deliver her to the Lord in heaven.

In the situation of Keniff’s client, her psychosis appeared to have been triggered by a self-help book her adult brother brought home a few days earlier

Moments later, the baby was thrown to her death. The cell phone video I obtained from the neighbor across the courtyard captured it all.

My client’s psychosis was so evident, both on the video and in the reports of the forensic psychologists who evaluated her, that the district attorney prosecuting the case was willing to concede an insanity defense.

The only issue was whether my client, by then properly treated, medicated and completely functional, should risk being indefinitely confined to a state psychiatric institution – many consider such places a worse alternative to prison – or plead to a lesser manslaughter charge that could have her released from prison after a few years of good behavior.

She ultimately chose the latter path and is no longer incarcerated.

While I cannot help but view the Clancy case through the lens of my client’s case, I do not know whether Lindsay Clancy was experiencing psychosis when she took the lives of her three children. And I firmly believe that such conclusions should be reserved for the experts who treated and evaluated her, and ultimately for the jurors, who get to see, hear and consider all the evidence.

But in an age that not only condones, but demands, less than fully informed opinions, conveyed through endless cable news roundtables and social media posts, merely voting ‘present’ on something as sensational as the Clancy trial will not be tolerated.

Perhaps, then, I’ll offer this. The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously remarked: ‘I know it when I see it,’ when describing the means he used to evaluate whether pornographic material crossed the line into obscenity.

In my client’s case, I was able to see in real time someone who was undeniably operating outside her mind. There was universal agreement among all involved in her case that she had suffered a psychotic break, and she carried the eternal grief that came with learning she had taken her own child’s life.

I see similarities in Lindsay Clancy’s case. But, as the saying goes, the jury is still out.

Thomas Kenniff is a criminal defense attorney and founding partner at Raiser Kenniff & Lonstein, P.C. He is the author of the newly released legal thriller Tuxedo Park, published by Post Hill Press