A mother's wails filled a Massachusetts court last week as autopsy photographs of eight-month-old Callan Clancy were shown to a jury.

The proceedings were abruptly halted. Lindsay Clancy, 36 and confined to a wheelchair, a grieving parent and an accused child murderer, was removed from the room, sobbing.

After allegedly strangling her three little children, Clancy cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-floor window, paralyzing herself from the waist down, in 2023.

She has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. A panel of her peers will decide if she should spend the rest of her life in prison. But it is for the US legal system and, indeed, the nation to ask if Clancy should have been forced to face a jury at all.

Twenty-five years ago, my law partner George Parnham and I took a case defending another mother accused of filicide.

At the time, little was known outside the psychiatric community about post-partum psychosis – even less was understood by the public.

Andrea Yates was 36 years old in 2001 when – in a one-hour gap between the time her husband Rusty left home for work and before her mother-in-law arrived to help care for the kids – she systematically drowned her five children in the bathtub of her suburban Houston home.

Noah was 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; Mary, 6 months.

Yates was charged with murder. And, in her first trial, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Due to false testimony from a key prosecution witness, the verdict was thrown out and in a 2006 retrial Andrea was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Today, she remains under doctor's care in a state mental facility in Texas.

It is impossible for me to follow the Clancy trial without seeing the parallels. Two young women with no prior criminal history being treated for depression committed unthinkable acts less than a year after birth, while, by many accounts, in the throes of severe post-partum psychosis.

Are these women criminals or victims?

All those years ago, I put it to Yates's jury this way: If someone driving a car lost control because of a sudden heart attack and the car ran over and killed a pedestrian, would you convict the driver for murder?

The answer is obvious.

Prosecutors will attempt to show that mothers who kill are sane and act with criminal intent; allegedly planning their murderous deeds ahead of time, ensuring their husbands are away and unable to intervene before carrying out killings methodically. That argument fails to consider what science now understands about severe mental illness.

A post-partum psychotic delusion can – and did in the cases of Yates and Clancy – turn a mother's basic instinct of protection upside down, where the act of killing, in their minds, is an attempt to save the child, not harm them.

In Yates' case, a battery of medical professionals, including a forensic psychiatrist who diagnosed her with schizoaffective disorder, severe depression with schizophrenic symptoms, testified that Yates believed Satan had taken control of her and was targeting her children next. Clancy's lawyers say she heard voices telling her before the killings: 'This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself.'

Since Yates's trial, an entire movement has formed for the purpose of educating the public and medical professions about post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis.

In my opinion, it's clear how much work remains.

On Monday, defense attorneys cross-examined Clancy's primary psychiatrist who testified that she treated Clancy 14 times via telemedicine. On the stand, Dr Jennifer Tufts revealed that she did not have nor did she seek to obtain records of Clancy's previous psychiatric treatments, even as she prescribed and adjusted several of her psychiatric medications. 

Dr Tufts has denied any wrongdoing and has moved to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit filed against her by Patrick Clancy, Lindsay's husband.

While I have no doubt that the district attorneys prosecuting Clancy act in good faith, this is all information that must be considered when making charging decisions.

It cannot be ignored decades after Yates' not guilty verdict that fewer post-partum psychosis cases go to trial. Often, cases are now referred to a civil mental health system where mothers could face a possible lifetime commitment.

The US legal system should not be wielded as a tool of psychological torture.

If you still have any question about the distorted delusions of women like Yates and Clancy, just ask the people who know them best; their husbands who still support them and their friends who said they were good mothers when they were not sick.

'Do they think the children want Andrea to be in prison?' Rusty Yates told reporters in 2006 after prosecutors showed the jury crime scene photos of his dead children. 'Do they think we, her family on either side, want Andrea to be in prison? Is it of any public benefit for Andrea to be in prison? Is she a danger to anyone?'

'I'm so proud of the jury for seeing past that,' he said after the jury returned a not guilty verdict.

As for punishment, imagine for a moment being one of these women and waking up from a delusional nightmare to realize that it was real.

Imagine having to live with the knowledge of what you have done.

That seems to be punishment enough.