Closing arguments will begin today in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother accused of murder after strangling her three children in 2023.
Jessica Salerno, associate professor of psychology at Cornell University and associate faculty member at Cornell Law School, studies how jurors make decisions about verdicts and punishment. Salerno, who conducts research about how jurors’ attitudes and stereotypes about women and their emotions might affect their decisions, describes the key dynamics at play in the courtroom for jurors in this case
Jessica Salerno
Associate Professor
“Lindsay Clancy’s status as both a woman and a mother could cut both ways with jurors. On one hand, people can judge women especially harshly when they violate expectations that mothers should be nurturing and protective. That could make jurors more likely to see her actions as intentional or premeditated. On the other hand, those same expectations could work in her favor: jurors may have difficulty imagining a mother killing her children unless she was severely mentally ill, making them more receptive to a lack-of-criminal-responsibility defense.
“Jurors’ emotional responses to the evidence will also surely affect their decisions, despite being instructed to set them aside. But their perceptions of the defendant and witnesses’ emotions are also likely to shape how credible they find them to be.
“Our research has found that people are very suspicious of others who don't express the expected level of emotion a traumatic situation like this—but also can use that emotion against people they already suspect by perceiving the emotion to be fake and manipulative. What emotion to express in court is a very fine needle to thread—and often dictated by gender.”
