A South Carolina congresswoman told TMZ that a Massachusetts mother who killed her three children should die in public. The remark is not law. It is a political statement colliding with a hung jury, a contested psychiatric diagnosis, and a state that last executed anyone in 1947.
Key Takeaways by Planet Today
What was said on camera: On September 14, 2026, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told TMZ DC that Lindsay Clancy “should be dead too,” that the punishment “should be a public execution,” and that it should stand as “a warning to women everywhere.” She named a firearm or the electric chair as acceptable methods and ruled out lethal injection.
What the law allows: Massachusetts has not executed anyone since May 9, 1947. The Supreme Judicial Court struck down the state’s last capital statute in Commonwealth v. Colon-Cruz (1984). If Clancy is retried and convicted of first-degree murder, the ceiling is life without parole. A member of Congress cannot impose a sentence in a state case.
Where the case actually stands: Clancy does not deny killing Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, on January 24, 2023. A Plymouth jury deadlocked after seven days and a judge declared a mistrial on September 4, 2026. Reporting from the trial put the split at 11–1 against a guilty finding. A status hearing is set for September 29. She remains at Tewksbury Hospital.
The medical fight, not the act: The defense says postpartum psychosis erased criminal responsibility. Prosecutors say she was ill and still knew the killings were wrong. Experts for each side disagreed on the diagnosis. That disagreement, not the deaths themselves, is why twelve jurors could not speak with one voice.
The political aftershock: Conservative outlets treated Mace’s line as overdue moral clarity. Mainstream and left-leaning outlets treated it as spectacle from an outgoing member who lost a governor’s primary. Both frames skip the same hard fact: the remark changes none of the docket in Plymouth County.
The newest official move in Massachusetts: On September 15, 2026 — the same news cycle as Mace’s interview — Gov. Maura Healey proposed free nurse home visits for every new parent in the state and more money for perinatal mental-health screening, tying the package to the Clancy trial without taking a position on guilt.
What Mace Said, Word for Word
The clip that set the week alight did not come from a committee hearing. It came from a sidewalk interview with TMZ DC reporter Jacob Wasserman on Monday, September 14, 2026, in Washington. The context was Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, asking President Donald Trump for a pardon after the mistrial. Trump had already said the case is a state matter and outside federal pardon power. Mace called the request a publicity stunt. Then she went further.
“Her children are dead. She should be dead too,” she said.
Wasserman asked whether she meant the death penalty. “She should get the death penalty. It should be public. It should be a public execution.” Asked what that would look like, she answered: “It could be by a firearm; it could be the electric chair. I don’t really care.” Several recaps of the same interview add that she rejected lethal injection. Pressed on whether she wanted Clancy in an electric chair in front of a crowd, she said, “A hundred percent.” She called Clancy “a serial killer” and said a public death “should be a warning to women everywhere. You don’t kill your kids.”
TMZ published the interview the same afternoon and updated it on September 15. The outlet also reported that Mace used an offensive slur while dismissing Reddington’s pardon appeal. That detail is TMZ’s characterization; the slur itself is not needed to understand the policy claim.
On X she kept going. “I said what I said. Lindsay Clancy deserves the death penalty. Make it public. And make it a warning to others — killing your kids is MURDER.” Another post: “Murdering your children — one by one — is unhinged. … Mental illness is an explanation but it is not an excuse.” And: “A woman who murders her children with her bare hands is not a victim.” A further post, widely quoted: “100%. She murdered her kids. Lindsay Clancy doesn’t deserve to live.”
Those sentences are the record. Everything else is argument about what they mean.
🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Nancy Mace is calling for Lindsay Clancy to be publicly executed ... telling TMZ DC's @jacob_wass the Massachusetts mom accused of killing her three children "should be dead too." https://t.co/HNQ1hnjytJ
— TMZ (@TMZ) September 15, 2026
The Case Mace Was Talking About
Lindsay Clancy, then 32, was a labor-and-delivery nurse in Duxbury, Massachusetts. On January 24, 2023, she strangled her three children with exercise bands in the basement of the family home: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, eight months. She then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window. She survived with paralysis from the waist down. Her husband, Patrick, had been sent on an errand. He found the children after he came home.
She has not denied the killings. She pleaded not guilty to murder. Under Massachusetts law, that plea can sit beside an insanity defense: the question for a jury is not “Did she do it?” but “Was she criminally responsible when she did it?”
The defense theory is postpartum psychosis — a rare, abrupt break with reality that can follow childbirth, often in women with a bipolar vulnerability. Lawyers said she heard a commanding voice, felt like a puppet, and believed she had to kill the children and then herself. They pointed to months of deteriorating mental health, emergency-room visits, hotline calls, and a thick stack of prescriptions. Court evidence described about 30 prescriptions for 13 drugs from at least six providers between September 2022 and the deaths. Defense experts, including forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick, told jurors she was “frankly psychotic.”
The prosecution theory is narrower. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz’s office did not claim she was well. A state expert, Dr. Avram Mack, told the jury she was in a “serious psychiatric state” and suffering, but that he saw major depression rather than psychosis at the moment of the killings, and that she still understood the acts were wrong. Prosecutors pointed to planning: children taken one by one to the basement, a husband sent out, a missed call returned in the middle of the event in which she approved a generic purchase at a pharmacy. They argued that sequence looks like knowledge, not a blank mind.
Those two pictures cannot both be fully true. A jury of nine women and three men sat with them for seven weeks, then deliberated seven days. On September 4, 2026, they sent a note that began, “It is with a heavy heart…” Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. Multiple trial reporters described an 11–1 split, with the majority prepared to find her not criminally responsible and one juror refusing. Reddington tried a last-hour appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court to keep that jury sitting. The court declined. Clancy went back to Tewksbury Hospital. The next date on the calendar is a September 29 status hearing, when Cruz must signal retry, plea, reduced charges, or something quieter.
A mistrial is not mercy and it is not conviction. It is an unfinished file.
Why “Public Execution” Is Rhetoric, Not a Docket Entry
Massachusetts last used the electric chair on May 9, 1947, when Phillip Bellino and Edward Gertson were put to death at Charlestown State Prison. After the U.S. Supreme Court paused American capital punishment in Furman v. Georgia (1972), Massachusetts voters in 1982 approved Article 116, which says the state constitution should not be read as banning death sentences. The legislature passed a new statute. In 1984 the Supreme Judicial Court threw that statute out in Commonwealth v. Colon-Cruz, 393 Mass. 150, because it punished defendants who went to trial more harshly than those who pleaded guilty and therefore burdened the right to a jury. No later bill has survived that logic. First-degree murder in the Commonwealth now carries a mandatory life sentence without parole.
Federal prosecutors can still seek death in federal cases arising in Massachusetts — the Boston Marathon bombing trial showed that. Clancy’s file is a state murder case. Trump cannot pardon it. Mace cannot sentence it. A South Carolina House member has no writ in Plymouth Superior Court.
That does not make the interview empty. It makes it a speech about national culture wearing the clothes of a sentence. Mace has separately pushed to restore capital punishment in the District of Columbia for first-degree murder, terrorism, and certain crimes against children. She has said she supports death for people who kill or rape children. The Clancy remarks fit that longer record. They do not fit Massachusetts law.
Readers who want a different kind of capital-punishment collision — a Florida official who voted to expand the death penalty and was later arrested on child-sex charges — can start here: Florida Clerk Who Backed Death Penalty for Child Sex Crimes Arrested on Similar Charges.
Mental Illness as Explanation, Excuse, or Neither
Mace’s sharpest line was not the method. It was the rule: “Mental illness is an explanation but it is not an excuse.” That sentence is popular on the right and incomplete as law.
Massachusetts, like every American state, already draws a line between illness and excuse. The insanity standard is not “she was depressed” and it is not “she was sad after birth.” It is whether, at the time of the act, a mental disease or defect left her unable to understand the wrongfulness of what she was doing or, in some formulations, unable to control it. Plenty of killers are ill. Few meet that test. The Clancy jury was not asked to decide if the deaths were tragic. It was asked to decide if the legal test was met.
The medical literature does not settle that question for this defendant. It does establish that postpartum psychosis is real, rare, and dangerous. Reviews place the incidence near 1 in 1,000 births. A 2024 systematic review in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health repeats a figure often used in this debate: untreated postpartum psychosis has been associated with an infanticide rate around 4 percent. Other reviews of large historical series put the filicide share lower, closer to 1 percent in some samples, and note that the 4 percent figure has been contested as a misreading of older follow-up studies. Both numbers are small as a share of births and large if you are the child in the room. The same literature calls the condition a psychiatric emergency that usually needs hospital care the same day, not a medication tweak and a follow-up next week. Dr. Phil McGraw, who is not a treating clinician in this case, said the same thing after the mistrial: psychosis can hijack a mind as bluntly as a tumor; that is not the same as a walk-home card.
Clancy’s chart complicates the slogan war. She sought help. She was medicated, heavily. She was not given lithium. She was given antidepressants, which can worsen mixed or bipolar pictures. She was not, according to the prosecution’s telling, ever formally diagnosed with postpartum psychosis before the killings — depression and, later, a disputed bipolar label. Defense doctors said the system missed the real illness. Prosecution doctors said the system saw illness and that illness still left her responsible. A reader can hold both facts: the healthcare sequence looks sloppy, and sloppy care is not automatically a legal pardon.
Mace had already drawn a harder corollary before the verdict. In early September she argued that if postpartum mental illness is a “get-out-of-jail-free card” for killing children, then anyone diagnosed with it should lose custody. That is a political syllogism, not a statute. It treats a rare psychotic break as if it were the same thing as ordinary postpartum depression, which is far more common and far less often tied to violence. Collapsing those two diagnoses is how a deterrence speech becomes a custody speech. It is also how a mental-health speech becomes an accusation that every struggling new mother is a risk. Neither leap is required by the trial record.
A nearby comparison, not a twin, sits in the Bronx. In August 2026 a New York judge found Dimone Fleming not responsible by mental disease or defect for the deaths of her two young sons after psychiatrists for both sides agreed she was psychotic. No jury fight. Joint medical conclusions. Different outcome, different proof. Planet Today covered that file here: Bronx Mother Not Responsible After Sons’ Deaths.
What Mass Media Said — and What Alternative Outlets Did With the Same Clip
The raw material is identical: a TMZ video and a handful of X posts. The packaging is not.
Mainstream and center-left outlets ran the remarks as an outlier from an outgoing Republican. Mediaite called the interview “absolutely bonkers.” The Independent, Newsweek, the New York Daily News, and Hollywood Life stressed backlash, the mistrial, and the legal impossibility of a Massachusetts execution. Several noted that Mace is leaving the House after a failed run for governor. The subtext is familiar: this is performance, not policy. AP, Reuters, the New York Times, and WBUR, covering the trial itself rather than Mace, stayed closer to process — hung jury, hospital hold, Cruz’s choice, Healey’s health proposal.
Right-leaning and alternative outlets ran the same quotes as moral plain speech after a week of what they called a “pink mob” around the courthouse. The Gateway Pundit framed Clancy as an “admitted child killer” and treated the holdout juror as the only adult in the room. LifeSiteNews presented Mace as stating an obvious equivalence: dead children, dead mother. Western Journal and Townhall had already amplified Mace’s earlier claim that a Black mother in a similar case would not have drawn the same sympathetic crowd. The People’s Voice, which recirculated the TMZ package under the headline about a “warning to women everywhere,” added little reporting of its own and leaned on the deterrent frame. That site has a long record of mixing real clips with claims that do not survive basic checking. In this instance the quotes track TMZ. The surrounding temperature does not.
Both ecosystems omit pieces. The “bonkers” frame underplays a real public appetite for punishment after three child deaths and a near-acquittal. The “overdue justice” frame underplays the legal test the jury was given, the split among credentialed psychiatrists, and the fact that Clancy is not walking into a supermarket. Even an acquittal by reason of mental defect would have meant years, perhaps decades, inside a locked hospital. The New York Times put that confinement point on the record the day after the mistrial. Dr. Phil said it on Fox. Reddington said it at the courthouse. “Not guilty” in this file was never going to mean “free.”
Mace’s phrase “warning to women everywhere” sits in the middle of that split. Supporters hear a rule about parents and children. Critics hear a rule aimed at mothers, not fathers, and a revival of public killing as theater. The United States has not carried out a true public execution in generations. States that still use capital punishment do it behind prison walls, with witnesses, not in a square. Whether deterrence works at all is an old empirical fight. Whether a televised death would stop a psychotic break is a different fight, and the medical literature on command hallucinations does not give Mace much help. A person who believes a voice has ordered the deaths of her children is not, in that hour, doing a cost-benefit analysis about South Carolina talking points.
That last sentence will anger people who think any talk of psychosis is a dodge. It will also anger people who think any talk of punishment is cruelty. Both groups can still read the same exhibits.
The Political Figure Doing the Talking
Nancy Mace represents South Carolina’s 1st District. She is finishing her House term after losing the Republican primary for governor in 2026 and announcing she would not seek another term in Congress. She is a sexual-assault survivor who has spent years mixing libertarian-leaning votes with hard lines on crime and sex offenses. She is also a politician who knows what a TMZ camera does.
None of that decides the Clancy file. It does explain why the quote traveled. An outgoing member can say things a colleague running in a swing district will not. A tabloid interview rewards certainty. “I don’t really care” about the method is a sentence built for a clip, not for a sentencing memorandum.
She is not alone on the punishment side. Columnist Miranda Devine argued after the mistrial that the planning — basement, one child at a time, a returned phone call — undercut the claim that Clancy did not know the acts were wrong. That is the prosecution’s best factual point, and it does not require Mace’s gallows. On the other side, maternal-health advocates used the same week to say the real failure happened months earlier, in clinics that prescribed and released. Both claims can be partly true. The children are still dead.
For another current American race in which personal conduct swallowed policy, see Chris Gallant BDSM Photos: What the NY-01 Race Is Now About. For a Massachusetts family story that also turned on institutions and a child’s vulnerability, see Massachusetts Family Loses Teen After School’s Secret Transition Fight.
The Latest Hard Fact in Boston, Not on the Hill
While Mace was talking to TMZ, Massachusetts was talking about nurses. On September 15, 2026, Gov. Maura Healey proposed free home visits by nurses for families of the state’s roughly 68,000 newborns a year, plus $2 million to start that program, $250,000 more for the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms, and tighter rules on perinatal mental-health screening. “To every mom who has struggled with her mental health before, during or after pregnancy, I want you to know we see you — I see you,” she said at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in remarks the Associated Press moved the same day. She did not call Clancy a victim. She did not call for a rope. She tied the policy to the trial the state had just watched.
That is the other available moral from the same deaths: build a net that catches the next psychotic break before a basement does. It will not satisfy people who want a body in return for three small ones. It also will not put Clancy on a gallows that the Commonwealth no longer owns.
Source for the Healey package: U.S. News / Associated Press, September 15, 2026.
What Still Has to Be Decided
Three clocks are running.
First, Timothy Cruz. He is an elected district attorney, on the ballot in November, running unopposed. WBUR noted the obvious incentive: a tough-on-crime prosecutor does not love walking away from three child homicides. He can retry the same charges, offer a plea, or charge something that a future jury might actually finish. He has not announced.
Second, the hospital. Clancy is not on bail. She is at a state psychiatric facility. Experts told the New York Times that even a later finding of no criminal responsibility would likely mean a high-security forensic hospital, not a discharge. The legal label changes the building and the review schedule. It does not return Cora, Dawson, or Callan, and it does not put their mother in a kitchen.
Third, the country watching. Public executions are easy to demand and hard to defend once someone has to write the protocol, pick the hour, and live with the tape. Mental-health acquittals are easy to denounce and hard to replace with a test that still lets a truly psychotic defendant out of a guilty verdict. The Clancy file sits on the seam. Mace chose the loud side of the seam. Healey chose the clinic. The jury chose neither, which is why the file is still open.
A Reader’s Ledger
Settled, as of September 16, 2026:
- Lindsay Clancy killed her three children on January 24, 2023, in Duxbury. She does not contest the act.
- A Massachusetts jury deadlocked. A mistrial was declared on September 4, 2026. She remains hospitalized.
- Nancy Mace, on September 14–15, 2026, called for a public death sentence and rejected mental illness as an excuse. The quotes are on video and on her account.
- Massachusetts cannot carry out that sentence. The last state execution was in 1947. Colon-Cruz still controls.
- Psychiatrists for the two sides did not agree on postpartum psychosis versus depression-plus-responsibility.
- Gov. Healey, on September 15, 2026, answered the same news cycle with a screening-and-home-visit proposal, not a gallows.
Not settled:
- Whether Cruz retries.
- Whether a second jury would finish the job the first one could not.
- Whether Clancy met the legal insanity test at the moment she tightened the bands.
- Whether a public execution, if it existed, would deter a psychotic parent. There is no modern American dataset for that claim because the country does not kill people in public squares.
The children are not a metaphor. The diagnosis is not a vibe. The congresswoman’s sentence is not a court order. Hold those three facts at once and the week’s noise drops by half.
Primary sources
- TMZ, “Rep. Nancy Mace Calls For Lindsay Clancy to Be Publicly Executed,” published September 14, 2026, updated September 15, 2026: tmz.com
- TMZ / X post of the interview, September 15, 2026: x.com/TMZ
- AP, “Mistrial is declared in Lindsay Clancy child killings case after jury deadlocks,” September 4, 2026: apnews.com
- Reuters, mistrial report, September 4, 2026: reuters.com
- The New York Times, “Clancy Faces Years of Confinement, No Matter What Comes Next,” September 5, 2026: nytimes.com
- WBUR, mistrial and courtroom reporting, September 4 and 15, 2026: wbur.org
- Associated Press via U.S. News, Healey postpartum proposal, September 15, 2026: usnews.com
- Massachusetts law compilation on capital punishment: mass.gov
- Commonwealth v. Colon-Cruz, 393 Mass. 150 (1984)
- Death Penalty Information Center, Massachusetts page: deathpenaltyinfo.org
- Friedman et al., “A systematic review of postpartum psychosis resulting in infanticide,” Archives of Women’s Mental Health (2025; review dated 2024): PubMed
- The People’s Voice recap of the Mace remarks, September 15, 2026: thepeoplesvoice.tv
Original clip source, with date: TMZ DC interview with Rep. Nancy Mace, published September 14, 2026 (5:41 p.m. PDT), updated September 15, 2026 — https://www.tmz.com/2026/09/14/nancy-mace-wants-lindsay-clancy-to-be-publicly-executed/
Note for fact-checkers. TMZ is an entertainment-news outlet. It is reliable for capturing a public figure’s on-camera words and less reliable as a court of last resort on law or medicine. The People’s Voice republished those words inside a hotter frame; treat the quotes as only as good as the underlying TMZ tape, and treat the site’s other output with caution. AP, Reuters, WBUR, and the trial judge’s docket are the cleanest sources for dates, the mistrial, and the next hearing. Newsweek, the Daily News, Mediaite, LifeSiteNews, Gateway Pundit, and Fox Carolina are useful for how tribes heard the same clip. None of them can turn a sidewalk interview into a Massachusetts death warrant. This article does not take Clancy’s side or Mace’s. It sets the quotes, the statute book, and the medical fight on the same table and leaves the verdict to the reader.