Deborah Becker
speaker
439 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 5d ago
Deborah Becker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Assistant district attorney Sprague said Clancy's crimes should be considered extreme cruelty and atrocity, which is required for a first degree murder conviction.
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Now both sides did agree that Clancy was a devoted mother who was mentally ill.
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Where they disagreed was on whether her mental illness made her unable to conform her conduct to the law.
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Well, they never clearly said why they went with first degree as opposed to lesser charges.
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They did say that the first degree charges were appropriate for this crime because three children were violently murdered.
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But the consequence of their decision to try her for first degree was that this had to be a trial with a jury.
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In the state of Massachusetts, that's required.
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Lower charges can go before just a judge.
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And the DA has gotten a lot of criticism because if he'd taken a different approach, it could have resulted in a judge mandating treatment for Clancy rather than prison time.
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Yeah, almost from the beginning, this case really turned into an examination of mental health care, uh, especially for new mothers.
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And it really laid bare a lot of the inadequacies and and lack of clarity really about what is going on with new moms amid huge hormonal and life changes.
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Even the experts uh didn't agree on the definition of what the postpartum period is.
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The prosecution said it's up to four weeks after birth, and that's as stated in the DSM.
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That's the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders that psychiatrists use to diagnose a patient.
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And the prosecution maintained that because Clancy killed her children after that four week period, remember she had given birth to her third child eight months prior.
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They said she was not in postpartum psychosis, uh, and prosecution experts said she may have had bipolar two disorder and she was depressed.
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But not psychosis.
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The defense, of course, challenged those experts and then questioned their expertise in postpartum mental health.
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Well, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, depression is a mood disorder.
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It's generally a persistent feeling of sadness.
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Showing 21–40 of 439 · page 2 of 22
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