The prosecution's own psychiatric expert in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has been quietly removed from his position days after taking the stand — and the silence from every institution involved should trouble every American who thinks justice runs on truth, not leverage.
Dr. Avram Mack, chief of psychiatry at Nemours Children's Health in Delaware since 2023, is "no longer employed" at the hospital system, according to CT Insider. His patients have been reassigned. His name has been scrubbed from the website. Nobody at Nemours will explain why. Nobody at the Plymouth County District Attorney's Office — which had Mack on retainer — will say whether that relationship continues. And nobody at the University of Pennsylvania, where Mack has taught for a decade, will confirm his status either.
Mack testified as a rebuttal witness for the prosecution on August 21 and again for cross-examination on Monday. His conclusion: after interviewing Clancy and reviewing her records, he found no evidence of postpartum psychosis. He told jurors that some of Clancy's reported fears — like the fear her children would be taken away — were "quite normal." He noted that eight months had passed since Clancy's last child was born, while the postpartum period is generally considered to last four to six weeks.
He also delivered some of the most devastating testimony of the trial: that Clancy told her children to "go to God" as she strangled them, and that she described hearing a "loud male voice" telling her to kill all three kids and herself.
On cross-examination, defense attorney Kevin Reddington challenged Mack's qualifications to diagnose adults — Mack is a child psychiatrist. When asked Friday whether he had heard about Mack's departure from Nemours, Reddington turned to the camera and smiled.
The timing raises questions the institutions involved don't want to answer. When a prosecution witness on the DA's own retainer loses his job within days of testimony in a nationally watched murder trial, Americans are entitled to an explanation. Was Mack pushed out because his testimony hurt the state's case on cross? Was it unrelated? The public doesn't know, and the powerful institutions that do aren't talking.
This is how the expert witness system rots. Prosecutors put experts on retainer. Those experts depend on that income and on their institutional positions. If testimony that doesn't land cleanly — even testimony delivered on the prosecution's behalf — can cost a witness his career, then every future expert knows the price of independence. The witness doesn't work for the truth. He works for the office that signs the check.
Meanwhile, the jury of nine women and three men deliberated for more than 10 hours over Thursday and Friday without reaching a verdict. They asked to see the knife Clancy used in her suicide attempt and her prescription medication bottles. They'll return Monday. Clancy faces life in prison if convicted of first-degree murder.
Three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — are dead. The question for the jury is whether postpartum psychosis drove Clancy to kill them, or whether she planned their murders while her husband was sent away on errands. That question deserves an honest process — and honest processes don't survive when witnesses learn that testimony carries professional consequences nobody will explain.
