New Delhi, July 27 -- that Cora, age 5, Dawson, age 3, and Callan, eight months old, died that night in the family's Duxbury home.

Prosecutors allege that Clancy, then a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, sent her husband Patrick out on errands, strangled each of the three children, and then jumped from a second-floor window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. She faces three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington opened before the jury on Monday and framed the case immediately in medical terms. "Even though we're in a court, let's talk a little bit about humanity," Reddington told the jury, Fox News reported, arguing that at the time of the killings C...