A sympathetic plaintiff and well-crafted defense dominated Clancy trial

By RICHARD FAUSSET

Kevin Reddington, a veteran trial lawyer, kicked off the defense of his client earlier this summer with an audacious assertion, given that his client is Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts nurse who had admitted to strangling her three young children.

“This,” Reddington told 12 jurors in his opening remarks, “is not a righteous prosecution.”

Eleven of those jurors voted not to convict Clancy, 36, who claimed she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings. With one holdout juror, the judge declared a mistrial, leaving a question mark hovering over a murder case that set off a global conversation about the mental health burdens of motherhood and long-held questions about the essential fairness of the insanity defense.

A retrial is possible. But for now, the mistrial must be considered a victory for Reddington, one that allows his client to return, for the time being at least, to a state-run psychiatric hospital rather than a prison cell.

But if Reddington is to be believed, it will not register as a win for Clancy. During the trial, he described her as a mother well aware of what she had done to her children and “living her own hell.”

Such statements by Reddington were part of a defense strategy that acknowledged Clancy’s dark actions but emphasized her mental health problems and the missteps of the medical establishment as she sought help. In the wake of the six-week trial, a number of legal experts said that Reddington, 75, had masterfully pulled off an astonishingly difficult courtroom assignment amid the most macabre of circumstances.

Reddington had an important factor that worked in his favor. Under Massachusetts law, it is up to prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant like Clancy, who claims to be suffering from mental illness, was “criminally responsible” for her conduct at the time of killing — meaning that the defendant had “the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.”

R. Michael Cassidy, a professor at Boston College Law School, said that Massachusetts “is one of a handful of states where, once the defense of ‘lack of criminal responsibility’ is raised, the burden is on the government to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s not true in many states, and it’s not true in federal court. The defendant must prove lack of criminal responsibility by a preponderance of the evidence in most states, and in federal court, they have to prove it by clear and convincing evidence.”

Reddington sought to instill a sense of doubt in the jurors from the outset.

“The government says that this is a situation that’s not a referendum on women’s having babies and having postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression, but it sure as hell is,” he told the jury.

The strong language was a good introduction to jurors of Reddington’s style. He wore a dark suit on the first day of the trial, a likely acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation. But his language could be down-to-earth and occasionally salty — unsurprising for a man who has tried high-profile cases for decades but rides a Harley-Davidson in his spare time.

He was also focused on hammering home the message that jurors should reject the prosecution’s argument that Clancy had acted “rationally” in carrying out the killings.

“What I think Reddington did early on is he made this a reasonable doubt case,” said Daniel S. Medwed, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. “We don’t know exactly, of course, what happened in the deliberation room, but at least some of the reporting and some of the revelations in court indicated that the jurors were focused on reasonable doubt.”

Medwed said that Reddington may have helped win over jurors with the empathy he showed toward his client. For much of the trial, she sat next to him at the defense table in a wheelchair; Reddington explained to jurors that she was paralyzed from the waist down, the result of a jump from a second-story window after she had killed her children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — on Jan. 24, 2023. She had cut her wrists and neck before she had jumped.

Over the course of the trial, Reddington described his client as a woman who had been a professional caregiver, friend and mother until she began suffering from extreme mental anguish and seeking out solutions in vain. But because Clancy did not take the stand, the portrait was only Reddington’s to paint. Medwed said he had done so deftly.

“It seemed like he had a genuine empathy for her, and I think that matters,” he said. “That matters in any case. But I think it really matters in a case where the defendant refrains from testifying.”

Prosecutors portrayed Clancy as manipulative and deliberate in her actions, arguing that she sent her husband out on errands to give her time to kill the children. The claims of postpartum psychosis, they argued, were efforts to evade responsibility for her actions.

For Timothy Cruz, the Plymouth County district attorney, the decision to try Clancy on three first-degree murder charges, which would have resulted in life in prison without parole, was “about getting justice for those three little babies.”

After the mistrial was declared Friday, Cruz said he had not yet made a decision about whether to retry the case.

A plea agreement is one possibility. And if Cruz decides on a retrial, he could seek a conviction on a lesser charge, such as second-degree murder or manslaughter.

Cassidy said that if Reddington were to return to the courtroom, he might try to have some of the most horrific evidence entered into the record based on the transcripts of previous testimony, rather than a live rehashing by witnesses on the stand.

Prosecutors could object, and seek to revisit these stories with live witnesses, but they will most likely have to weigh some practical considerations.

“I mean, this trial took six weeks,” Cassidy said. “That’s a lot of court resources and Plymouth County DA resources.”

But Cassidy said that at this point, many observers may have come to consider the matter as “a classic instance of insanity” unworthy of a retrial.

“I mean, if this isn’t insanity,” he said, “what is?”