Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer argued his client should be declared not guilty at a hearing Tuesday, Sept. 29, arguing the case against the mother accused of triple murder was “based on speculation,” and declaring, “Where is the evidence that she did this?”
Clancy returned to court Tuesday for her first hearing since Sept. 4, when her high-profile case ended in a mistrial after a jury in Plymouth, Massachusetts failed to reach a consensus verdict. Clancy was accused of murdering her three children — Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months — in January 2023.
During the trial, much of Clancy’s defense centered on the claim that she acted while experiencing postpartum psychosis. But at the hearing today, her lawyer Kevin Reddington argued for a full not guilty verdict, claiming there was a “total and complete lack of evidence” that Clancy murdered her children at all.
Reddington lambasted key parts of the government’s case, like the DNA and fingerprint evidence purportedly found on the exercise bands Clancy allegedly used to strangle her kids; Reddington called both “woefully deficient.” He also described the police investigation as “horrific” and “ridiculous,” before arguing, actually, “It was not even a horrendous investigation — there was no investigation.”
And Reddington pointed to potentially dubious blood splatter evidence while attempting to cast doubt on the claim that, after Clancy allegedly killed her kids, she cut herself and jumped out a window in an ostensible suicide attempt that left her paralyzed.
“Where are the smears from a person who has just cut their wrist, cut their throat, is in a state of psychosis, that throws themselves out a window — where are the smears from that person walking across the blood up to the window and then propelling themselves out the window?” Reddington said.
Pointedly, Reddington pushed back against the claim that Clancy ever directly admitted to killing her children. “Where does she say she did this?” he argued, noting that, after she came out of a coma in the hospital, a psychiatrist testified that Clancy “was told what happened. She had no memory of what happened.”
In her rebuttal, Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham called Reddington’s argument “laughable.” She defended the DNA evidence found on the exercise bands and argued there was plenty to back up the claim that Clancy was the only person at the house with the three kids during the time of the alleged murder.
As for Reddington’s suggestion that Clancy never actually admitted to killing her kids, Buckingham said, “The entire record is voluminous as to the information supporting the fact that she did this.” She also mentioned comments Clancy allegedly made to a hospital chaplain where she “talks about the fact that she had these hallucinations telling her what she had to do, telling her she had to kill the kids.”
Following both arguments, Judge William Sullivan said he would take the defense’s not guilty argument under advisement and would make a decision at a later date. That could happen at the case’s next hearing Nov. 2, though there will be several other items on the schedule for that day. Those include additional arguments from Clancy’s defense on their motion to dismiss the case and avoid a retrial on double jeopardy, as well as a motion related to their efforts to further question the holdout juror.
And while the question of a retrial remains, technically, undecided, Sullivan seemed to at least be preparing for the possibility. Tuesday’s hearing ended with the judge asking both sides to pick a new trial date, though neither the prosecution nor the defense was prepared to commit to one. Sullivan said the issue would also be settled at the Nov. 2 hearing.
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