Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer asked a judge Thursday to enter a not-guilty finding in the killings of her three young children and block a second trial, arguing prosecutors never proved she was criminally responsible.
Kevin Reddington filed a renewed motion in Plymouth Superior Court for a required finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. The papers arrived less than a week after Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial when the jury deadlocked.
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Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, strangled 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan on Jan. 24, 2023, then tried to kill herself.
She has not been cleared of the killings. The dispute in court is whether she can be held responsible for them. Prosecutors have said Clancy planned the killings.
Reddington argued that the five-week trial left the state short of proof that she knew the acts were wrong or could obey the law.
“No rational jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no mental disease or defect when the Commonwealth’s own proof established that she did,” he wrote.
The motion says all six forensic experts — three called by each side — agreed Clancy had a serious mental illness on the day of the murders. Prosecution experts disputed the label, not the illness itself, the papers said: a major depressive episode according to Dr. Mack, and bipolar II disorder with dissociation according to Dr. Heilbrun.
Clinicians who treated her in the weeks before Jan. 24 testified she had postpartum depression and anxiety and that they did not see psychosis.
Reddington wrote that their testimony “bears on which illness she had, not on whether she had one,” and that depression and anxiety severe enough to bring a psychiatric admission are themselves a mental disease or defect.
Prosecutors told the jury she was lucid enough to plan and carry out the killings, citing that she drove, made phone calls and sent her husband on errands.
“Taken at their strongest, these show that Ms. Clancy could perform familiar tasks and act in sequence. They do not show that she could appreciate wrongfulness or conform her conduct to the law,” he wrote.
He said the prosecution’s case on criminal responsibility was “legally insufficient.”
Reddington made the same request at the close of the state’s evidence and again at the close of all the evidence. Sullivan denied it both times.
The new filing is under Rule 25. Reddington said a required finding for insufficient evidence is an acquittal that bars retrial.
“Rule 25 exists so that a case the evidence cannot sustain is not tried twice,” he said.
In the papers, he said the jury deliberated more than seven days and that 11 jurors were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible. One was not. According to the motion, the foreman’s note said the holdout had acknowledged doubt but would not apply it as the law requires.
Sullivan declared a mistrial last Friday after the panel’s third note saying it was deadlocked.
Reddington also pointed to jurors’ recent comments in the media and suggested they could be treated as an “unannounced verdict,” raising a double-jeopardy argument against trying the case again. He asked that the motion be heard at a conference already set for Sept. 29, when a new trial date could also be scheduled.
An aquittal would not restore the lives of Cora, Dawson and Callan. Three children went to bed on January 24, 2023, in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never get to grow up.
Pro-life writers have called that reaction a moral inversion: compassion for a mother who killed her children, with far less public focus on Cora, Dawson and Callan themselves.
Journalist Caitlin Flanagan wrote that “what began as admirable compassion for a woman who says she was driven by mental illness to commit the world’s greatest form of evil has turned into something strange: an almost exultant, fan-like celebration of Lindsay Clancy.”
Paul Batura of Focus on the Family argued that a culture already trained to treat a child’s death as secondary to a mother’s distress — first in abortion, then in cases like this one — struggles to say plainly that killing children is wrong even when the mother is ill. Postpartum mental illness is real, he wrote, but “an individual can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible.”
Abby Johnson, CEO and founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries, who herself experienced postpartum psychosis after the birth of one of her children, said the intense identification with Clancy reveals a deeper moral distortion long cultivated by abortion advocacy.
“I am not arguing that compassion for Lindsay is wrong…What concerns me is something different. We have become extraordinarily practiced at looking at a dead child and asking first what his or her mother was going through. And abortion taught us how to do that. For decades, the defense of abortion has depended on shifting the moral center of the story away from the human being who dies and toward the human being experiencing the crisis. The mother’s suffering becomes the justification. But suffering does not make killing good,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson stressed that mental illness may affect legal culpability without changing the moral nature of the act.
“Mental illness may affect a person’s culpability for an act. It does not change the moral nature of the act itself,” she said. “Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them.”
Johnson argued that culture has spent more than 50 years training itself to begin with a mother’s fear, financial stress, lack of support or depression until the child’s humanity nearly disappears—first in abortion and now in cases like this one.
“We can demand better postpartum mental-health care in their names. We can acknowledge that their mother may have been gravely ill. We can pray for Lindsay,” Johnson wrote. “None of that requires us to forget where the greatest irreversible harm occurred. Three children went to bed on January 24, 2023, in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never get to grow up.”
Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot be allowed to become peripheral to their own story.
