A judge on Thursday refused to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty of murder in the strangulation killings of her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
Plymouth Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan denied a defense motion for a required finding of not guilty. The request, renewed after a hung jury, asked the court to clear Clancy of murder in the children’s deaths at the family’s Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023.
The first trial ended in a mistrial Sept. 4.
“The Court finds that the evidence, when viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth and with the reasonable inferences permitted to be drawn, was sufficient to have satisfied any rational trier of fact beyond a reasonable doubt as to the essential element of the defendant’s criminal responsibility,” Sullivan wrote.
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Prosecutors said Clancy ordered food from a restaurant in Plymouth that night and sent her husband, Patrick Clancy, to pick it up and to stop at CVS. GPS data and surveillance footage showed he was out of the house, and Sullivan wrote that Clancy was the only person home when the children were killed.
Patrick Clancy returned to find his wife on her back in the yard. She told him she had tried to kill herself and that the children were in the basement. He called 911 and found Cora, Dawson and Callan with exercise bands tied around their necks after they were strangled to death.
At trial, the defense did not dispute that Clancy was the person who killed the children.
But after the mistrial, attorney Kevin Reddington also argued that a flawed police investigation left prosecutors short of proof that she was the one who strangled them. The claim startled many observers of the controversial case because Clancy had not contested the murders during trial.
Sullivan rejected that attempt today.
Reddington’s central argument was that prosecutors had not proved she was criminally responsible. In a memo, he wrote: “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 pointed to psychiatric medications and other factors.
Sullivan disagreed. He wrote that prosecution experts concluded Clancy did not lack substantial capacity to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct, or to conform her conduct to the law, when the children were killed. Defense experts differed. The judge wrote that jurors may give that testimony little or no weight.
The same motion had already been denied during trial, including at the close of the prosecution case and the close of the defense case. Under the rule, the judge must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution.
The new argument does not change the central facts that brought Clancy to court: three young children are dead, and at trial her defense did not dispute that she strangled them. What changed Tuesday was the defense’s claim about the proof.
For those who say Cora, Dawson and Callan still have no voice in the case, the question remains whether prosecutors will put that evidence before another jury.
The defense argues there was no “manifest necessity” for the mistrial, pointing to comments that the holdout juror acknowledged doubt yet would not find Clancy not criminally responsible. But the holdout juror says that’s false and that he always knew Clancy was guilty.
Reddington has also asked the court for the holdout juror to be investigated, stating the inquiry “will not touch the substance of deliberations.”
Cora, Dawson and Callan are dead. An 11-1 vote for lack of criminal responsibility would have produced no finding of guilt in their killings and no justice for them.
Postpartum mental illness is real, but a person can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible. Mental illness does not change that three children were killed in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never grow up. The children cannot speak in the courtroom. Dismissing the charges would leave the taking of their lives without a completed finding of criminal responsibility.
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.
