Attorneys for Lindsay Clancy asked a judge Monday to dismiss three first-degree murder charges and bar a second trial, arguing that retrying her after a hung jury would violate double jeopardy protections.
Clancy is charged in the January 24, 2023, deaths of her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan — who she strangled with exercise bands in the family’s Duxbury home. She then slashed her wrists and jumped from a second-story window and is now paralyzed.
Neither side disputed that she killed the children. Prosecutors said the killings were premeditated and that Clancy knew they were wrong. Her lawyers said she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, had sought help, and was not criminally responsible.
A seven-week trial ended September 4 when Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial.
The jury of nine women and three men deliberated about 38 hours over seven days and deadlocked 11-1. Eleven jurors were prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible by reason of mental illness or defect. One juror was not.
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Boston attorney Martin Weinberg joined the defense on a limited basis to handle the double-jeopardy motion. Lead defense attorney Kevin Reddington said Weinberg “will lead any appeal that follows” and called him “one of the finest constitutional lawyers in the country, and Lindsay deserves nothing less.”
Reddington said he hopes Sullivan “allows the termination of the case. This case is just a case that needs to be done.”
He also said he hoped to speak with Plymouth County prosecutors, who have not said whether they will retry the case: “I would hope that he’d like to talk.”
A hearing is scheduled for September 29.
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.
