Clancy defense asks judge to clear her on insanity grounds

Prosecutors have not said if they will retry Clancy

Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney asked the Massachusetts judge who oversaw her first-degree murder trial to declare her not guilty by reason of insanity, six days after the trial ended in a mistrial when jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict. In a motion filed Thursday in Plymouth, Massachusetts, attorney Kevin Reddington argued that prosecutors during the six-week trial did not present evidence that would allow a jury to find her guilty of first-degree murder.

Reddington’s central argument is that even the prosecution’s expert witnesses agreed Clancy suffered from serious mental illness at the time of the killings, and that the prosecution’s evidence showed at most that she retained the ability to perform familiar tasks — not that she could appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions.

“No rational jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no mental disease or defense when the Commonwealth’s own proof established that she did,” Reddington wrote in the motion, referring to the prosecution.

The jury deliberated for seven days before Sullivan declared a mistrial last Friday following repeated reports that the panel was deadlocked. A fourth member of the twelve-member jury had gone public to describe how a single juror prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict. In his motion, Reddington said eleven of the twelve jurors had been prepared to find her not guilty by reason of what Massachusetts law calls lack of criminal responsibility, but could not return a verdict because the holdout acknowledged having reasonable doubt while refusing to agree to the not-guilty finding.

At trial, Reddington built the defense around the argument that Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis when she killed her children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and eight-month-old Callan.

Clancy, 36, has admitted to strangling her three children with exercise bands on January 24, 2023, in the basement of the family’s home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb. She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in an attempt to end her own life, leaving her paralyzed.

Reddington has asked Sullivan to hear arguments on the motion at a hearing scheduled for September 29. A spokesperson for Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz did not respond to a request for comment on whether prosecutors plan to retry Clancy.