Kevin Reddington, the lawyer for Lindsay Clancy, said on Wednesday he will ask for the case against his client to be thrown out after hearing from several jurors in the case.
Reddington told “CBS Mornings” he will present a motion to dismiss on Sept. 29 at a previously scheduled status hearing.
“It will be a motion to dismiss based on what’s called double jeopardy grounds, because there’s no … manifest necessity,” Reddington said. “You have to have a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial for obvious reasons — the invested time that the jurors put into it, the court, the staff, the defendant, the prosecution, everybody.”
Clancy is accused of murdering her three young children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan — in their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on Jan. 24, 2023. Her attorneys argued she was not criminally responsible because she was overmedicated and suffering from postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors said Clancy planned to strangle her children and knew right from wrong.
The highly publicized murder trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4 after the jurors could not come to a unanimous verdict after more than seven days of deliberation.
The jury was apparently split 11 to 1, as the foreperson sent a note to Judge William Sullivan on Sept. 3 claiming a single juror was not following the court’s orders about reasonable doubt.
“The majority of people, it doesn’t matter what side they were on, were very firm in their stance and their belief from the beginning,” the woman known as juror No. 5 told CBS Boston station WBZ-TV on Tuesday. “The stand-alone juror was not the only one that was unwilling to see things from the other side.”
The foreperson wrote that the juror “has made statements acknowledging doubt but refuses to apply it to the verdict as the law states,” Reddington said in court at the time.
However, Sullivan denied a motion by Reddington to dismiss that juror and a second request on Sept. 4 to further question jurors on the matter.
“I would defend that person’s right to be a holdout for a month. That’s what the system is about,” Reddington told “CBS Mornings.” “But when the forelady indicated clearly and unequivocally in the jury question that this person had doubt, reasonable doubt, as we know now, and just refused to listen to the judge’s instruction on the law, that’s when I was upset, because that’s why I used the expressions and the terms I did. It just wasn’t right.”
CBS News legal contributor Caroline Polisi referred to Reddington’s decision to push for a dismissal as “huge news,” although, she referred to it as a “long-shot motion.”
“He’s going to make a motion to bar a retrial. Typically when you have a mistrial, double jeopardy doesn’t apply, which means the prosecution can come right back and charge on the same charges,” Polisi said. “He’s making a motion based on double jeopardy, based on this one juror who, apparently, had reasonable doubt but refused to apply his conscience to the law, and was a holdout.”
“So what he’s arguing is that it was not a manifest necessity for the judge to call a mistrial and, essentially, the judge should have inquired further as to whether or not this juror could maintain his oath,” Polisi said. “That’s a huge deal. … If he wins that motion, she would go free.”
The other option is Plymouth, Massachusetts, District Attorney Tim Cruz could work out a plea deal that would include lesser charges for Clancy.
“It’s up to Tim,” Reddington said when asked about what he would want in a plea deal. “He could reduce the charge to second-degree [murder]. … I know enough to know it doesn’t matter what I’d like. All I know is that I’m not ever going to agree this young lady do a day in jail.”
Reddington said Clancy is “not well” when asked how she’s doing.
“I mean, in the sense that she’s disappointed, she’s sad and she still has the same affect that she’s had for three and a half years,” he said. “Thankfully she’s getting great psychiatric treatment, medical treatment at Tewksbury.”
The jury was faced with rendering a verdict on one of five options: not guilty by reason of insanity, not guilty, first-degree murder, second-degree murder or manslaughter.
Prosecutors have not yet said if they will retry the case after the mistrial. Reddington said he would not like to see another trial.
He does hope the trial at least makes people more aware of postpartum psychosis and the lack of psychiatric treatment.
“It’s so easy for people to say, ‘Oh, come on, you don’t hear voices. You’re making that up. You’re lying. You’re evil,'” he said. “Because it’s easier to punish someone.”
“It would be so easy for a lot of people if we could just put Lindsay in jail and say this is terrible, she’s evil and guilty,” Reddington continued. “No one is discounting the horrific loss of those kids, let alone Lindsay Clancy, who is well aware and lives with that every day.”
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