Lindsay Clancy’s Lawyer Wants Judge to Dismiss Murder Charges

The lawyer for Lindsay Clancy, charged with murdering her three young children, is urging a judge to dismiss the first-degree murder counts so she cannot face another trial for their deaths.

Clancy, 36, is accused of strangling Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts home on Jan. 24, 2023. Prosecutors say she then jumped from an upper-story window after sending her husband out on errands.

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Her defense maintains she was not criminally responsible because of severe postpartum psychosis. But prosecutors say that is an excuse and she carefully planned killing the children.

A summer trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4 after more than 26 hours of deliberations when jurors reported they were deadlocked 11-1, with 11 favoring a not-guilty-by-insanity verdict and one holdout refusing to acquit.

Judge William F. Sullivan declared the mistrial after successive jury notes. Defense attorneys Kevin Reddington and Martin G. Weinberg argue he failed to adequately inquire after the foreman indicated the holdout acknowledged doubt but would not apply the law on reasonable doubt, and should have considered further steps or an alternate juror before ending the case.

But the holdout juror has said that’s not the case and he never had doubts.

“There are a number of ways in which this Court could have conducted further inquiry without impermissible coercion,” Reddington and Weinberg wrote.

They contend a retrial would violate Clancy’s double jeopardy protections.

Prosecutors oppose dismissal and say the mistrial was properly declared. They wrote that the judge “took every possible tack to address the foreperson’s notes while avoiding the risk of pressuring the dissenting juror or exposing the jury’s private deliberations.”

In court papers they stated: “Because a mistrial was properly declared due to the manifest necessity of a deadlocked jury, the defendant’s motion to dismiss should be denied, and the Commonwealth should be permitted to continue to pursue justice for Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy.”

They added that “double jeopardy does not operate to bar the Commonwealth from seeking justice on behalf of the three victims.” Plymouth County prosecutors have not said whether they will retry the case if the charges stand. A hearing on the motions is scheduled for Monday.

The defense has also sought the holdout juror’s records and an evidentiary hearing, requests the court has previously restricted. Prosecutors have asked for a gag order on public statements by the lawyers.

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.