Trump Says Lindsay Clancy Case a “State Situation,” Laments Children’s Deaths

President Donald Trump said Sunday that the case of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, charged with killing her three young children, is a “state situation,” not a federal one.

His comments come after a request last week from Clancy’s attorney – who knows Trump can’t actually pardon Clancy since it involves state charges not federal. He’s seen as trying to engender sympathy ahead of a potential second trial.

Meanwhile, Trump lamented that “three children are dead” in what he called a terrible case.

Asked whether he would pardon Clancy, Trump called the situation “very sad.”

“There’s no winner there. There’s no win no matter what you do. Three children are dead,” he said.

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The remarks came after Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, publicly asked Trump last week to grant her a pardon.

“Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady. The type of person she is, what she has been through, and consider a pardon,” Reddington said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Trump said Reddington is “a good attorney” and that he has “heard from other people he’s a very good attorney.”

“I hope they can work it out. That’s something they have to work out … There is no win there,” Trump said.

Clancy faces three counts of first-degree murder in Massachusetts state court. Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse, is charged in the Jan. 24, 2023, deaths of her children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan — at the family’s home in Duxbury.

She has not disputed that she killed the children.

After sending her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, out to pick up takeout and medicine, she strangled them with exercise bands in the basement. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.

When Patrick Clancy called 911, he told the dispatcher, “She killed the kids.”

Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial Sept. 4 after the jury deadlocked. Clancy remains charged with three counts of first-degree murder while Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz decides whether to retry the case.

The legal fight has never been about whether the children were killed. It has been about whether Clancy can be held accountable.

Reddington argued that postpartum psychosis and prescribed medication left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her behavior to the law. Prosecutors said she acted intentionally and with planning.

A pardon would not restore the lives of Cora, Dawson and Callan. Three children went to bed that January night in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never grow up.

Outside the courthouse, some feminist spectators have dressed in pink in support of Clancy.

After the mistrial, Patrick Clancy’s attorney, David Meier, said: “The loss of Patrick’s children is something from which he will never recover and from which there will never be closure. The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful — for Patrick, for his family, and for all us.”

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.