Kevin Reddington did not wait long. Four days after a Plymouth jury deadlocked on whether Lindsay Clancy should answer for strangling her three children, her lawyer went on Good Morning America and asked the President of the United States to wipe the slate clean.
I’d like to say that perhaps Donald Trump, who felt compelled to speak out about this case. Mr President, I hope that you would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, what’s been through, and consider a pardon.
That is not a legal argument. That is a publicity stunt dressed as humility. And it treats three dead children as a footnote to a lawyer’s affection for his client. It also gets Reddington the additional headlines he seems to crave, keeping himself in the news with an ask he knows won’t work.
Trump Already Answered Him
Reddington acted as if the White House had not already spoken. On Friday, after Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial, President Trump told reporters he had been following the case because it was hard not to.
It’s a shame. It’s a horrible tragedy. Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. Can’t be worse. But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price. It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something, but I guess they’re going to go through another trial.
Just the News carried the same remarks. Trump did not call Clancy a wonderful person. He did not float clemency. He said there would be a price. That is the moral floor this case never should have been allowed to sink beneath.
There is a second problem Reddington skipped on national television. A presidential pardon reaches federal offenses. Clancy faces Massachusetts first-degree murder counts in Plymouth Superior Court. Article II does not let a president erase a state killing. Reddington has practiced law in Massachusetts since 1975. He knows that. The cameras did not care.
He’s not an idiot. He’s just feeding his own narcissism in hopes of being the main character in this story, even if it means pushing the memories of three murdered children aside.
What the Jury Could Not Finish
The facts were never the mystery. On January 24, 2023, in Duxbury, Clancy strangled Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and eight-month-old Callan with exercise bands. She sent her then-husband, Patrick, out for a CVS run and takeout. Then she jumped from an upstairs window. She lived. The children did not. She is paralyzed and held at Tewksbury State Hospital.
She admitted the act. The trial was about criminal responsibility. Reddington sold postpartum psychosis and a cocktail of prescriptions. Prosecutors pointed to planning, timing, and a voice she described only after the killings. After more than 37 hours over seven days, the panel of nine women and three men could not agree. Reddington says eleven were ready to find her not guilty by reason of insanity and one would not move. He called that juror a thief of seven weeks and hoped the juror could sleep at night.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused his last-hour attempt to keep the jury sitting. Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. A status hearing is set for September 29.
Fox News reported Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not announced a retrial. Cruz said his job is to keep the victims from becoming invisible. Reddington, who has known Cruz for three decades, spent Friday crowing that Cruz was “crushed,” then told the Daily Mail he would listen to a deal so Clancy does not have to sit through another trial.
First he wants a pardon. Then he wants a bargain. Anything but a verdict that names the act for what it was.
The Cult Around a Confession
Reddington told America he feels a “very strong bond” with Clancy because she is intelligent, hardworking, and a “wonderful, wonderful person.” That is the language of a defense table, not a graveside. It is also the language that has followed this case from the first pink-clad courthouse vigils to the TikTok chorus of “Same Lindsay” to a GoFundMe for her parents that blew past $830,000. Women carried infants to the sidewalk and asked the public to see a patient instead of three small bodies.
Mental illness is real. Postpartum collapse is real. None of that turns a strangling into an administrative error. Days after this jury hung, another mother, Corie Walsh of Illinois, was charged with murdering her two-year-old son. She had been texting about the Clancy trial that same afternoon. When a culture baptizes one child-killing as a mental-health parable, copycats do not need a subpoena to get the message.
Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan are not exhibits in a campaign against “stigma.” They are the case. A lawyer may love his client. A president may pity a broken woman in a wheelchair. Neither assignment includes pretending a pardon, or an 11-1 shrug, can wash innocent blood off the floor of a Massachusetts basement.
Cruz still has to decide whether those children get another day in court. That is the only question that matters. The rest is television.
