A Sympathetic Plaintiff and Well-Crafted Defense Dominated Clancy Trial
New York Times · LC · trust 41/100
The defense lawyer for Lindsay Clancy showed empathy for his client in showcasing her mental health problems. That may have made all the difference.
Listen · 8:30 min Share full article Lindsay Clancy’s defense lawyer, Kevin Reddington, after leaving the courthouse this week. Credit... Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images By Richard Fausset
“This,” Mr. Reddington told 12 jurors in his opening remarks, “is not a righteous prosecution.”
Eleven of those jurors voted not to convict Ms. Clancy, 36, who claimed she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings. With one holdout juror, the judge declared a mistrial, leaving a question mark hovering over a murder case that set off a global conversation about the mental health burdens of motherhood, and long-held questions about the essential fairness of the insanity defense.
A retrial is possible. But for now, the mistrial must be considered a victory for Mr. Reddington, one that allows his client to return, for the time being at least, to a state-run psychiatric hospital rather than a prison cell.
But if Mr. Reddington is to be believed, it will not register as a win for Ms. Clancy. During the trial, he described her as a mother well aware of what she had done to her children and “living her own hell.”
Such statements by Mr. Reddington were part of a defense strategy that acknowledged Ms. Clancy’s dark actions but emphasized her mental health problems and the missteps of the medical establishment as she sought help. In the wake of the six-week trial, a number of legal experts said that Mr. Reddington, 75, had masterfully pulled off an astonishingly difficult courtroom assignment amid the most macabre of circumstances.
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