A judge rejected a request from Lindsay Clancy‘s lawyers to find the mother not guilty of killing her three children after her high-profile case ended in a mistrial after a jury in Plymouth, Massachusetts, failed to reach a consensus verdict.
According to The New York Times, Judge William Sullivan wrote that a rational juror could reasonably have found Clancy, 36, guilty of triple murder based on the evidence presented in court. Sullivan denied the lawyer’s new arguments that prosecutors failed to present enough evidence during the trial that Clancy murdered her three children — Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months — in January 2023.
A lawyer for Clancy did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
During a hearing on Tuesday, Sept. 29, Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington argued his client should be declared not guilty and claimed that the case against the mother was “based on speculation.” He added, “Where is the evidence that she did this?”
Reddington pointed to potentially dubious blood splatter evidence while attempting to cast doubt on the claim that, after Clancy allegedly killed her kids, she cut herself and jumped out a window in an ostensible suicide attempt that left her paralysed. Clancy’s lawyer also pushed back against the claim that she ever directly admitted to killing her children.
In her rebuttal, Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham defended the alleged DNA evidence found on the exercise bands purportedly used to strangle her children and argued there was plenty to back up the claim that Clancy was the only person at the house with the three kids during the time of the alleged murder.
When addressing Reddington’s suggestion that Clancy never actually admitted to killing her kids, Buckingham said, “The entire record is voluminous as to the information supporting the fact that she did this.” Buckingham also pointed to comments Clancy allegedly made to a hospital chaplain where she “talks about the fact that she had these hallucinations telling her what she had to do, telling her she had to kill the kids.”
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Sullivan has set a Nov. 2 hearing to discuss a possible retrial for Clancy. Other related items on the schedule include additional arguments from Clancy’s defence on their motion to dismiss the case and avoid a retrial on double jeopardy, as well as a motion related to their efforts to further question the holdout juror.
From Rolling Stone US
