Lindsay Clancy’s Lawyer Has One Small Problem With His Trump Pardon Request

Apparently, when your client murdered her three children, the next logical step is to ask President Donald Trump to ride in on the White House horse and make the whole thing disappear. 

That appears to be the strategy of Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, who is now asking Trump to pardon his client after a Massachusetts jury managed to deadlock over whether she was criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three young children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan.

Appearing on “Good Morning America,” Reddington made his unusual appeal to Trump after the jury failed to reach a verdict in a trial that has generated a massive national debate over mental illness, criminal responsibility, and whether a person can be held accountable for horrific acts committed during an alleged psychotic episode.

“I’d like to say that perhaps Donald Trump, who felt compelled to speak out about this case … Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady, [the] type of person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” Reddington told leftist host George Stephanopoulos.

There is, however, one tiny constitutional detail standing between Reddington and his dream of presidential intervention.

Clancy was charged under Massachusetts state law, not federal law.

Trump is president of the United States, not the governor of Massachusetts, emperor of New England, or the nation's all-purpose pardon dispenser.

The president's constitutional pardon power applies to federal offenses. It does not allow him to walk into a state criminal proceeding and announce, "You're free to go."

Even if Trump possessed the legal authority to pardon Clancy, there is another problem.

He has already condemned what happened. So if he flipped to her side, he would look like the main course at a Waffle House.

In the Oval Office on Friday, Trump described the killings as a “horrible tragedy” and indicated that he expected Clancy to face another trial.

“It’s a shame. It’s a horrible tragedy,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. Can’t be worse.”

That's probably not the sort of presidential endorsement Reddington was hoping for. But my guess is that he wants to put the president in a precarious position, which he has no right to do.

In January 2023, Clancy took her three young children into the basement of their Duxbury home and strangled them one by one with exercise bands.

The defense does not dispute that she killed the children. Instead, Reddington has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore was not criminally responsible for her actions. Unfortunately, her act and the publicity it has garnered has resulted in several copycat acts by other mothers.

That argument was apparently enough to leave a jury hopelessly divided after 38 hours of deliberation.

Trump said the case had been difficult to escape because of the enormous amount of television coverage surrounding it. He also predicted that Clancy would face consequences, whether that meant confinement in a psychiatric institution or prison. In my humble opinion, Trump should have completely stayed out of it altogether.

“There’ll be a price,” Trump said, adding that he believes prosecutors would bring the case to trial again and calling that scenario “too bad.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial Friday after the jury, consisting of nine women and three men, failed to reach a unanimous verdict.

“With a heavy heart, we report we cannot come to a unanimous decision,” the jurors wrote in their final note to the judge.

The most serious charges were three counts of first-degree murder, each carrying a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

For now, Clancy is expected to remain at Tewksbury State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital.

Reddington claimed he believed the jury was split 11-1 in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. He seemed to implicate one of the three men on the jury which has led to several tons of controversy as the country has taken sides. The Left wants to excuse Clancy and the Right wants something called justice to be served. 

Unfortunately for anyone hoping to turn that into a definitive legal fact, the actual vote remains unknown.

As of Tuesday, Reddington said he had not spoken with any jurors, and none had given media interviews.

Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz said Friday that his office remains committed to seeking justice for the three children, although he stopped short of announcing whether prosecutors would retry the case. 

Does anyone have bets that Clancy will roll free?

“Our priority has always been to fight for Cora, for Dawson, and for Callan. The noise in this case may be louder than it is for other prosecutions in our county, but we have treated it the same as any other case,” Cruz said. “Children were murdered, and it’s our job to seek justice.”

That would seem like a fairly straightforward mission statement.

Three children were murdered.

The government is supposed to seek justice.

The defense attorney, naturally, has a different vision.

Reddington said he remains optimistic that he can negotiate some sort of deal that would prevent Clancy from facing another trial. He described her almost like a member of his own family, calling her a daughter and an “incredible person” with whom he shares a “strong bond.” [Imagine if your own daughter murdered your grandchildren.]

“I’m willing to listen to Tim [Cruz]. I’ve known Tim for 30 years. He’s a very high-charging prosecutor, conservative gentleman,” Reddington told ABC. “I hope, however, after sitting through this trial and seeing the evidence that was presented from the government as well as from the defense, that he would revisit that issue and hopefully would be able to work something out that would be acceptable to both sides.”

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a defense attorney doing his job. That job is to advocate for his client.

But asking the president to pardon someone convicted, or potentially convicted, of a state crime is roughly like asking the fire department to issue you a driver's license.

And perhaps that's the most fitting conclusion to this bizarre chapter.

Three children are dead.

A jury could not agree.

A retrial may be coming, as I believe it should. 

A defense attorney wants a deal.

And somewhere along the way, somebody apparently decided the Constitution was an inconvenient barrier. 

I'd be happy to know what you guys think, so feel free to comment.

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Jonathan Turley Torches Lindsay Clancy Lawyer Over ‘Utterly Reprehensible’ Attack on Holdout Juror

Law Professor Jonathan Turley had some choice words for attorney Kevin Reddington after the Lindsay Clancy murder trial ended in a mistrial.

"The attack on the holdout juror that was a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency."

Frankly, they were deserved.

Reddington represented Clancy in the trial over the murders of her three young children. He did not merely express disappointment with the hung jury. He went after the lone holdout juror in a manner Turley described as "utterly reprehensible." 

There is a reason lawyers are expected to exercise restraint when discussing jurors. Those citizens are not political opponents, punching bags, or convenient targets for public humiliation. They are ordinary people who have been entrusted with one of the most serious responsibilities in American society. 

Apparently Reddington decided that responsibility went out the window the moment one juror refused to give him the verdict he wanted. "For Reddington and others, the hung jury was less ‘Twelve Angry Men’ and more ‘One Angry Man.’ Yet, what he did in front of the courthouse was utterly reprehensible …" Turley wrote.

Turley went even further, arguing that Reddington knew precisely what could happen when he publicly singled out the juror."…The attack on the holdout juror that was a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency. Reddington knows it is very likely that the name of this juror (he has already been identified as one of only the three men on the jury) will eventually be uncovered by Internet…"— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) September 5, 2026.

"But it was his attack on the holdout juror that was a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency. Reddington knows it is very likely that the name of this juror (he has already been identified as one of only the three men on the jury) will eventually be uncovered by Internet sleuths," he added. 

"He effectively put a target on the back of a juror who committed the unpardonable sin of not being convinced by his arguments." That is the truly ugly part of this episode. Reddington had every right to argue his client's case. He had every right to be disappointed by the verdict, or lack thereof. He had every right to challenge legal rulings through appropriate channels.What he did not need to do was publicly demonize a juror who simply refused to agree with him.

But Reddington apparently wasn't finished.

Just before the judge officially declared a mistrial, Reddington made a Hail Mary attempt to have the lone holdout removed and replaced with an alternate. The effort failed. But not before Reddington used his filing to accuse the juror of having an inherent bias against people with disabilities or those suffering from mental illness. 

Then, after the mistrial was declared, Reddington went after the juror again. He claimed that Clancy and the other jurors had been "robbed by one man," Reddington made sure the public knew that the supposed villain was one of only three men on the jury. "They know they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors that were so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful," he said.

Think about that for a moment. One citizen disagreed with the other jurors. Rather than recognizing that a jury is supposed to deliberate and that disagreement is an essential part of the process, Reddington portrayed that citizen as someone with some mysterious "agenda" who had supposedly stolen seven weeks from everyone else.

That is not an argument for justice. It sounds more like the tantrum of a lawyer who cannot accept that his arguments failed to persuade someone.Reddington then sneered, "I hope that guy can sleep well at night," while boasting that he had "crushed" District Attorney Tim Cruz and accusing Cruz of not caring about the murdered children.

There is something particularly grotesque about turning a murder trial involving three dead children into a courtroom version of a personal score-settling exercise.

Outside the courthouse, women supporting Clancy's murderous acts shouted at Cruz that he "only cared about the [murdered] children" and had no compassion for their mother, who never denied that she was the one who killed them.

Turley correctly invoked the classic 1957 film "12 Angry Men" to make the point that Reddington appears to have forgotten one of the most fundamental principles of jury deliberation: jurors are not required to surrender their consciences simply because everyone else disagrees with them. "The rising hatred toward this juror reflects how an act deemed noble in one context can be denounced as craven in another."

"Viewers love to watch Henry Fonda stand alone against his fellow jurors to raise reasonable doubt in favor of the young defendant," Turley continued. "But in this version, the sole juror believed that his fellow jurors were ignoring the defendant’s culpability." 

Exactly. The hero of "12 Angry Men" is celebrated because he refuses to cave to the majority. He doesn't demand that the holdout be removed. He doesn't publicly brand his fellow jurors as villains. He doesn't suggest that someone should be replaced because that person refuses to go along with everyone else. He stands his ground. That is precisely what makes Turley's criticism so important.

Imagine if the logic Reddington appeared to embrace had been applied to Henry Fonda's character. The lone holdout could simply have been tossed aside and replaced by someone more agreeable. The deliberation would end when the majority got tired of hearing dissent. 

That might make for a convenient legal system. It would also be a terrifying one. And this is where Reddington's conduct crosses from merely being aggressive advocacy into something far uglier. A lawyer can fight like hell for his client without treating a citizen who disagrees with him as a human punching bag. The holdout juror did not "steal" anything. 

He did his job. 

He deliberated.

He listened.

And he refused to convict or reach whatever conclusion the other jurors wanted simply because they had the numbers. That is not a failure of the jury system. That is the jury system. 

Turley ultimately brought the discussion back to another classic work, "To Kill a Mockingbird," quoting the principle that should have been obvious throughout this entire episode: "‘The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,'" 

There it is. 

A conscience does not require permission from a lawyer. It does not require approval from a prosecutor. It does not require agreement from eleven other jurors. And it certainly does not disappear because an attorney is furious that his case did not produce the verdict he wanted. 

Reddington may believe he "crushed" the prosecution. He may believe one juror ruined seven weeks of deliberation. He may believe the juror was biased. But none of that gives him license to publicly put a target on that citizen's back. 

Jonathan Turley was right to call it out. A lawyer's job is to advocate for his client. It is not to publicly vilify an ordinary citizen for having the audacity to exercise his conscience. 

If Reddington cannot tolerate a juror who refuses to fall in line, perhaps the problem is not the juror. Perhaps the problem is the lawyer.

Thanks for following Brain Flushings. Please take time to check out the sponsors on this page--it's one way to support my work and you don't need to purchase anything to do so. Of course, you can Buy Me A Coffee at any amount if you want to support me directly. And finally, don't be afraid to subscribe if you enjoy the blog--it's free, and worth the cost.

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