A Massachusetts judge on Thursday denied Lindsay Clancy’s motion to be found not guilty in the deaths of her three young children, keeping her murder case on track for a second trial.
Plymouth County Superior Court Judge William Sullivan ruled that prosecutors presented enough evidence for a jury to find that Lindsay Clancy was the person responsible for the killings. The request was what Massachusetts calls a Rule 25 motion, which asks a judge to throw out a case because the prosecution’s evidence is too weak for any reasonable jury to convict. Defense attorneys file these motions in almost every criminal trial, and judges usually deny them. Sullivan also denied the same request when the first trial ended.
Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse, is charged with murder and strangulation in the deaths of her daughter Cora, 5, her son Dawson, 3, and her 8 month old son Callan. Prosecutors say she strangled the children with exercise bands at the family’s home in Duxbury in January 2023, then tried to take her own life by jumping from a window.
At trial, her lawyer Kevin Reddington never disputed that she killed them. He argued she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare and severe mental illness that can follow childbirth. Experts called by prosecutors testified that they came to a different diagnosis and that she was responsible for her actions. After more than a week of deliberations, the jury deadlocked 11 to 1 in favor of finding her not guilty by reason of insanity, and the judge declared a mistrial on September 4.
At a hearing Tuesday, Reddington took a different approach. He argued that prosecutors never actually proved Clancy killed the children and that police immediately assumed she was guilty without properly investigating. He said the insanity defense put him in a bind because it forced him to effectively admit she did it in order to argue that she was not responsible. Prosecutors called the new argument “laughable” and said the record was full of evidence that she committed the killings.
Sullivan sided with prosecutors, writing that the evidence would allow a rational jury to find her guilty of murder. He also wrote that mental illness on its own does not rule out criminal responsibility.
Prosecutors have said they plan to retry the Lindsay Clancy case. Her legal team has filed a separate motion arguing that a second trial would violate double jeopardy, the constitutional protection against being tried twice for the same crime. Arguments on that motion are set for November.
