Kevin Reddington filed a renewed motion Thursday asking Judge William Sullivan to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty, six days after her five week murder trial ended in a mistrial. His argument is that prosecutors failed to put on enough evidence for any juror honestly seeking the truth to find guilt proven on every element beyond a reasonable doubt.
What he filed is a sufficiency motion. That means he is not arguing the jury got it wrong or that a retrial would be unfair. He is arguing the state’s case never cleared the legal bar to begin with, and that when evidence falls short of that bar the judge can decide the matter himself rather than sending it to another jury. He wrote that no rational jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy had no mental disease or defect when the Commonwealth’s own proof established otherwise.
The timing is set by court rule. A motion like this can be renewed within five days after a jury is discharged if the judge already denied it during trial, which Sullivan did. The mistrial came down September 4.
Reddington was direct that this is not about the numbers in the jury room. According to jury foreperson Roni Carlson, the panel was split 11 to 1 in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. Reddington says the motion rests on whether prosecutors presented legally sufficient evidence, not on how close the jury came.
That distinction matters for what happens next, because he has a second motion coming that does turn on the jury. At Clancy’s September 29 hearing he plans to file a motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, arguing there was no manifest necessity for Sullivan to declare a mistrial in the first place. Manifest necessity is the standard a judge has to meet before ending a trial early while preserving the state’s right to try the case again. A hung jury normally clears it without much argument. Reddington’s position is that this one did not, because the foreperson told the court a single juror had acknowledged doubt but refused to apply it to the verdict as the law requires, and Sullivan should have questioned that juror before pulling the plug rather than treating a mistrial as the only option.
Two motions, two different mechanisms, one outcome each is aimed at. The sufficiency motion asks the judge to end the case with a not guilty finding. The double jeopardy motion asks the judge to bar the state from trying her again.
The jury of nine women and three men deliberated for seven days beginning August 27 and had five choices in front of them: not guilty by reason of insanity, not guilty, first degree murder, second degree murder, and manslaughter. Reddington asked Sullivan to remove the holdout juror before the mistrial and was denied. He asked the judge to survey the jury on a lesser charge first, which would have taken first degree murder off the table for any retrial, and was denied. He got one hour to take an emergency appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court, and Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt denied it Friday afternoon. She did not rule on double jeopardy, which is why that question is still open.
Clancy, a 36 year old former labor and delivery nurse, pleaded not guilty to three counts of first degree murder in the deaths of her children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan, at their Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. Her defense did not dispute that she killed them. The argument was that she was overmedicated and suffering from postpartum psychosis, and therefore not criminally responsible. Prosecutors argued she planned the killings and understood right from wrong. Five of the medical professionals who treated her mental health testified, along with her husband Patrick Clancy, his parents, her mother and sister, a former babysitter, a former colleague, and a longtime friend.
Clancy has spent most of the time since 2023 at Tewksbury State Hospital, and a sheriff’s van returned her there hours after the mistrial. A not guilty by reason of insanity verdict would have kept her committed to state psychiatric care with periodic review for release, not sent her home. The motion Reddington filed Thursday asks for something different than that.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not said whether his office will retry the case.
