Kevin Reddington has gone nuts.
The 75-year-old defense attorney spent six weeks telling a Massachusetts jury that his client, Lindsay Clancy, killed her three children because of postpartum psychosis and therefore she was not criminally responsible. On Tuesday, he stood in Plymouth Superior Court and asked the judge to acquit her because, suddenly, nobody can prove she did it.
"Where is the evidence that she did this?" Reddington asked.
Clancy’s first trial ended in a mistrial earlier this month because only one juror was willing to declare her criminally responsible.
Now it looks like Reddington is testing out a new strategy to get his client not only off the hook.
Reddington told the court that the DNA and fingerprint evidence fell far short and the prosecution's timeline was ridiculous. He accused police of never doing a real investigation and of assuming Clancy was guilty from day one. He insisted she never confessed, that she remembers nothing about the killings, and that everything she knows came from other people after she woke up sedated in a hospital bed. The whole case, he said, is speculation.
Speculation? That's rich coming from the man who never once told jurors his client didn't kill those children during the trial.
In fact, at the trial, Reddington's entire defense depended on the fact that Clancy did kill her children. He asked the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing that severe postpartum psychosis had her hearing a voice that ordered her to kill her kids and then herself. Nobody pleads insanity for a crime someone else committed.
So how does Reddington explain the about-face? Would you believe he’s actually blaming the judge?
According to Reddington, Judge William Sullivan refused to split the trial into two phases, one on guilt and one on criminal responsibility. Reddington says that decision forced him to concede Clancy committed the killings so he could make the insanity argument at all. In other words, the admission shouldn't count because he didn't want to make it.
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Prosecutor Shanan Buckingham pointed out that Reddington's doubts about who killed these children only appeared after the trial ended. During the trial, she noted, he objected to evidence of the crimes because Clancy had already admitted to them. Buckingham called the insufficient-evidence claim laughable and reminded the judge of testimony that Clancy's DNA turned up on the ends of the exercise bands used to strangle the children.
Prosecutors argued Clancy planned and carried out the murders in cold blood. Her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, told jurors she sent him out to pick up dinner so she could commit the murders. He came home to find all three children motionless in the basement with exercise bands around their necks. He found Lindsay in the backyard with wounds to her neck and wrists after she jumped from their second-floor bedroom window. Prosecutors said the suicide attempt showed she knew what she had done was wrong. Defense experts called it proof of psychosis.
Until Tuesday, neither side disputed any of that.
Jurors also heard plenty about Clancy's mental health in the months leading up to the killings. Over four months, she saw a psychiatrist regularly, called a suicide hotline twice, and checked herself into a mental institution for nearly five days. Over the same stretch, five different providers put her on thirteen powerful medications, which Reddington argued made her worse. A jury can weigh that argument. It only works, though, if she killed her children.
Reddington literally built his whole defense on an admission and an alleged diagnosis, and now he wants the court to act like the admission never happened. What is he driving at? The only thing I can think of is that he’s trying to get the judge to dismiss the charges.
Perhaps he’s the one who should be committed.