1. The defense lawyer, Kevin Reddington, wanted the holdout juror removed by the judge, and even filed an emergency appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Reddington accused the lone holdout juror of being “biased” against those with “debilitating mental illness.” I can’t blame the guy for trying: this is called “zealous representation,” and Massachusetts (I’m a Bay State lawyer, remember) is one of the few remaining states that still requires its lawyers to “represent a client zealously within the bounds of the law.” One “X” wag summarized Reddington’s demand as “The juror is impermissibly biased against my client, and we know that because the juror did not vote to acquit my client.”
I might argue that the 11 jurors who wanted to acquit Clancy were biased in favor of mothers who snap and kill their children.
2. That phenomenon, which includes the pro-baby killing supporters of Clancy (Is it possible that any of them oppose abortion on demand?) who I discussed in the first EA post on the matter, is an example of what author Allie Beth Stuckey describes in her book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion:
“We are told that empathy is the highest virtue—the key to being a good person. Is that true? Or has “empathy,” like so many other words of our day—“tolerance,” “justice,” “acceptance”—been hijacked by bad actors who exploit compassion for their own political ends? In “Toxic Empathy,” Allie Beth Stuckey argues that empathy has become a tool of manipulation by left-wing activists who bully people into believing that they must adopt progressive positions to be loving. She explores the five most heated issues through which toxic empathy is deployed: abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social justice. Progressives use catchy mantras to present their perspective as empathetic, like “abortion is healthcare,” “love is love,” or “no human being is illegal,” but in each case, they ignore the other side of the moral equation. For example, abortion is presented as compassionate for the woman, but what about the human life the procedure kills?”
Indeed, the pro-Clancy mob’s refusal to focus on the three innocent victims of Clancy’s crime is, as I mentioned earlier, a symptom of dangerous ethics rot.
3. Judge Sullivan brought the jurors into the courtroom one by one and asked each whether they could follow his instructions regarding “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” Then he brought the entire jury back into the courtroom and explained the meaning of reasonable doubt again before ordering them to return to deliberations.
“I want to remind you that you are required to follow my instructions on the law as I gave them to you,” Sullivan told the jury. “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt does not mean proof beyond all possible doubt.”
That little distinction, in my experience, is almost impossible for laypersons to grasp, and a lot of lawyers aren’t so clear on it either.
Reddington again asked the judge to remove the juror accused of disregarding the instructions and replace that juror with an alternate. Sullivan refused, saying he could not determine which side of the jury was correct. “I don’t feel that it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations,” Sullivan said “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to say I agree with one juror or the 11.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague, of course, approved of Judge Sullivan’s response. “I think what Your Honor has done by asking each juror if they’re able to follow the law and then giving a general instruction on reasonable doubt is appropriate,” she said.
I agree.
4. After the mistrial, Reddington gave a speech to reporters on the courthouse steps, condemning the hold-out juror among other declarations.. On “X”, Prof. Turley flagged his statement as unethical:
“Reddington’s attack on the holdout juror in front of the courthouse was, in my view, an outrageous and reckless moment. It would warrant a response from the judge about stoking the rage against this one juror……I would not be surprised if District Attorney Cruz sends a letter to Judge Sullivan on the attack of Reddington on this holdout juror. The fact is that his name is likely to be discovered eventually, and Reddington just fueled the rage with rhetoric about “stealing” the case and denying justice for some unknown reason. The reason is that the juror was not convinced by the defense…It was a breathtaking lack of judgment and restraint from the defense counsel. In my view, it would warrant a communication from the court. In a nation of rage addicts, Reddington just supplied a villain for cathartic fury.”
I must note that the professor has a book out about “the Age of Rage” in America, and is exploiting every opportunity to relate current events to his product.
5. The New York Post reports that another distraught mother, Corie Walsh, 38, is charged with first-degree murder after one of her neighbors found Walsh’s son, Barrett, hanging from the rafters in the family’s basement, his feet off the ground, and a ligature around his neck. Walsh was reportedly found lying in a bathtub, fully clothed and drenched in bloody water. A few hours before, she had been discussing the Clancy case with neighbors.
Noting this story, Ann Althouse delivered a trenchant, chilling comment: “Is this the new “Me Too” movement?”
6. There were 9 women and 3 men on the jury. How did that happen? Well, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1994 landmark case J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B., using peremptory challenges (strikes without stating a reason) to exclude jurors based solely on gender (or race) violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Clancy’s case shows why that ruling can be “prejudicial to the administration of justice”. Many…too many… women are wired to have “toxic empathy” for mothers who snap, as the protests in Clancy’s favor demonstrate.
7. I was watching “Fox and Friends” as they discussed the mistrial. One of the three idiots said, “We all know that the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and must also prove that Clancy is sane beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“What?” I thought. That’s wrong: the burden of proof in an insanity defense lies with the defense, not the prosecution. But not in Massachusetts! It is one of only four states that holds the prosecution responsible for proving that a defendant claiming to be not guilty by reason of insanity was sane at the time of the killing. Almost no news sources reporting on the case mentioned that, and it’s obviously important; the quirky rule may explain why 11 jurors concluded that the State hadn’t proved the case.
The Fox host was still wrong, however. The standard for the prosecution in proving a defendant’s sanity is not beyond a reasonable doubt, but the much, much easier “by a predominance of the evidence.”
If the majority of women will excuse a woman who murders all of her kids, then there is an open question about whether women (at least in the West) should be allowed to serve on juries. They were not weighing psychological testimony that vitiated intent or an understanding of the rightness or wrongness of the action.. They just saw the word “postpartum” and blamed everyone else BUT Clancy.
Although, on a side note, I think most of the psychological profession is corrupt and absurd, so one positive out of this trial hopefully is a diminished respect for it overall.
All of this “same Lindsay” stuff is insane. We have to have an honest conversation about what’s going on with women in this country. They vote for the right to kill their own children and think that it’s empowerment. Something is deeply wrong.
I wonder how many of the women on the jury would accept hormonal issues with pedophiles or rapists.
It would seem to me that the defendants behaviors immediately prior to the crimes would be enough evidence to demonstrate rational thought.
That is the prosecution’s theory.
I counter what the defense attourney said with what the judge said to the jury
He did address it to the whole jury, but I want to think that he’s speaking to the one holdout when he was saying the words: “ Winston Churchill was the prime minister for England when England pretty much stood against Nazi Germany alone.“
I’m hopeful the judge will do two things:
Be aggressive in his defense of this one juror. Treat any attempt to go after him as it should be, criminal.
Sanction the defense attorney and make him recant in public. Have him sit in jail until he’s ready to recognize the errors of his ways. The line of aggressive defense ends when it comes to threatening a specific juror.
Right now the only ones not acting tribal in America are white and asian males. Women are acting incredibly tribal right now, and this case is the prime example of this behavior. So are black Americans. Stoking that is a key pillar of the democrat party.
Donald Trump is the first part of the backlash. If they keep it up, men will react. They will rue the day that men become tribal back, but they really only have themselves to blame.
Right now the only ones not acting tribal in America are white and asian males.
That is changing, by the way. The Presidential election of 2024 showed that the strongest preference for Trump were young white males. They are sick and tired of all the male bashing and anti-white bias in the education system, and the effect of DEI on their chances of being admitted to college or hired for a job. This has the undesirable side effect that they become very open to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and become radicalized. They care very little about history lessons about slavery, Civil War and Jim Crow as they see that as left wing propaganda used to put whites in their place. There is also traction for the idea to repeal the 19th Amendment that gave women the right the vote.
The 2020 hiring data for the top companies in America showed that they hired 38% of the minority college graduates that year, but only 1% of the white college graduates. That is going to make some people upset. Now, the media will say that anyone who claims that the system was rigged against them is lying, but much like Trump in that situation, many are not going to believe it.
Do we actually know at this point a) who the jurors are b) what their motivations are behind how they voted on whether the defendant is guilty? Maybe I am behind on the news as I am spending a lot of time on the road and in national parks this week, but unless I know more I do not consider myself qualified to comment on this jury.
I see on X that many commenters both liberal and conservative seem to feel differently; I am calling out Sean Davis with his comment on TikTok Karen’s on the jury.
The only think I want to mention is that being the single holdout on the jury for six days takes a lot of moral courage. I rewatched 12 Angry Men recently to see why holdouts can be critical to achieving a just verdict.
Hi CVB,
you are so correct that none of us was in that courtroom and did not hear all the evidence. A lot of information has been relayed in the news and by legal commentators. For me there are elements that raise questions.
Lindsay Clancy is a sympathetic woman and so many new mothers can relate to sleeplessness, stress, anxiety, fear. It is overwhelming to care for three young children while recovering from childbirth. And you could conclude that no loving mother would kill her children, so she must be crazy and, therefore, innocent by reason of insanity. Enter toxic empathy. If postpartum stresses, fatigue and depression are valid reasons to murder your children – buckle up. None of these is psychosis, and certainly not an excuse for murdering babies.
The jury is supposed to weigh facts and evidence and evaluate with respect to the law. It seems that eleven of the jurors were swayed more by emotion and empathy than by evidence. Her tiny victims have been nearly forgotten in this drama. That is most likely why we are seeing so much outrage.
I want to caveat everything that follows with this: the GPS data for sending the husband away, the denial of suicidal ideation, and the letting go of the nanny would be hard for the defense to fight, were I a juror in this trial. I would likely (but not necessarily, as I don’t know all the facts) vote guilty.
However, I heard a report from a psych-something (I’m a little fuzzy on the difference between psychology and psychiatry and tend to mix them up at best) that was rather convincing along with some things I have heard from people on psych medication. This woman was purportedly given 18 different prescriptions for PPD over the last several months. Even if she was only on two at the time, she could have still been under the influence of many of the others. Some of the meds she had been on require weaning and if you are not weaned properly, can cause psychosis. The fact that she got so many scripts so fast shows that she was not weaned properly from at least some. I personally have little doubt that there could have been some medicine induced psychosis, and such things can last not seconds or minutes, but days, according to some people who have experienced psych med psychosis.
I do not know how I would have voted, not knowing all relevant details as these jurors did. This is especially the case as I certainly feel the three dead children, as well as some of the publicly discussed circumstances, are details that cry for attention and detract from the psychosis defense. While I do not deny the possibility of toxic empathy, I think it is healthier, overall, for us to assume that the prosecution did not prove its case adequately. Any other assumption (and pretty much all we can do is assume, I think) indicts the entire justice system, and I don’t think we want to go there without a preponderance of evidence that the justice system really does fail. In addition, a guilty person going free is indeed a point of success for our system as “it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer”. (I struggle more with the Chauvin case than this one.)
The long trail of internet searches on how to kill the children is also telling. From what I have heard of the trial, she was on a lot of medications, but she took very few of them. The defense questioned the husband about it and demanded to know if he was aware that she had only taken 3 of these or 4 of those. The husband said he wasn’t sure the exact number (from 3 years ago), but that they were trying different things and that she had been started on several medications with rapidly changing dosages. So, some of the 18 medications included possibly 4 different doses of the same medications, each of which was taken only a few times. He had a big bag of the unused medications that he had been meaning to take for proper disposal. So, it is very possible that she had never been on any of those medications long enough to need to be weaned off and/or that she was just switched to a different dose of the same medication.
Many comedians are commenting, “The history books will say this is the point where women lost the right to vote”.
You can’t demand responsibility and also state that you can’t be held responsible.
Just comedians????
I hate to be the nitpicker – but I believe the Prosecution’s burden in the Clancy case was to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that she was legally sane. That’s what the whole trial was about. She stipulated to the underlying crime with that defense. (See LIBS? That’s how an underlying crime works!)
…and even if I’m wrong on that standard, I’d challenge you to swap out “predominance” with “preponderance” in that sentence. 😉