Prosecutors ask judge to deny Lindsay Clancy’s defense motion to dismiss charges

Prosecutors have asked a judge to deny Lindsay Clancy’s motion to dismiss the charges against her, arguing in a motion that they have the right to seek justice on behalf of her three young children even after a mistrial.

“Since a mistrial was properly declared due to the clear necessity of a deadlocked jury, defendant’s motion to dismiss the case should be denied, and the Commonwealth should be allowed to continue seeking justice for Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy,” prosecutors wrote in the motion filed Monday.

Clancy was charged with three counts of murder and strangulation in the deaths of her three young children in 2023, and her trial took place in a Massachusetts courtroom over the summer. The trial was declared a mistrial in September when the jury told the judge it was deadlocked after seven days of deliberations — with one holdout juror.

Clancy is accused of strangling her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in their Duxbury home. Her lawyers argued that she suffered from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible for her actions.

His defense team decided to dismiss the charges against Clancy on the grounds of double jeopardy – a law that prevents defendants from being prosecuted more than once for the same crime.

Prosecutors say that standard doesn’t apply in Clancy’s case because no verdict has been reached. The remedy for the jury deadlock should not be to dismiss the charges against Clancy, but to hold a new trial, according to the prosecution’s motion.

The escalating legal battle centers on the holdout juror, who said he has been harassed since the trial ended but continues to maintain his position that Clancy premeditated his children’s murders. The other 11 jurors were prepared to acquit Clancy under the insanity standard, they said. They claimed the holdout juror failed to meet the standard of reasonable doubt throughout the deliberations.

Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued throughout the trial that she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis at the time of the murders and was therefore unaware of her actions and unable to control herself.

The prosecution, however, argued that Clancy was not in psychosis when she killed her children and that she had planned the strangulations in advance.

In his response Wednesday to the prosecution’s opposition to dismissing the charges against Clancy, Reddington argued that a new trial without an investigation into jury misconduct would subject his client to “successive prosecutions with all the attendant burdens and dangers against which the Supreme Judicial Court has repeatedly warned.”

“This is not the law,” Reddington’s motion reads. “To the contrary, it flies in the face of centuries of Double Jeopardy jurisprudence. »