Lindsay Clancy‘s attorney has filed a new motion asking the judge to find her not guilty of killing her three children by reason of insanity, and the request comes just days after the judge already declared a mistrial in the case.
The Massachusetts mom, 36, pleaded not guilty to murdering her three kids — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — whom she shared with ex-husband Patrick Clancy. Her legal team argued during the high-profile trial that Lindsay was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she fatally strangled the children. Prosecutors, meanwhile, felt she knew right from wrong at the time of the murders.
On Thursday, September 10, Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington filed a new motion asking for an acquittal. In the filing, according to the New York Post, Reddington wrote that “no rational jury could find beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no mental disease or defect when the Commonwealth’s own proof established that she did.”
The case will appear before Sullivan for a status hearing on September 29, with Reddington planning to argue his motion further at that time.
Facebook/Lindsay Marie Clancy
The motion comes after Reddington said during a Wednesday, September 9 appearance on CBS Mornings that he plans to file a motion to dismiss based on double jeopardy at the hearing.
“Because there’s no … manifest necessity,” Reddington said. “You have to have a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial for obvious reasons — the invested time that the jurors put into it, the court, the staff, the defendant, the prosecution, everybody.”
Reddington also said that while he can respect a juror’s right to hold out on a verdict, he doesn’t believe the lone holdout in this case listened to the judge as it pertains to reasonable doubt.
“But when the forelady indicated clearly and unequivocally in the jury question that this person had doubt, reasonable doubt as we know now, and just refused to listen to the judge’s instruction on the law, that’s when I was upset,” he told CBS, “because that’s when I used the expressions and the terms that I did that it just wasn’t right.”
Of his client, he added, “I mean, in the sense that she’s disappointed, she’s sad, and she still has the same affect that she’s had for three and a half years. Thankfully, she’s getting great psychiatric treatment, medical treatment at Tewksbury.”
Clancy returned to Tewksbury Hospital, a psychiatric facility, following the mistrial.