On the menu today: President Trump probably isn’t going to attempt to intervene in the potential second murder trial of Lindsay Clancy. But that doesn’t mean that Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, isn’t going to try to goad the president, and Reddington’s seemingly nonsensical request for a presidential pardon has a deeply cynical but shrewd strategy behind it. Read on.
A Strange Appeal
At first glance, Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, is a moron who does not know that the president of the United States cannot pardon someone for state charges:
“Mr. President, I would hope that you would consider this young lady and the person she is, what she’s been through, and consider a pardon,” Reddington said Tuesday in an interview on Good Morning America.
But in an interview with the CBS affiliate in Boston, Reddington laid out his strategy, which is straightforward and much less moronic than it first appeared. He wants the president — who loves to get involved in every high-attention event from the World Cup to the U.S. Open to the Super Bowl to the NBA Finals — to intervene and prevent a second trial by leaning on the county prosecutor:
“The goal is pretty simple. It’s to seek help from Trump,” Reddington said. “I mean, if President Trump feels that this is a case that warrants that type of intervention from, you know, the executive branch, even though legally it’s not a federal case, he certainly has an awful lot of clout.”
“I’m sure that, were he hypothetically to reach out to Tim Cruz, you know, they’re both Republicans, and I don’t know, maybe that will be something that Tim would listen to and consider,” Reddington said. “I think any type of help that we can get is helpful.”
The decision of whether or not to retry Lindsay Clancy — and on what charges — is entirely up to Tim Cruz, the district attorney for Plymouth County. Cruz is a Republican who has held the district attorney seat since 2001.
WBZ-TV reached out to the District Attorney for reaction to Reddington’s comments.
“We have no comment on Reddington’s comments,” a spokesperson for the Plymouth County DA said.
Trump briefly discussed the trial Friday, but didn’t seem inclined to intervene in the case:
Q: Mr. President, while we were here with you, a mistrial was declared in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Have you been following that trial? Have you watched any of it?
Trump: I have. Well, it’s hard not to; it’s on television so much it’s hard not to follow it. I’ve followed it pretty much. But it’s a shame — it’s a horrible tragedy; it’s a horrible tragedy. I see what’s happened, and it looks like it’s a hung jury and I think the judge just said it’s going to be a mistrial.
I assume there’s going to be another trial. It’s a terrible situation. Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing — can’t be worse. But you’ll find out what the price to pay is. There’ll be a price; it’s going to be a mental institution or jail or something. But I guess they’re going to go through another trial. It’s too bad.
At this rate, Reddington will start claiming that Clancy was the victim of a witch hunt by “Sleepy Joe,” or that she’s a big enthusiast of cryptocurrency.
During any other presidency, attempting to get the commander in chief to intervene in a local county prosecution would be self-evidently absurd and a waste of time. With this president it’s a long shot, but probably worth taking the shot. There’s little cost to Reddington, and a greater-than-zero chance that Trump, who pops out pardons and clemencies like a Pez dispenser, might just decide to call up the prosecutor and lean on him.
Yesterday on the Three Martini Lunch podcast, Greg and I observed the shameless defense lawyer used to be a stock character in comedies — Lionel Hutz, Jackie Chiles, the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. Particularly after the O. J. Simpson case’s “Dream Team,” we more or less expected any lawyer in a high-profile case to be bombastic, fast-talking, slippery, relentlessly self-promotional, and willing to try anything to get their client acquitted. Then Bob Odenkirk had to go and make that trope a complicated, three-dimensional character.
But there seems to be something more sinister about Reddington, and the way he walked right up to the line of threatening the lone holdout juror:
They [the other eleven jurors] know that they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors that was so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful. And listen to this evidence and you could see how defeated they were sitting there. And I got a funny feeling that they would have gone on for another week if they had to. So, I hope that guy can sleep well at night.
Hey, it’s not like a “crime junkie” hasn’t already entered a restricted area by the courthouse and recorded video of the jurors, right?
But we are where we are, because eleven of the jurors in this case either bought Reddington’s arguments, or believed Massachusetts law, which requires the prosecution to prove the sanity of the defendant when an insanity plea is made, required them to acquit. If Johnnie Cochran were alive, he might have offered, “If her sanity disappeared, she must be cleared.”
NBC’s Boston affiliate conducted an interview with three of the jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Juror Kellie Farina shared her views of the prosecution:
I just found it to be harsh, Sue. Very, very harsh. I mean, again, maybe we we’re talking with ourselves here, but the fact that they had no character witnesses to in regard to Lindsay of being a bad mother. I mean, right out of the gate, it’s like, you’re presenting all these medical professionals, but nobody’s presenting for the prosecution a woman and a mother of three children.
What charges was Clancy facing? Ah, that’s right, three counts of murder. Not three counts of being a bad mother.
And really, what evidence is there that Lindsay Clancy was a bad mother, other than that little detail of her strangling all three of her children?
She continued:
So, I found it to be biased right out of the gate. I found them also to be kind of unprofessional and um, just without a heart.
“Biased”? The prosecution is not supposed to be objective; the prosecution is there to make a case and put the defendant behind bars. The judge and jury aren’t supposed be biased, but the prosecution and defense attorney really ought to have a strong opinion about what happened and how they want the jury to decide!
The job of the prosecutor is not to “have a heart” for the defendant. The prosecutor’s job is to lay out the evidence and seek the appropriate punishment and sentence.
A few moments later, Farina seems to recognize she’s looking for something that doesn’t need to be there:
I was like, “Okay where is this going?” right from statement one. There is no compassion in this courtroom right now . . . which I guess is expected of a prosecution but I thought it was very cold.
Farina continued:
We appreciated the fact that [defense attorney] Kevin [Reddington] was just, you know, cut through the [bull****], if you don’t mind me saying, and just moved it along with just so much compassion for her. And we didn’t find any compassion in the prosecution. I mean, I know it’s their job, but in a case like this, you expect a little bit, I think, from whatever side of the counsel.
“We didn’t find any compassion in the prosecution.” That’s not their job!
Another juror, Paula Devlin, said in the interview, “There wasn’t one person on either side that could say anything bad about her. Even the prosecution really couldn’t point to anything.”
Later in the interview, an NBC News reporter asked, “Did the prosecution make any points at all? Did you . . . was there anything that . . . you considered?”
Devlin answered, “No, I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve thought about that a lot.”
Farina added, “I honestly feel like the prosecutor did themselves more damage than good by just not thinking about Lindsay.”
I’ve seen more thorough thinking and harder judgments from Care Bear dolls.
Some might find it a little mean to ridicule these jurors like this, but . . . they did choose to sit down and do an on-camera television interview, laying out their reasoning in the case, and in at least one case, it appears that the juror watched the trial unfold before her and found the prosecutor insufficiently “compassionate” and too “harsh” to a woman who had admitted she strangled three young children.
I wrote a bit about the impossibility of our understanding what’s going on inside a juror’s mind while the trial is going on, back during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Then, as now, I turned to one of the wisest philosophers in Western civilization . . . comedian Dennis Miller, who used to joke, “If you ever get charged with a crime, your fate will be in the hands of twelve people who were too dumb to get out of jury duty. . . . And the only way to get on a jury is to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you don’t know [squat] about the case you’re about to try.”
He also concluded, “We have too many hung juries and not enough hung defendants.”
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Corey Lewandowski is exactly the shameless sleazeball you thought he was.