Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother charged with strangling her three young children, wants her case heard outside of Plymouth County, but prosecutors say there is no need for that.
Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, is asking for his client’s trial to be held at Suffolk Superior Court in Boston instead of Plymouth Superior Court, where he believes pooling an impartial jury is unlikely because of “exploitive prejudicial publicity” from the media.
Plymouth Second Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague has said Reddington’s arguments for moving the trial to Boston fall short, citing how the trial judge will employ a “deliberate and thoughtful individual voir dire process to ensure only impartial jurors.”
The trial is slated to begin on Feb. 9 but Reddington has also requested that it be pushed back to next spring, at the earliest.
Clancy, 35, is charged with murdering her three children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months. Clancy has pleaded not guilty.
The children were killed, the prosecution has said, by ligature strangulation, in which Clancy would have had to hold the ligature, which police allege was an exercise band, in place for up to 5 minutes per child to cause death.
Authorities say that Clancy then attempted suicide by cutting herself in the master bedroom and then leaping from the window, a fall that has paralyzed her and relegated her to a wheelchair.
“In light of the extensive media coverage in this case,” Reddington wrote in his motion for a venue change in the trial, and “the prejudicial information contained in the media coverage … the unavoidable conclusion is that Lindsay Clancy cannot be given a fair trial in Plymouth County.”
Sprague disagrees with that assertion. Not only does she asset that media coverage has “not been highly prejudicial to the defendant,” but that Reddington spurred some of it by speaking to reporters at Plymouth District Court with one of his experts in the case, Dr. Paul Zeizel.
“The media coverage was extensive,” Sprague wrote, “and defense counsel pitched his version of the facts and his opinion of his client’s mental health to most, if not all, of the local television and print media.
“Defense counsel’s bid for a new venue because the public may have formed opinion based on media coverage seems disingenuous,” the prosecutor added, “after he himself courted the media at the inception of the case in an attempt to sway the public to his version of events.”
Reddington is pursuing an insanity defense. He has maintained that Clancy was emotionally unstable the evening of Jan. 24, 2023, when she allegedly strangled her three children.
Clancy had, at the time, been suffering from postpartum depression, Reddington has said.
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Tuesday morning at Plymouth Superior Court.
