Judge William Sullivan of Plymouth Superior Court on Thursday denied a motion from Lindsay Clancy's defense attorney seeking a not-guilty finding for lack of evidence, leaving the Massachusetts murder case on a path toward a possible retrial.
The ruling, first reported by the Washington Examiner and confirmed in dispatches from Reuters and CBS News, came nearly a month after Clancy's first trial ended with a deadlocked jury. Clancy, 36, is accused in the 2023 deaths of her three children.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington had filed what is known as a Rule 25 motion, arguing that prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy killed her children, Cora among them, according to the Gateway Pundit's account of the proceedings.
Sullivan rejected that argument. According to Fox News, the judge ruled that the evidence permitted a rational jury to find Clancy guilty of murder. The ruling moves the case one step closer to a potential retrial, ABC News reported.
The decision landed as a separate argument was unfolding online, one that has little to do with the legal filings in Plymouth Superior Court and everything to do with how a segment of the public is talking about the case.
Commentator Tim Pool, posting from the account @Timcast, pointed to what he described as a wave of Clancy supporters migrating to the case of Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman convicted in a 1995 torture killing. In a video accompanying his post, Pool laid out the argument he says is being made on Pike's behalf.
"She and her friends tricked this young woman to go out, apparently because she thought this young woman was trying to steal her boyfriend, mercilessly tortured her, and crushed her skull with a chunk of asphalt," Pool said. "And now, she is arguing, as many others online are, that in kinship, I'm not kidding, in kinship with Lindsay Clancy, she must be exonerated."
Pool continued: "You see, women can't be held responsible for their actions because of hormones and stuff. I'm not joking. They're arguing that we didn't know about trauma back then. We didn't understand what women were dealing with. I am not joking. This is the actual claim, that she planned it, premeditated torture and murder with conspirators. But, she's a woman, and you know, women don't think straight, I guess. That's the argument."
Pool anticipated the pushback his commentary would draw and addressed it directly on camera.
"A lot of people are going to be like, Tim, you're just being mean, you're insulting women," he said. "No, they are arguing that as a young woman, she couldn't be held accountable for her actions, because we're only just now learning about the trauma that women endure, like Lindsay Clancy. Lord, have mercy."
The posts carrying the story span the ideological spectrum, from the Washington Examiner and CBS News to Reuters and the Gateway Pundit. The Examiner's post simply stated that the judge in the Clancy murder trial rejected the defense's not-guilty bid.
The Gateway Pundit's first post carried the headline "Judge Denies Clancy Attorney's Motion to Find Lindsay Clancy Not Guilty for Lack of Evidence." Its second post added detail on the procedural history, noting that Reddington "argued in court that prosecutors failed to prove Lindsay Clancy killed her children, Cora," and that the motion was denied Thursday in Plymouth Superior Court.
CBS News reported that Sullivan denied the request from Clancy's attorney to find her not guilty of murder in the 2023 deaths of her three children following the mistrial last month.
Reuters framed the ruling as the judge denying a request to find Clancy not guilty after a mistrial. The Guardian, in its own coverage, noted that the request for Clancy, 36, to be acquitted was turned down nearly a month after the first trial ended with a deadlocked jury.
The Independent reported that Reddington tried to persuade Sullivan that prosecutors had not offered any proof that Clancy killed her three children. The ABC News account said Sullivan's ruling puts Clancy one step closer to a potential retrial.
Separately, Reddington has pushed back in a new interview on claims that he shifted strategy after the mistrial, according to coverage of his remarks.
What is not in dispute is the legal posture of the case: no verdict has been reached, the mistrial stands, and the question of Clancy's guilt or innocence remains unresolved in court. The defense motion that Sullivan rejected sought to end the case without a second trial. That effort failed.
What Pool and others are reacting to is the broader cultural argument they say has attached itself to the case, an argument that a defendant's status as a woman, combined with claims about trauma and hormones, should insulate her from accountability.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims being made about either case or the extent of the online campaign described.
For readers trying to follow the thread from the courtroom to the comment section, the sequence is straightforward. A jury deadlocked. A mistrial was declared. The defense moved to have the judge acquit Clancy outright. The judge said no. And online, a parallel argument took shape, one that Pool says treats the Clancy case and the Pike case as connected, and treats gender itself as a defense.
That argument has not been tested in a courtroom. It has only been made, loudly, by people who are not bound by rules of evidence.
Our Take
The judge's ruling is a rebuke to the idea that the state's case simply evaporates because a jury could not agree. Rule 25 motions are hard to win for a reason. If the evidence would let a rational jury convict, the case goes on. Sullivan said it would, and that is the correct call in a system built on letting juries, not judges, weigh the facts.
What deserves real scrutiny is the other development. A campaign is now underway to convert the Clancy case into a template, to argue that women accused of premeditated violence are not moral agents but symptoms, and that the proper response to trauma is acquittal. That is not compassion. That is a recipe for a two-tier justice system, one that punishes men for what they do and pities women for the same.
None of this settles the underlying facts of the Clancy case. That is what a retrial is for. But the debate that has attached itself to the case has already reached its verdict: accountability is optional if the right people are doing the arguing.
