Lawyers & Shameless Press Wage War on Justice in Lindsay Clancy Trial

Lawyers live under the burden of being assumed to be unethical. Donald Trump tends to label our “mainstream” press as “the enemy of the people.” While both judgments might be painting with too broad a brush, the behavior of Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington and Boston’s NBC News 10 employees have demonstrated why that brush is used so often. We just witnessed a major attack on the American jury system.

It was already apparent at the beginning of the trial of Lindsay Clancy that something deeply ugly and evil is dwelling in the psyche of much of the American left. While many women no doubt sympathize with Clancy, who was dealing with psychological problems when she brutally killed her three young children, the response went beyond sympathy to a kind of fandom.

Even if Clancy truly had no capacity to make decisions when she killed the children—a judgment many found doubtful, given the evidence of premeditation on her part—she ought not be treated as a hero.

Yet that is what happened. Liberal and leftist women began wearing pink hats in her honor, selling merchandise, and making TikTok videos about her. Many showed up outside the courtroom to cheer her on like a sports star. Some conspiratorially claimed it was really her ex-husband who killed the children or caused their death somehow. Juror Paula Devlin, who took interviews immediately after the mistrial was announced, called Clancy’s actions “altruistic filicide.”

Horrible stuff. Yet equally as grotesque was the response from left-wing activists to the mistrial. They were teed up by jurors speaking to the press and complaining about the one lone holdout – the one juror who refused to acquit Clancy of murdering her children when she admitted to doing so.

It is highly unusual for jurors to single out one member of the jury. It is even more unusual for their smears to be amplified by the defense’s lawyer, in this case Clancy’s counsel, Kevin Reddington, who had already revealed that the holdout was one of the three male jurors.

Reddington denounced the holdout juror to the press after the mistrial declaration, saying of the other eleven: “They 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 were so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful.” He added, “I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

Reddington’s strategy was obvious, even if it was destructive. Given that the state can still try Clancy again, Reddington was attempting to dissuade Massachusetts from attempting a second trial. He was also daring any potential future jurors to disagree with his defense. Critics noted immediately that Reddington’s action could expose the holdout juror in this trial to threats.

One might have thought the criticisms of Reddington might have cooled the impulses of others, but, sadly, they did not. Juror Paula Devlin shocked Gayle King by revealing that the holdout juror was a black male. The working assumption was that the “bad” juror was the arch nemesis of the modern left – one of the dreaded white males.

One young woke woman who identifies as a “non-practicing white” even lamented how the revelation that the holdout was black “changes the landscape of the conversation a little bit.” Though the juror list was supposed to be kept sealed until two weeks after the trial’s end, NBC 10 in Boston somehow found out who the holdout was and decided to track him down. Though they didn’t speak to him, they decided to publish reporter Ryan Kath’s article about his past, which included charges (but no conviction) of domestic violence, overdue rent, and hostile comments from his ex-wife and others.

As a face-saving measure, NBC 10 withheld the juror’s name, but their action was clearly aimed at intimidation and delegitimizing the mistrial result. When they posted Kath’s article on X, a Community Note was applied with a link to the relevant statute: “Massachusetts law prohibits anyone ‘to engage in an act directed at a [juror] that seriously alarms or annoys such person’ with a penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment.”

Given that several of the jurors had already publicly outed themselves, it was inevitable that there would be retaliation in the public arena. The New York Post revealed that juror Kellie Farina is a true crime fan who posted repeatedly on social media about the 2023 case of Karen Read, another Massachusetts woman who was accused of murdering her boyfriend.

Others have passed around a screenshot of a Massachusetts court docket for a 2002 assault and battery charge against one Kellie J. Farina. Is it the same woman? We don’t know, but the burden of the NBC 10 report is that the holdout juror might have lied on his juror questionnaire. We will now see a mad scramble to figure out if Farina was truthful on hers—and whether any other jurors have any skeletons.

This is a disaster for the justice system. Lawyers are involved in jury selection, and they have to deal with the jury chosen. If, after every outcome they don’t like, they can count on siccing a partisan media and the public on jurors who displeased them, we are going to see fewer and fewer people willing to do this important task.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis offered the holdout juror asylum in Florida. That’s all well and good, but the destructive behavior of Reddington and NBC 10 employees will poison Massachusetts and other states if their actions are not dealt with harshly and quickly. If Reddington and NBC 10 avoid consequences, we will see lawyers and media pushing the limits even further in a bid to intimidate current and potential jurors and corrupt the entire American justice system.

The late social theorist James Q. Wilson popularized the “broken windows” thesis of crime. When governments allow visible signs of low-level crime and antisocial behavior to stand, it encourages further and worse crimes. Clancy’s lawyer and NBC 10 just shattered a row of windows in the justice system. If they aren’t cleaned up, Americans can expect much, much worse.