On Thursday morning, a 75-year-old sole practitioner from Brockton will stand up in Plymouth County Superior Court and have roughly thirty minutes to convince twelve people that Lindsay Clancy was not criminally responsible when she strangled her three children.
Kevin J. Reddington has been preparing for that half hour for fifty-one years.
He is, at the moment, the most-searched criminal defense attorney in America, the subject of TikTok compilations and “Better Call Kevin” merchandise, and the reason several hundred people in pink shirts gathered outside the courthouse on August 20 to cheer for him. Asked by the Boston Globe whether he had become the advocate for all women, he gave a two-word answer: “I’m not an advocate.”
This is a look at who he actually is, what he has done, and how he has run this defense.
Who is Kevin Reddington?
He was born in February 1951 and grew up in Stoughton. He graduated from Suffolk University Law School in 1975 and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar the same year, which means the Clancy trial falls in his fifty-first year of practice.
He has never been a prosecutor. Not for a year, not for a summer. He told NBC10 Boston he never wanted to be, and quoted the late Gerry Spence to explain it: “As Jerry Spence said, ‘I never sinned.’ Nope. Nope. I don’t have it in me to ever try to put somebody in jail.”
His office is at 1342 Belmont Street in Brockton, and the operation is smaller than the reputation suggests. He is a sole practitioner. His son Patrick works with him, along with a colleague of thirty-eight years, Laura Mather. During a hearing in this case he described the setup himself: “I am a sole practitioner. I’m it except for my son, Patrick, who helps me out getting coffee.”
The credentials are not small. In September 1996 he was elected a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an invitation-only body that caps membership at roughly one percent of trial lawyers in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. Boston Magazine named him the best criminal defense attorney in Massachusetts in 2002, based on asking hundreds of lawyers, judges and former clients a single question: if your brother were charged with a serious crime, who would you want representing him? Super Lawyers has listed him every year from 2004 through 2025.
The volume is what separates him. He had tried fifty murder cases by 1997. By 2011 the number was described as nearly a hundred homicide trials. By 2023 it was more than a hundred murder cases. He still takes roughly ten trials a year, and he told a hearing in this case that in the three months before the Clancy jury was empanelled he had tried a murder, a rape and two back-to-back federal cases.
What are Kevin Reddington’s most famous cases?
Therese Rogers (1989). A Bridgewater woman who drove knives into her sleeping boyfriend’s eyes. Reddington won an acquittal on what is generally described as the first successful battered-woman-syndrome defense in Massachusetts. During the trial he threw martial-arts stars across the Brockton courtroom to show the jury what his client had been living with. The marks stayed in the wall for decades. That verdict is what led to his election to the American College of Trial Lawyers.
Mo Vaughn (1998). The Red Sox first baseman, charged with drunk driving after his truck flipped leaving a nightclub. Reddington argued the failed field sobriety tests came from crash shock, a bad knee and off-season weight, not alcohol. Acquitted. He has called it the case that made his career, and he knew the stakes going in: “I said, ‘Jay, it’s Mo Vaughn. If I win, everybody’s going to go, who’s going to convict Mo Vaughn? If I lose, I’m the bum that lost Mo Vaughn’s case.'”
Michael “Mucko” McDermott (2002). Seven coworkers shot dead at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield. Reddington ran an insanity defense: McDermott believed he was killing Hitler and Nazi generals to prevent the Holocaust. The jury deliberated three days and convicted. Seven life sentences. This case matters more than any other for understanding the Clancy defense, and we come back to it below.
Catherine Greig (2012). Whitey Bulger’s longtime girlfriend, charged federally with harboring a fugitive and identity theft. She pleaded guilty and received eight years, more than the twenty-seven months Reddington argued for and less than the decade the government wanted. Forty to fifty cameras outside the federal courthouse, the biggest media crush of his career until this summer.
Jasiel Correia (2021). The former Fall River mayor, tried federally on twenty-four counts of fraud and extortion. Convicted on most of them, sentenced to six years. The relationship ended badly, and we address that below too.
Jack Callahan (2024). A nineteen-year-old from Duxbury who held his father’s head underwater at Island Creek Pond, telling police he was baptizing him to exorcise demons. Charged with murder. Reddington got it down to involuntary manslaughter. Another severe-mental-illness case, another substantial reduction, and it happened in the same town as the Clancy killings.
He has also represented a Catholic priest in a clergy-abuse prosecution, a retired Milton Academy instructor extradited from Thailand, a former New England Mafia boss, and a Cape Cod physician accused of shooting her husband, for whom he assembled years of spousal-abuse evidence and persuaded a grand jury not to indict at all.
Did Kevin Reddington represent Karen Read?
No. This question gets asked constantly, and the answer is a flat no. Reddington had no role in the Karen Read case, not as counsel and not as a commentator.
Read was represented at both trials by Alan Jackson and David Yannetti, with Elizabeth Little, and with Robert Alessi and Victoria George added for the retrial. Martin Weinberg handled the appeal. Her first trial ended in a hung jury in 2024; at her 2025 retrial she was acquitted of murder, manslaughter and leaving the scene, and convicted only of operating under the influence, drawing a year of probation.
The confusion is understandable. Two enormous Massachusetts trials, two defense lawyers who became household names. They are not the same lawyer and not the same case. Weinberg, Read’s appellate counsel, did comment on Reddington this month, telling USA Today that Clancy showed “sagacity to hire somebody with Kevin’s experience and comfort level in these kinds of homicide trials.”
Why Lindsay Clancy hired him
Because he has spent his career on exactly this problem.
The through-line in his practice is not celebrity clients or organized crime. It is defendants whose crimes were driven by severe mental illness: Rogers, Richard Shuman in the late 1990s, McDermott, Callahan. He has been arguing about psychosis and capacity in front of Massachusetts juries since the 1980s, in a state whose insanity standard, from Commonwealth v. McHoul, turns on substantial capacity rather than diagnosis. We explain that standard in how an insanity defense actually works in Massachusetts.
Peers describe an obsessive preparer. Boston defense lawyer Rosemary Scapicchio has said he has to “put his hand on every single piece of paper to get it in his head,” and will visit a client in a jail cell at eleven the night before trial. Former federal prosecutor Zachary Hafer, who opposed him for more than a decade: “It’s a combination of his preparation and his human touch. Reddington fights really hard for his clients, and he does that without alienating all the other people in the system.”
Judge Richard Savignano, who prosecuted cases against him in the early 1980s, put it this way: “Kevin is extremely bright. He is very sharp at thinking on his feet. Like most good trial lawyers, he’s very adept at turning a phrase and making a persuasive statement.”
The Globe’s description this month is shorter: “a hammer of a cross-examiner, a man who wears a suit and still somehow appears a bit rumpled.”
The Clancy defense strategy, reviewed
Start with what he gave away. Reddington has never disputed that Lindsay Clancy killed Cora, Dawson and Callan. There is no identity defense, no alternate suspect, no challenge to the cause of death. If jurors accept the defense, she is committed rather than released. Everything has been aimed at one element, and in Massachusetts it is the element the Commonwealth has to prove: that she was criminally responsible when she did it.
That choice shapes every decision that follows.
Before the jury was picked
He got the trial delayed from 2025 into July 2026, which bought time for psychiatric evaluation and, not incidentally, put more distance between the jury pool and the January 2023 headlines. He lost most of the rest. His motion to move the trial out of Plymouth County was denied. So was his request to split the trial into two phases, one on the killings and one on her mental state, which would have let jurors weigh her mind without first sitting through the deaths; Judge Sullivan found it would call the same witnesses twice for marginally different purposes. He lost a fight to put ordinary postpartum-psychosis survivors on the stand, and he lost most of his objections to the 911 call and the autopsy photographs, having dismissed one part of the forensic presentation as “voodoo forensics.”
One thing gets miscredited to him. The three strangulation counts that vanished eleven days before jury selection were dropped by the Commonwealth’s own filing, on the ground that they were redundant of the murder charges. That was not a defense win, and we explained what actually happened in this piece.
His most consequential move drew almost no coverage. On August 4, after a personal colloquy with Clancy in open court, Reddington stipulated away the entire forensic case: chain of custody, blood, fluids, DNA, the exercise bands. In his own words it “relieves the government of having to bring in dozens if not more witnesses.” Consider what that purchases in a trial where the killings are already conceded. It deletes days of technicians walking a jury through the physical evidence of three strangled children, and it drags the trial onto the only ground he can win on.
He also seeded the overmedication theme publicly in 2023, describing a client on a long list of psychiatric drugs. By the time a jury heard it in 2026, it was not a novel claim; it was the story that had been attached to the case for three years.
The opening
He did not open by minimizing. He opened by warning the jury how bad it was going to be: “In this case, God bless you. You people are gonna have to listen to some of the most horrific things, look at some of the most horrific things.”
Then he located his client inside the horror rather than outside it: “She’s living her own hell. She knows what happened with those kids.”
And he told them what he thought the case was about, framing it as “a referendum on women’s having babies and having postpartum psychosis, postpartum depression.” That is an unusually large frame for an opening statement, and it tells you he was speaking past the evidence to the jurors’ own experience of illness, families and mothers.
Cross-examination
His cross of Patrick Clancy is the clearest example of his method. He did not attack a grieving father, which would have cost him the room. He used him. By the end, Patrick had agreed that his wife was a devoted mother, that she was severely sleep-deprived and anxious, and that the family had been assured she was safe with the children. Every one of those concessions came from the prosecution’s own most sympathetic witness.
He went further than concessions. On July 29 he handed Patrick pill bottles from his wife’s nightstand and asked him to compare them with bottles police had seized from his car. Patrick clarified that the seized ones were discontinued prescriptions. “Without that context, it paints a different picture,” Reddington said, and Patrick agreed. The Commonwealth would not offer those bottles as evidence of non-compliance until August 4. He had defused the exhibit five days before it was introduced. He ran the same play on the laptop, getting Patrick to acknowledge that he himself had reached suicide-method content through a musician’s Wikipedia page, two weeks before the digital forensics witness took the stand.
His handling of the treating providers is the hardest technical work in the trial, and a large part of why the case is close. He never called any of them liars. Dr. Jennifer Tufts had been independently credentialed for roughly a month when she took Clancy on, saw her only in short telehealth visits, and never obtained her perinatal records. “Seriously? She’s visiting with you as a patient, and you can’t access her medical records?” A nurse practitioner who testified she saw no signs of psychosis had seen Clancy three times. Clancy had called a suicide hotline twice and been turned away, and Tufts conceded she never asked about it. The argument is not that these clinicians lied about what they saw. It is that none of them had the access, the records, the minutes, or the experience to have seen it.
The “can you treat a sociopath” search got the same treatment. He never disputed it. He buried it, walking jurors through the searches surrounding it from those same weeks: psychosis, hallucinations, bipolar, schizophrenia, intrusive thoughts, benzodiazepine withdrawal, and a drug-by-drug tour of her own prescriptions. A woman researching her own mind rather than selecting a target. Then he established that neither examiner could say who had been at the keyboard. Our breakdown of where the six experts actually diverge covers the psychiatric split in full.
Against the Commonwealth’s retained experts he attacked foundations. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun conceded roughly $54,000 in billing across about 180 hours, no publications on postpartum psychosis, and that he had last treated such a patient in 1982. He also conceded that Clancy was “trying hard to get help,” that she had been refused admission, and that she was “a very good mother.” That last concession set up the question Reddington wanted left hanging: “She then randomly decides to kill her children by strangling them. Those are the facts we’re dealing with?”
The style has drawn criticism. Reddit threads during the trial accused him of hovering over and demeaning prosecution experts, and the Globe quoted that criticism directly. Jurors are the only audience that matters, and nobody outside the box knows how it is landing.
The order of the defense case
The defense ran from August 17 to August 21, and the sequence was deliberate.
Family came first. Clancy’s mother, Paula Musgrove, testified about the December 2022 conversation in which her daughter disclosed thoughts of harming the children and said, “This isn’t me. I just want to feel better and enjoy my kids again.” Her sister testified. So did her former mother-in-law. That is a month of documented warning delivered by people with no professional stake, before any expert took the stand.
Then the chaplain from Brigham and Women’s, Sheila Cavanaugh, who visited Clancy roughly two hundred times and described a persistent male voice. Then Dr. Paul Zeizel, a forensic psychologist who met with her about sixty times and told jurors that psychosis comes and goes like “waves at the beach,” that she believed strangers could hear her thoughts, and that testing showed no sign of faking.
He saved Dr. Phillip Resnick for last, on August 21, and rested immediately after. Resnick evaluated Andrea Yates. He examined Clancy at Tewksbury State Hospital and told the jury she suffered postpartum psychosis with command hallucinations, that she felt her body had been taken over by an external force, and that she was frankly psychotic and not criminally responsible. Ending on your strongest witness and sitting down is old-fashioned trial craft, and it left Resnick’s testimony as the last thing jurors heard from the defense.
The rebuttal fight and the mistrial motion
The Commonwealth answered with three experts, and on August 24 Reddington got something he can use either way.
Heilbrun testified about asking Clancy whether suicide was a mortal sin and about her belief that she and her children would be together in heaven. It was the second time the prosecution’s questioning had put Clancy’s Catholic faith in front of the jury; earlier, a prosecutor had asked her former mother-in-law whether she was aware that murder is considered a mortal sin, drawing audible reaction in the courtroom.
Reddington moved for a mistrial with prejudice, alleging intentional misconduct. Judge William Sullivan denied it, struck the testimony, called it an absolutely inappropriate area of testimony and reprimanded the prosecution in strong terms.
Read that as a two-track play. If the jury acquits, none of it matters. If it convicts, a first-degree murder conviction goes automatically to the Supreme Judicial Court under G.L. c. 278, § 33E for full review of the whole case, and a preserved mistrial motion over prosecutorial conduct that the trial judge himself called inappropriate is exactly the kind of issue that review exists to examine. We explain that appellate posture in what happens if Lindsay Clancy is found guilty.
Where the defense is exposed
Two soft spots, and both were made by the Commonwealth rather than conceded by him. Cavanaugh was his best corroborator who was never paid a fee, and on cross she agreed that across roughly two hundred visits she never once wrote down that Clancy told her she heard a voice. And every account of the commanding voice reaches this jury through forensic interviews conducted well after the fact, not through anything written down in January 2023. Dr. Gregory Saathoff’s line that “committing the act is not curative of the voice” is the sharpest expression of that problem, and cross did not visibly blunt it. He also asked Judge Sullivan for an involuntary manslaughter instruction built on involuntary intoxication by over-prescription, which is a different theory from command hallucination. Running both gives jurors two doors, and it also gives them a reason to wonder which one he believes.
His actual record on insanity defenses
Here is the part most coverage skips, and Clancy’s jury will never hear it.
Reddington’s history with mental-illness defenses is genuinely mixed, and the mix is instructive. He won an outright acquittal for Therese Rogers in 1989. He lost McDermott in 2002, where seven people were dead, the psychotic content was florid and public, and the jury convicted anyway after three days. He got Jack Callahan’s murder charge reduced to involuntary manslaughter in 2024. Richard Shuman was convicted in the late 1990s despite an early psychiatric evaluation Reddington engineered on the night of the arrest.
The pattern is not that he wins these. It is that juries in Massachusetts rarely return a flat not-guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility in a case with multiple victims and a lot of dead children or coworkers, no matter how good the lawyer or how real the illness. McDermott is the closest analogue to Clancy in his own career, and McDermott lost.
What the record does show is a lawyer who repeatedly moves cases down: murder to manslaughter, indictment to no indictment, a decade to eight years. In a first-degree murder trial the lesser included offense of second-degree murder carries life with parole eligibility after fifteen to twenty-five years instead of life without parole. That is not the verdict he is asking for on Thursday. It is the one his career suggests is most reachable, and we weigh all of the outcomes in will Lindsay Clancy be found guilty or not guilty.
The criticism
A profile that only quoted his admirers would not be worth reading.
In 2024, Jasiel Correia, acting for himself from federal prison, filed a motion attaching text messages he said showed Reddington pressuring him for money, including messages about a fee that “would normally be $250K” and about negotiating for a percentage of Correia’s company. Correia alleged extortion and ineffective assistance of counsel.
Reddington denied misconduct. His explanation was that he took the case in 2018 as a contained investor-fraud matter at a set fee, and that a superseding indictment turned it into a sprawling public-corruption prosecution requiring a renegotiated fee: “It’s almost like a client coming to me in a drunk driving case with an auto accident, and I charge them a certain amount of dollars. Then six months down the road, they charge them with motor vehicle homicide. It’s a totally different case.”
Context matters on both sides. Correia had fired him after trial and hired new appellate counsel, and that appeal did not raise ineffective assistance of counsel. The motions were denied, and no disciplinary proceeding arising from the allegations has been reported. We found no public record of bar discipline against Reddington, though the Board of Bar Overseers database is not searchable in a way that allows us to state that categorically.
What happens Thursday
Closing arguments are expected Thursday, with roughly thirty minutes per side. In Massachusetts the defense closes first, so Reddington speaks knowing the Commonwealth gets the last word before Judge Sullivan instructs the jury on the McHoul standard and on the burden the prosecution carries to prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
Thirty minutes, after fifty-one years. We break down what each side is expected to argue in this preview, and our trial timeline tracks the case as it moves. If you want to follow a Massachusetts case yourself, our guide to looking up a court case on masscourts walks through it.
Common questions about Kevin Reddington
Who is Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer?
Kevin J. Reddington, a criminal defense attorney based in Brockton, Massachusetts, who has practiced since 1975 and has handled more than a hundred murder cases.
How old is Kevin Reddington?
He is 75, born in February 1951.
Where did Kevin Reddington go to law school?
Suffolk University Law School, class of 1975. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar the same year.
Did Kevin Reddington represent Karen Read?
No. Karen Read was represented by Alan Jackson and David Yannetti, with Martin Weinberg handling her appeal. Reddington had no role in that case.
What are Kevin Reddington’s most famous cases?
The Therese Rogers battered-woman-syndrome acquittal in 1989, Mo Vaughn’s 1998 drunk driving acquittal, the Michael McDermott workplace shooting trial in 2002, Catherine Greig’s federal case as Whitey Bulger’s girlfriend, the Jasiel Correia public corruption trial, and now Lindsay Clancy.
Was Kevin Reddington ever a prosecutor?
No. He has been a defense lawyer for his entire career and has said he never wanted to prosecute.
Where is Kevin Reddington’s office?
Brockton, Massachusetts, on Belmont Street. He practices as a sole practitioner alongside his son Patrick and a longtime colleague.
Accurate as of Wednesday, August 26, 2026. This article will be updated after closing arguments and the verdict.