Kevin Reddington tapped his client’s hand, stood up, and began speaking so quietly that reporters in the gallery noted it.
That is how the defense closing began Thursday morning in Plymouth County Superior Court, in a courtroom where every seat was taken and an overflow room was running. Each side has one hour. When both are finished, Judge William Sullivan completes his instructions and twelve people begin deciding whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible when she killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
What follows is what was argued, and why it was argued that way.
The Commonwealth closed on an image
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague finished shortly before noon, and the last sentence she gave the jury was this:
“She left them in the basement like broken toys, because she was done playing with them.”
"She left them in the basement like broken toys, because she was done playing with them."
Sprague finishes
— Lauren Conlin (@conlin_lauren) August 27, 2026
It is a brutal line, and it is a deliberate one. Reddington spent his hour trying to make the killings inexplicable by any ordinary motive, because inexplicable is where an insanity defense lives. Sprague’s closing image does the opposite work in nine words. It supplies a motive, an ugly one, and it invites the jury to stop searching for a psychiatric explanation.
How she answered the defense, point for point
What made the Commonwealth’s closing effective was that it tracked Reddington’s almost line by line.
He said it was the medicine and the care. She told jurors this was not a woman suffering from a lack of care or a lack of resources, that Clancy had all of that and more, and that the treatment questions, while important, were distractions from what was actually on trial. She argued Clancy did not take the medication as prescribed, pointing to leftover pills, and that as a labor and delivery nurse she knew better but wanted to manage it on her own terms.
He used the journals to show a mind coming apart. She used the same journals to argue the meticulous entries simply stopped on January 18, from a woman who had been tracking everything, and read that as someone who stopped trying.
He said she looked up the distances because she wanted her husband home. Sprague’s answer was the sharpest inversion of the day: she knew it was wrong, Sprague argued, because she sent Patrick out so she could do it.
He built on the command voice. Sprague went at the inconsistencies, contrasting the versions Clancy gave the hospital chaplain with the versions she gave the forensic examiners, and drew the jury’s attention to the order of the killings. Dawson first, she said, because Clancy knew he might struggle.
Then the question she left hanging, which is aimed squarely at the heart of the defense: if you are killing yourself because of a compulsion, why would you not kill yourself the same way you killed the children?
"She didn't expect to face the consquences, she expected to die."
Sprague says the order in which she strangled the children was deliberate and rational.
She brings up Lindsay's facebook post about Dawson, and strangling him first, because "she knew he might struggle."
Sprague…
— Lauren Conlin (@conlin_lauren) August 27, 2026
The argument underneath the images
Strip out the rhetoric and Sprague made a narrow legal argument, which is the correct one for her to make.
She did not tell the jury Lindsay Clancy was well. She conceded depression and mental illness, and then argued it did not negate responsibility, framing the question as whether Clancy knew the difference between right and wrong and could conform her behavior to the requirements of the law.
Her strongest evidence for that was not psychiatric at all. It was that Clancy told her husband and her mother about thoughts of harming the children and did not tell her providers, which Sprague characterized as a rational calculation to keep her children from being taken. A person who manages what she discloses, the argument runs, understands what she is disclosing.
She closed the sequence with intent: Clancy did not expect to face the consequences, Sprague said, because she expected to die. And on motive, she declined to soften it. It was her choice. A horrible choice. But the choice she made.
What that leaves for the jury
Both sides have now argued the same evidence to opposite conclusions, which is the honest state of this case. Six experts, none of whom said she was well. A set of facts nobody disputes. And a legal standard that asks about capacity rather than illness.
The jury has four options in writing: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
What has not happened yet: Judge Sullivan has not delivered his final charge, the jury has not received the case, and there are no notes and no verdict. Clancy cried through the descriptions of the stranglings. Reporters watching the box described jurors as intently focused, one older juror looking down and closing her eyes during the description of Dawson.
The verdict slip, answered
The open question in this trial has been which verdicts the jury would actually be permitted to return. Judge Sullivan settled it before closings, and he gave the defense the option it asked for.
Jurors may convict of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or involuntary manslaughter, or find her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. They have the instructions in writing.
The manslaughter option is a real defense win, and it is worth being precise about why. Reddington sought it on an involuntary intoxication theory: that the psychiatric medications Clancy was prescribed produced the state she was in. Prosecutors opposed it. Its presence on the slip gives a juror who cannot accept an outright acquittal, but who also cannot call this murder, somewhere to go. In a case where the only genuine dispute is a state of mind, every additional door in that room is a place a divided jury can converge rather than hang.
How Reddington finished
He closed on the burden, and he closed on a warning.
Watch the evidence, he told them. Watch the manipulation.
Then the point he needed to land more than any other: Lindsay Clancy does not have to defend or prove anything. The burden belongs to the Commonwealth, to prove the elements of the crimes and to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible.
That is the last thing the defense said to this jury, and it is the correct instinct. Everything else in his hour was in service of that sentence.
The back half of the argument
Between the family photographs and the ending, Reddington did the technical work.
He walked the experts one at a time, and his framing was not that his experts were right and theirs were wrong. It was that every one of them, including the Commonwealth’s, acknowledged serious mental disease or defect. He rested on Dr. Phillip Resnick’s conclusion that she was psychotic, noted that Dr. Kirk Heilbrun had conceded an altered state, and told jurors not to rely on Dr. Avram Mack.
He answered the hired-gun problem directly rather than hoping it would not come up. Chaplain Sheila Cavanaugh was not retained by anyone. Dr. Paul Zeizel, he said, was contacted out of humanity, while Clancy lay intubated and chained.
He used her own journals as a clock. In September she was tracking her medications in careful detail. By January the entries had become chicken scratch. Her mind was gone, he told them. It is the most effective kind of evidence in a case like this, because it is not an opinion purchased from an expert; it is a woman’s handwriting deteriorating on the page.
He inventoried the failures. Two calls to a suicide hotline, both turned away. Hospitals. Providers. Then the question he left hanging: what does she have to do?
And he went at the errand theory, which is the spine of the prosecution’s case. Prosecutors say Clancy engineered a window by sending her husband on a longer trip. Reddington’s account is the inverse: she looked up the distance to the restaurant and the pharmacy because she wanted him home, and quickly, because she was in distress. He put Apple Watch timestamps in front of the jury, 5:33 and 5:38, to argue she was not trying to buy herself time at all.
Whether twelve people accept that reading of the same text message is close to the whole case.
What the Commonwealth had to answer
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague began immediately after Reddington sat down, and her opening move was to try to shrink the case back down.
What is on trial here, she told jurors, is what Lindsay Clancy did. Arguments about the mental health system and about how women are treated are, in her framing, designed to make them angry and passionate about something that is not the question in front of them.
Then she went at the physical facts. She described Clancy standing over her children and continuing to strangle each one for minutes after they were unconscious, to be certain. She walked through the timing to argue the killings began almost immediately after Patrick left, and that the children were already dead when he called.
She used the same journals Reddington used, for the opposite purpose: the detailed entries stop abruptly on January 18, and from someone that meticulous, she argued, it reads as someone who stopped trying. She pointed to a museum video in which Clancy looks unremarkable, saying you would not pick her out as a depressed mother. She noted the socializing from September through December. And she argued that Clancy controlled what she disclosed to her providers, which is a claim about capacity rather than illness: a person who manages what she reveals knows what she is revealing, and had a rational fear that her children would be taken.
Clancy cried during the description of the exercise bands.
Jurors have been stoic through both arguments. Reporters watching them noted that nobody has been taking notes during closings, and that a few quiet laughs surfaced at Reddington’s asides.
What is left
Sprague finishes, Sullivan completes his charge, and the jury goes out. There is no clock on what happens after that.
The defense went first, and went quiet
In Massachusetts the defense closes before the prosecution. Reddington therefore had to make his case knowing the Commonwealth would get the last word, and knowing he could not answer whatever came after him.
He opened by thanking the jurors and calling the evidence some of the toughest and most gut-wrenching a person can be asked to consider. Then he did the thing that has defined this defense from the opening statement: he refused to argue around the children.
Cora, Dawson, and Callan have not been forgotten, he told the jury. Clancy cried. He put up a post in which she had called Dawson her prince, and she cried again.
Lindsay continues to cry as Reddington shows a post of Dawson where she calls him her “prince”
— Sue O'Connell: COMMENTATOR, not a reporter (@SueOC_NBCBoston) August 27, 2026
The strategic logic there is worth spelling out, because it runs against instinct. A defense lawyer whose client killed three children has an obvious temptation to keep the children abstract and talk instead about diagnoses and burdens. Reddington did the opposite. He made the jury look at them, in the same room as the woman who is asking to be found not criminally responsible, because his entire theory requires those two facts to sit together. If the jury concludes she loved them, the killings become inexplicable by ordinary motive. Inexplicable is where his case lives.
The line he wants them to carry into the room
Holding a photograph of the Clancy family, he said this is a prosecution that has ripped the soul out of this girl. Then he held up a photograph of Lindsay in the hospital and asked how one turns into the other.
His answer, delivered flatly: it was the damn medicine and lousy care she got.
That sentence is the whole defense compressed. Not that she is blameless, not that nothing happened, but that a specific, documentable failure of psychiatric treatment produced the state she was in. It lets a juror hold on to the horror of what happened and still find that the woman who did it was not in command of herself. It also gives that juror somewhere else to put the blame, which is a real feature and not a small one, because jurors resist verdicts that seem to say nobody is responsible for three dead children.
The instruction he actually needs
Somewhere in the middle of the emotional material, Reddington did the legally decisive thing. He stated the burden.
As one attorney watching in the courtroom rendered it, he told jurors the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any mental disease or defect that may have existed did not deprive the defendant of her ability to behave as the law requires. And then that the Commonwealth has definitely not proved this beyond a reasonable doubt.
Read that carefully, because it is the single most important sentence spoken in this trial today.
Clancy has never had to prove she was insane. Once the defense fairly raised lack of criminal responsibility, the obligation flipped, and the Commonwealth took on the job of proving she was responsible, to the same standard it must meet on every other element. Most jurors walk in assuming the reverse. If Reddington gets twelve people to genuinely internalize the actual allocation, a juror who finds the six experts evenly matched has not reached a tie. That juror has reached reasonable doubt.
Notice also which prong he emphasized. Not whether she appreciated that killing was wrong, which is the ground the Commonwealth’s experts have occupied all trial, but her ability to behave as the law requires. That is the second prong of the standard from Commonwealth v. McHoul, and it is an independent route to the same verdict. A juror who believes she knew it was illegal can still acquit on capacity to conform. Reddington is steering toward the door the prosecution has spent five weeks not guarding.
🚨 Lindsay Clancy update:
Judge Sullivan ruled Reddington CAN argue gaps in the police investigation during closing.
But he DENIED a formal Bowden instruction.
So Reddington can question the investigation, but the judge will NOT specifically tell jurors they can consider those…
— Gen Just Law (@genjustlaw) August 27, 2026
A ruling most coverage will miss
Before closings, Sullivan ruled that Reddington may argue gaps in the police investigation, but declined to give a formal instruction on the point.
That is a Bowden question, and it has a specific meaning in Massachusetts practice. A defendant is entitled to argue that law enforcement’s failure to investigate adequately leaves the jury with reasonable doubt. A judge, however, is not required to instruct the jury separately on it. Sullivan split it the conventional way: argue it all you like, but the jury will hear nothing from the bench directing them to weigh it.
Practically, that means anything Reddington says about what investigators failed to do arrives as advocacy rather than as law. It is a modest loss, and it is exactly the kind of ruling that shows up later in an appellate brief if the verdict goes against him.
"CW must prove, beyond a reasonable doubts that, any mental disease or defect that may have existed, did not deprive the defendant of her ability to behave as the law requires"
Commonwealth has definitely NOT proved this beyond a reasonable doubt in the Lindsay Clancy trial. pic.twitter.com/M1j7kYvsjo
— Gen Just Law (@genjustlaw) August 27, 2026
What the Commonwealth has to do next
Before Sprague stood up, this was the task in front of her. Their task is narrower than it looks, and the shape of it is already visible from the evidence they built.
They will not argue Clancy was well. They have never argued that, and three of their own experts conceded serious mental illness. Dr. Avram Mack described her as in a serious psychiatric state and suffering. What they will argue is that illness and capacity are different questions, and that Massachusetts law asks only the second.
The material is there. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun’s line that she retained an awareness of the illegality of killing her children. Dr. Gregory Saathoff’s enumeration of the decisions she made in sequence, and his observation that the commanding voice never told her where, how, with what, or in what order, yet she managed all of it anyway. The 5:15 text extending her husband’s errand. The searches four days earlier. The chaplain who met with Clancy more than two hundred times and never once wrote down that she had described a voice.
Expect Heilbrun’s alternative story to carry the close: a profoundly depressed and suicidal woman who decided to die and could not bear to leave her children behind. That framing is sympathetic on its face, which is precisely why it is effective. It invites the jury to accept every bit of her suffering and convict anyway.
And they speak last. Whatever Reddington built this morning, prosecutors get to answer it with no reply available.
The realistic outcomes
Four endings are genuinely available, and they are not equally likely.
First-degree murder requires all twelve to find premeditation and criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. It carries mandatory life without parole and automatic Supreme Judicial Court review. The obstacle is that a juror must be certain enough about the mind of a woman who was hospitalized weeks earlier, cycling through roughly ten medications, and who told her mother in December she was having thoughts of harming her children.
Second-degree murder is the traditional landing place for a jury that accepts an intentional killing but cannot get to premeditation, or that simply cannot agree on the top count. Life with parole eligibility, minimum set between fifteen and twenty-five years. In a case this psychologically muddled, it is the compromise that lets a divided room converge.
Not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility requires unanimity that the Commonwealth fell short on capacity. It does not send her home; it begins civil commitment that can run decades. Massachusetts juries are told that, which removes the fear that usually suppresses this verdict.
A hung jury may be the most underrated outcome on the board. Six experts contradicting each other, an unfamiliar legal standard, a burden that runs backward from intuition, and three separate counts requiring unanimity on each. Andrea Yates was convicted at her first trial and acquitted at her second on substantially the same evidence.
Involuntary manslaughter is on the verdict slip. Reddington sought it on an involuntary intoxication theory built on the medications, prosecutors opposed it, and Judge Sullivan included it. Every additional option is another place a fractured jury can land, and in a case where the only dispute is a state of mind, the number of doors in that room may matter more than anything either lawyer says today.
We mapped where each verdict leads in what a guilty verdict would mean and what happens if she is found not criminally responsible, and weighed the evidence both directions in this analysis.
What happens after the arguments
Sullivan began instructing on the law before closings and will finish afterward. He will define criminal responsibility under McHoul, state the Commonwealth’s burden, and read the verdict slip. Deliberations follow, today or tomorrow, and run as long as they run.
There is no clock, and verdicts arrive with almost no warning. A note goes out, the parties are called, and everyone reassembles inside an hour. Notes asking for testimony to be read back or instructions repeated generally signal a jury working carefully rather than one about to return.
Our running timeline is updated as this moves, and the full five-week account is here.
Common questions
Who gives closing arguments first in Massachusetts?
The defense. The prosecution argues last, which is the reverse of the order most people expect.
How long are closing arguments in the Clancy trial?
Each side was allotted roughly one hour.
What did Kevin Reddington argue?
That failures of psychiatric care and medication produced Clancy’s state, and that the Commonwealth has not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that her mental disease or defect left her able to behave as the law requires.
Does Lindsay Clancy have to prove she was insane?
No. Once the defense raised lack of criminal responsibility, the Commonwealth carries the burden of proving she was criminally responsible beyond a reasonable doubt.
When will the jury start deliberating?
After both closings and the completion of the judge’s instructions, expected Thursday or Friday.
Can the jury convict of something less than murder?
Yes. The jury may return first-degree murder, second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, or not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
Reporting from live courtroom coverage as of Thursday morning, August 27, 2026. This article will be updated as the Commonwealth delivers its closing and the case reaches the jury.