Since Kevin Reddington asked the President to pardon Lindsay Clancy on national television, the question has spread faster than the answer. Could Donald Trump actually get her out?
The short answer is no, and it is not close. But “no” on its own is not useful, because people are proposing specific mechanisms and each one deserves a specific response. Here is every route that has been suggested, what happens to it, and the one channel that is real.
Route one: a presidential pardon
This is the one Reddington asked for. It fails on the constitutional text.
Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 gives the President power “to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Offenses against the United States means federal crimes.
The Supreme Court said so in terms a century ago. In Ex parte Grossman, 267 U.S. 87 (1925), the Court explained that the phrase was included “presumably to make clear that the pardon of the President was to operate upon offenses against the United States as distinguished from offenses against the states.”
That division is not an accident of drafting. It follows from the structure of American government, in which a state prosecutes crimes committed within it under its own law, and the federal executive has no supervisory role over that process. A President who could erase state convictions could nullify the criminal law of fifty states.
Lindsay Clancy is charged under Massachusetts law, indicted by a Plymouth County grand jury, and faces no federal charges. There is no federal offense in this case for a pardon to operate on.
Route two: a commutation instead
Same clause, same limit. A commutation is an exercise of the identical power, reducing a sentence rather than erasing a conviction. If the power does not reach state offenses for a pardon, it does not reach them for a commutation either.
There is also nothing to commute. Clancy has not been convicted and has not been sentenced. The trial ended in a mistrial on 4 September.
Route three: the Justice Department
The suggestion here is that federal prosecutors could somehow intervene. They cannot, because there is nothing for them to intervene in.
The Department of Justice prosecutes federal crimes. It has no authority to enter a state murder case, dismiss state indictments, or direct an elected district attorney in Massachusetts. Its civil rights division can prosecute officials who violate federal rights, which is a power to bring charges, not to release a state defendant.
A state prosecution belongs to the state. That is the whole design.
Route four: a federal court
This is the only genuinely federal path that exists, and it is not the President’s.
A person held under a state conviction can petition a federal court for habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254. The statute allows a federal court to hear an application “in behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court only on the ground that he is in custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.”
Three things make it unavailable here.
It requires custody pursuant to a state court judgment. There is no judgment, because there was no verdict. It requires a federal constitutional violation, not a disagreement with the outcome. And under § 2254(b)(1)(A) the applicant must first have “exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State,” which is years of appellate work.
Even where all of that is satisfied, the decision belongs to a federal judge. The President has no role in it whatsoever.
Route five: pressure the Governor
Clemency for a Massachusetts offense exists, but it belongs to Governor Maura Healey, acting with the advice and consent of the Governor’s Council, and the process runs through the parole board sitting as the Advisory Board of Pardons.
Two obstacles, one legal and one political.
The legal one is the same as before. Clemency operates on a conviction and the sentence that follows it. Clancy has neither.
The political one is that this is a Democratic governor and an elected Governor’s Council in Massachusetts, and a public request from this President is not obviously an asset in that room. A grant requires a recorded majority vote of the Council. It is difficult to construct a version of this where presidential endorsement moves those votes toward release.
The one channel that is real, and why it is running the wrong way
Strip out the mechanisms that do not exist and something does remain, but it is not a legal instrument. It is attention.
The only person who can end this case quickly is District Attorney Timothy Cruz, who decides whether to retry. That decision is discretionary. Discretionary decisions by elected officials are influenced by public opinion, and a President commands public opinion.
So the honest answer to “could Trump get her free” is: not by any exercise of his office, and only in the indirect sense that anyone with a large audience can make a prosecutor’s job harder or easier.
Which is where the theory runs into trouble, because that mechanism has already been tested twice this month and both tests went against the defence.
The President’s own comment. Asked about the case on 5 September, Trump did not sound like a man building a case for release:
“Look, she did a horrible, horrible thing. It can’t be worse. But, we will find out what the price to pay is. There will be a price. It’s going to be mental institution or jail or something.”
That is a call for confinement. If presidential attention is the mechanism, it has already pointed the other way.
The reaction to Reddington himself. The pardon request did not land in neutral territory. It landed into a week in which the defence lawyer had become the story.
After the jury was dismissed on Friday, Reddington said of the holdout juror: “They know 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.”
The response was hostile and it was not confined to anonymous accounts. There were calls on social media for professional discipline. More significantly, Jonathan Turley, the George Washington University law professor, published a column on 7 September titled “The Clancy Trial: When ‘Twelve Angry Men’ Becomes One Angry Man,” arguing that Reddington had gone out of his way to fuel anger against a single juror. Turley’s framing was that in the 1957 film, the juror attacked for wasting everyone’s time by refusing to yield to the majority turned out to be right, and that officers of the court should stand in the path of a mob rather than lead one.
Writing for JURIST, editorial director Ingrid Burke Friedman treated the underlying motion more sympathetically, noting the removal request was not frivolous and that Reddington had told the judge the juror “looked you in the eye, and lied.” But she also explained why Judge Sullivan refused it: Massachusetts confines juror removal to personal reasons unrelated to the case, and if a foreperson’s report that a dissenter was applying reasonable doubt incorrectly were sufficient, it would become impossible to distinguish misconduct from disagreement.
That distinction matters to the pardon question more than it looks. The public case for clemency rests on the idea that Lindsay Clancy is a sick woman who has suffered enough. The public argument her lawyer has actually been making all week is that one juror cheated her. Those are different arguments, and the second one has generated the louder response.
What would actually end the case
Three things could, and all of them are local.
Cruz could decide not to retry, and enter a nolle prosequi. Under G.L. c. 258B he would have to confer with the children’s father first, though he would not be bound by what he heard.
The parties could reach a negotiated resolution, which Reddington has now publicly asked for and which he already sought in writing in April, moving off first-degree murder to a charge carrying something other than life without parole.
Or a second jury could acquit her, or find her not criminally responsible, which on Reddington’s account eleven of the last twelve jurors were prepared to do.
None of those requires a President. All of them run through a courthouse in Plymouth County, and the next date there is later this month.