Kevin Reddington has been trying cases in Massachusetts since 1975. Press accounts credit him with more than a hundred murder trials. He is 75, works out of a Brockton office decorated with skulls, swords, and framed newspaper accounts of his own trials, and his car carries the vanity plate NG.
Here is what the record actually shows, including three famous cases he is routinely and wrongly said to have handled.
The acquittal that made his name
In 1989 he defended Therese Rogers, a 33-year-old Bridgewater woman charged with murdering her boyfriend by driving knives into his eyes while he slept.
Reddington did not dispute that she killed him. He argued battered woman’s syndrome as temporary insanity, and she was acquitted. It is reported as the first successful use of that defense in Massachusetts.
The trial produced the story that follows him around: to demonstrate the lethality of martial arts weapons, he threw metal stars across a Brockton Superior Court courtroom. The marks are said to still be in the wall.
He was elected a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers on September 1, 1996, a credential we verified against the College’s own directory rather than a profile page.
The wins
Dr. Ingolf Tuerk (2025). A Dover urologist and former chief of urology at St. Elizabeth’s, charged with first-degree murder in the 2020 strangulation of his wife. The jury acquitted him of murder and convicted him of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced in May 2025 to 12 to 16 years.
Dr. Ann Marie Gryboski (2007). A Cape Cod physician who shot and killed her husband. Reddington built a domestic abuse record before the case reached indictment, and the grand jury declined to indict. Not a trial win, but a complete one.
Mo Vaughn (1998). The Red Sox first baseman, charged with operating under the influence after a rollover crash. Acquitted.
Matthew Potter (2021). Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, but acquitted of two sexual assault counts and one assault count.
The losses, and the clients people remember
A defense lawyer who takes the cases nobody wants loses in public. His do.
Michael McDermott, who killed seven coworkers at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000. Reddington ran an insanity defense. The jury rejected it.
Jasiel Correia II, the former mayor of Fall River, convicted in 2021 on 21 of 24 federal counts of extortion, wire fraud, and tax fraud.
Catherine Greig, James “Whitey” Bulger’s longtime girlfriend. Reddington was retained in June 2011 after the Santa Monica arrest. She pleaded guilty to harboring a fugitive and identity theft and received eight years.
Frank Salemme, the New England Mafia boss, in 2008. On that kind of client Reddington has been blunt: “Some of my favorite clients have been those considered associates of organized crime.”
Reverend Ronald Paquin, who in 2002 became the first Boston archdiocese priest to plead guilty to child sexual assault charges.
Richard Shuman, convicted of murdering two business associates. Katherine Dickson, who pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder in a 1992 Pembroke double killing. Reynold Buono, a former Milton Academy teacher who pleaded guilty in 2022 to child rape.
And Lindsay Clancy, whose trial ended in a mistrial on September 4, 2026 after seven days of deliberation.
Three cases he did not have
These circulate constantly. All three are wrong.
Aaron Hernandez. He did not represent Hernandez, and we found no evidence he represented any Hernandez codefendant. His name appears in that coverage only as an outside commentator, quoted about the trial judge because he had tried murder cases in front of her.
Philip Markoff, the “Craigslist Killer.” No connection in any source.
Gary Lee Sampson. This one is backwards in an important way. Reddington was not Sampson’s lawyer. He represented a Sampson victim’s family, suing the FBI.
Sampson called the FBI’s Boston office on July 23, 2001 to surrender. An employee disconnected the call and never reported it. Sampson murdered Philip McCloskey the next day and two more people before his arrest. Reddington brought the estate’s case against the Bureau and its director.
He lost. The First Circuit affirmed dismissal in 2006, writing that there was “no principled way that the frontiers of tort law can be expanded to encompass the theory of liability that the co-administrators have premised on these horrific facts,” while adding that it did not “place our imprimatur upon Anderson’s failures.”
What 37 appellate opinions show
We pulled every published opinion bearing his name from the CourtListener database. There are 37, spanning 1977 to 2018.
The composition:
- 32 criminal, 5 civil.
- 21 state, 16 federal. Thirteen Supreme Judicial Court, eight Appeals Court, eleven federal district, five First Circuit.
- He appears for the government in none of them. Across half a century of published opinions he is always on the defense, petitioner, or plaintiff side.
His clearest appellate wins:
Commonwealth v. Parker, 402 Mass. 333 (1988). A first-degree murder and unarmed robbery conviction reversed outright, verdicts set aside, new trial ordered.
Commonwealth v. Mazzone, 55 Mass. App. Ct. 345 (2002). Child rape and indecent assault convictions reversed in full, the court holding that “while each error in isolation might not have required reversal,” the cumulative errors “fatally infected the judgment of conviction.”
Commonwealth v. Lourenco, 438 Mass. 1018 (2003). An attempted kidnapping conviction reversed and the finding set aside.
We verified dispositions in 21 of the 37 and could not retrieve the other 16, so we are not publishing a win-loss record. Anyone who gives you one from this data set is guessing.
The criticism nobody has reported
Four appellate opinions contain pointed judicial criticism of his written work. None has appeared in any profile of him, and in fairness two are close to forty years old.
The harshest is Commonwealth v. Lawrence, 404 Mass. 378 (1989):
“His brief offers little support for this comprehensive attack on the proceedings below. The brief misconstrues the evidence, ignores or misapplies recent precedent of this court, and makes generalized claims of error where specific claims are required. In short, it would appear that the brief is a ‘cut and paste’ creation constructed primarily from materials prepared for proceedings below. It does not meet the standards of this court.”
In Commonwealth v. Feroli, 407 Mass. 405 (1990), the court wrote that his claims were “so lacking in merit that no further discussion is required.” In Commonwealth v. Chamberlin the court described a “somewhat diffuse argument” and said it was “surprised that this argument has been advanced.”
The most recent is federal. In United States v. Zimny, 873 F.3d 38 (2017), the First Circuit endorsed a district judge’s criticism of his handling of a scheduling conflict. Reddington had taken on a two-week Massachusetts murder trial that overlapped his client’s federal fraud trial, returned on day six, and questioned only four of the seventeen witnesses who testified afterward. The panel wrote that he “did not seek to invoke Local Rule 40.2(d), which clearly has been adopted to reasonably resolve scheduling conflicts,” and “was slow to seek involvement from the district court.”
That was a ruling about scheduling and motion practice, reviewed for abuse of discretion. It was not a finding of ineffective assistance, and that issue was not before the court.
The record also runs the other way. In Commonwealth v. Mendes, 441 Mass. 459 (2004), the SJC credited his tactical judgment, noting defense counsel “understandably did not object, and reasonably may have concluded that it would have been better to let the jury hear about the single prior episode of domestic abuse.”
The lawyer
Boston College in 1972, Suffolk University Law School in 1975, admitted to the Massachusetts bar the same year. He practiced as a partner in Kelly and Reddington from 1975 to 1991, which the court record confirms: his name appears alongside Robert W. Kelley’s in opinions from 1977 and 1978.
He has been a sole practitioner since, at 1342 Belmont Street in Brockton, assisted by his son Patrick, who has appeared as lead counsel above him in at least one Appeals Court case.
Boston Magazine named him the state’s best criminal defense attorney in 2002. He has been listed in Super Lawyers for Massachusetts criminal defense every year since 2004.
The “more than a hundred murder cases” figure comes from press profiles rather than from him. His firm’s website publishes no biography and no case results at all.
Common questions
Who is Kevin Reddington?
A Massachusetts criminal defense attorney practicing since 1975, based in Brockton, currently representing Lindsay Clancy. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, elected in 1996, and press accounts credit him with more than a hundred murder trials.
Did Kevin Reddington represent Aaron Hernandez?
No. He did not represent Hernandez or any codefendant. He appeared in that coverage only as an outside commentator quoted about the trial judge.
Was he Gary Lee Sampson’s lawyer?
No, the opposite. He represented the estate of one of Sampson’s victims in a civil suit against the FBI over a missed surrender call. The suit was dismissed and the First Circuit affirmed in 2006.
What is his most famous win?
The 1989 acquittal of Therese Rogers, reported as the first successful use of battered woman’s syndrome as a defense in Massachusetts. More recently he won an acquittal on first-degree murder for Dr. Ingolf Tuerk in 2025, whose jury convicted on voluntary manslaughter instead.
How long has he been practicing?
Admitted in 1975, so roughly 51 years. His own firm website says “over 40,” which understates it.
Appellate case data compiled from the CourtListener database of published opinions; dispositions verified in 21 of 37 cases. Judicial quotations taken verbatim from the opinions cited. Fellowship date verified against the American College of Trial Lawyers directory. Career and client details as reported by the Boston Globe, the Patriot Ledger and Enterprise, the ABA Journal, WGBH, NBC Boston, Boston.com, and People, 1998 through 2026. Charges against Lindsay Clancy are unproven and she is presumed innocent. General information, not legal advice.