Lindsay Clancy After the Mistrial: Three Motions, Zero Rulings, No Trial Date

Three children are dead. Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy died in their home in Duxbury on the evening of January 24, 2023, and their mother, Lindsay Clancy, has been charged with killing them. Twenty-five days after the jury in her murder trial told Judge William F. Sullivan it could not agree, she was back in the same Plymouth courtroom, at the same defense table, in front of the same judge. The question that has hung over this case since the first day of trial has not moved an inch: is this a mother who killed her children, or a mother in the grip of a psychosis that the system around her never stopped?

The jury never answered that. It could not. And on the morning of September 29, 2026, the judge was asked three questions that sit underneath it. Was the Commonwealth's evidence ever enough to convict her at all? How much of what happened inside that jury, and at the sidebar where the lawyers argued about it, does the public get to see? And if there is going to be a second trial, when?

He heard argument on three motions. He ruled on none of them. He pushed three more to November 2 before the arguments even started. He tried to set a trial date and could not get either side to pick one. Defense counsel lost his temper and was hushed from the bench. And Lindsay Clancy walked out of that courtroom the way she walked in: presumed innocent on all three indictments, with no verdict, no ruling, and no date.

A mistrial is not a verdict. I am going to say that more than once in this piece because it is the single most misunderstood fact in this case right now. A mistrial is not a conviction and it is not an acquittal. A jury was sent home because it could not agree, and the Commonwealth has said it wants to try her again. Nothing about that changes the presumption of innocence. Not one word of it.

So let me walk you through what happened in that room, motion by motion, and let me ask the question I ask about every day of every trial we cover: is the process doing what it is supposed to do?

THE WHOLE HEARING, UNCUT (PART 76) Lindsay Clancy's Judge Hears Three Motions After the Duxbury Mom Mistrial and Rules on None

A Status Date That Turned Into a Motions Hearing

On paper this was a status date. The judge said so himself when he took the bench a little before ten. But a lot had been filed since the jury went home on September 4, and he wanted to walk through the file first and sort out what could be heard that morning and what could not. That sorting took the first stretch of the hearing, and it tells you a great deal about where this case is.

The first item on his list was the defense's renewed motion for a required finding of not guilty. He asked whether the parties were ready to argue it. They were, and he said he would hear it.

The second item was a motion that did not exist when the trial ended. A lawyer new to the case stood up on behalf of the juror at the center of the mistrial, identified in the court file only as Juror Doe. Her client's motion asks the court to preserve the juror records, to produce the juror questionnaire and related records, and for a limited inquiry of that one juror. The judge said he had been ready to go forward on it, but an agreed motion to continue had been filed, so he set it for Monday, November 2. He wanted a short date, not a far one. Late October dates were floated and did not work for everyone.

Before she sat down, the judge raised one more filing from the juror's lawyer: a motion for limited relief from impounded records, filed the day before. He told her he had not received the memorandum the motion referred to and was not clear on exactly what she wanted. She explained that a number of documents in this case are impounded, and she could not even see them well enough to say precisely what she was asking for. She wanted whatever was impounded that bore on the juror issue, so she could prepare.

The Commonwealth had agreed to that request. The judge said that did not settle it for him. He had impounded those materials for his own reasons, he said, and there was a bigger picture behind several of these issues that he needed to address. He needed to know exactly what was being sought before he decided. He would look at it on the papers, and if it could not be resolved that way, it would wait for November 2. Someone at counsel table suggested an earlier date, since the juror's lawyer might need those materials to argue her motion on the 2nd. The judge said November 2 was the earliest he had, and that if her filing convinced him an earlier date was needed, he would reach out.

Stop on that for a second. A juror, a private citizen who served on this jury, now has her own lawyer and her own motions in a murder case. The judge has impounded material about that juror. The prosecution agreed the juror's own lawyer could see some of it. The judge would not sign off until he knew precisely what it was. I am not going to criticize a judge for being careful about juror privacy. That is his job. But notice how much of the story of this mistrial now lives in paper the public cannot read. Hold that thought, because it comes back.

Then the list kept getting longer.

The defense had filed a motion asking that the jurors' notes and the sidebar discussions from the trial be released from impoundment. Both sides were ready. That would be argued.

The defense had also filed a motion to dismiss the case. Reddington's side was ready to argue it. The Commonwealth was not. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague told the judge the prosecution objected to arguing it that morning. The motion, with a thirty-four page memorandum, had arrived the previous Monday. The Commonwealth had understood this date to be for trial assignment and the required-finding motion, and it had only learned on Friday, from an email someone working with the defense sent to the clerk, that the defense wanted the motion to dismiss heard. She asked for more time.

Kevin Reddington said it was in the judge's discretion and that he was ready. The judge gave the Commonwealth its time. To be fair to both sides, he said, and without criticizing the defense for when it was filed, this was a significant motion. He set it for November 2 and asked the Commonwealth to file its opposition at least a week ahead.

That is a defensible call, and I want to be fair about it both ways. A thirty-four page double jeopardy memorandum is not something a prosecutor answers over a weekend, and if you want a ruling that holds up on appeal, you want both sides to have actually briefed it. But understand what it costs. The motion to dismiss is the motion that decides whether Lindsay Clancy can be tried again at all. Every week it waits is a week she waits, and a week the three children's family waits, with the single most important question in the case unanswered.

The Commonwealth had its own new filing, made late the day before: a motion to bar prejudicial statements outside the courtroom. The prosecutors were ready to argue it. The defense said, sure. And the judge answered that the other question was whether he was ready. He had not seen it until about five that morning. He said it raised significant constitutional questions, and questions of Massachusetts law, and he put it on for November 2 as well, so that he and the lawyers could be prepared. He mentioned a related motion from the Boston Globe about public access to arguments and sidebar conferences, which he had also only received the night before.

So before a single argument was made, the scorecard for November 2 already read: the motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, the juror's records motion, the Commonwealth's motion on statements outside court, and whatever the judge decided to do with the juror's request for impounded material. Three motions stayed on for the morning. The judge took the required finding first.

The Motion That Could End It: A Required Finding of Not Guilty

Let me explain what this motion is, because it is the most powerful thing a defense lawyer can ask a judge for, and most people have never heard of it.

In Massachusetts, it lives in Rule 25 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure. A motion for a required finding of not guilty asks the judge to take the case away from the jury and end it himself, on the ground that the evidence was never legally sufficient to convict. The judge does not weigh credibility. He does not decide who he believes. He asks one question: taking the evidence in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, could any rational juror have found every element of the crime proved beyond a reasonable doubt? If the answer is no, the defendant is found not guilty. Not a mistrial. Not a hung jury. Not guilty. And a finding of not guilty cannot be retried.

That is why this motion matters so much after a mistrial. If the judge grants it, there is no second trial. The case is over.

Reddington has been making this motion since the Commonwealth rested. The judge denied it. He renewed it when the defense rested. Denied again. He renewed it once more when the Commonwealth's rebuttal case closed, and that motion, carried past a jury that could not agree, is the one argued in Plymouth. Same evidence. Same judge.

THE REQUIRED-FINDING ARGUMENT, START TO FINISH Lindsay Clancy's Lawyer Asks the Judge to Find the Duxbury Mom Not Guilty After the Mistrial

He started with the standard. He cited Latimore, the Massachusetts case that sets the test for sufficiency, and the Supreme Court's decision in Jackson v. Virginia, which Latimore adopted. And he pressed a point prosecutors do not love to hear: the test is not whether there is some record evidence that touches each element. That, he said, is what the government always argues. The test is whether there was reliable evidence that could satisfy a rational juror beyond a reasonable doubt.

Then he took the judge back into the house. Patrick Clancy coming home on the evening of January 24, 2023, to a quiet house. Calling down to the basement and getting no answer. Going up to the bedroom. The knob locked, opened with a small key. The window open. The room cold. Blood on the floor and on the mirror.

And from there he fired questions at the Commonwealth's proof, one after another.

The exercise bands, the DNA and the fingerprints he called woefully deficient. And the police work he did not call a bad investigation. He called it no investigation.

She had said the screen was cut. The evidence was that it was not. He offered that as a false memory. She was found outside, in January, in black socks and no shoes. Where was the blood on the socks, he asked. When did the shoes come off, and why? Where were the smears from a person who had just cut her own wrists and throat walking across that blood to the window? The cup on the nightstand that Patrick Clancy said held crushed medication was never seized and never tested. No crusher. No spoons. No residue on the table, the floor or the bed. No blood on the bed. He raised the bands removed from the children's necks, and said the Commonwealth's own demonstration with the medical examiner showed them springing wide open.

The whole case, he said, was speculation. Where was the admission? When she came out of her coma at the hospital, she had no memory and was told what had happened. How could she remember killing her children? An uncorroborated statement by a defendant is not evidence in Massachusetts, he said, and there was no statement from her about the killings at all.

He argued the timeline did not work: Patrick Clancy leaving the house, the email at 5:24, the stops at CVS and at the restaurant, both on video. He said the Commonwealth had itself conceded in closing that she did not have enough time. He raised the children's core body temperature, and said it would take hours for a body to fall that far. He reminded the judge that he had asked for a Bowden instruction, the instruction that tells a jury it may find reasonable doubt in an inadequate police investigation, and said no case had ever called for one more than this one.

I want to be careful here, and I want you to be careful with me. Nothing in that argument is an accusation against anyone else, and I am not going to turn it into one. Reddington was doing what the law asks a defense lawyer to do on this motion: hold the Commonwealth to its burden on every element, and point at every place he says the proof runs thin. Whether the record actually supports each of those points is a question you answer by going back to the trial evidence, point by point, not by taking either lawyer's word for it.

Why He Is Making This Argument Now

Here is the part of this story that most coverage is going to miss, and it is the key to understanding everything Reddington said in that courtroom.

Before the trial ever started, he asked the judge to split it in two. One proceeding on whether she did it. A separate proceeding on whether she was criminally responsible. His argument, under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights and the federal Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, was that making a defendant fight both questions at once forces her to effectively admit the acts in order to raise her mental state. Some states do exactly that; California tries sanity in a separate phase after guilt. Massachusetts does not give a defendant that split as a matter of right, and the judge said no. One trial.

Reddington told the judge he did not know whether the reason had been cost or logistics, but that the result was a conundrum. His words for what happens next were blunt. Lay people hear that she did it, conclude she is guilty, and then, as he put it, "they go off on a tangent about all of these horrific allegations," that "she's a demon and she's possessed and she should be executed." He said that talk had come from politicians all the way up to the President.

So look at the bind that ruling created. At trial, the defense did not fight about what happened in that house. It fought about her mind. It conceded the acts and contested criminal responsibility under the McHoul test, and those are two very different things. Conceding the acts is not admitting guilt, and anyone who writes that it is has misunderstood the entire trial. The defense had to make a choice about where to put its weight in front of one jury, and it put it on her mental state.

A motion for a required finding is the one place the rules let a defense lawyer go back and make the other argument cleanly, in front of a judge instead of a jury, with no risk of confusing anyone. Reddington reminded the judge that the jury itself was instructed to decide first whether the Commonwealth proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she committed the acts, and only then whether it proved she was criminally responsible. That first question was real. The burden on it was real. He said he would argue the motion the same way, in two parts, and he did.

So when you hear that he is making this argument "for the first time," understand why. He was not free to make it the way he wanted to make it at trial. The judge's bifurcation ruling decided that for him.

"A Laughable Argument": The Commonwealth's Answer

And then the prosecutor stood up, and she hit exactly that point.

She said the Commonwealth had filed a written opposition and would rely on it largely for the facts, since there were no full transcripts yet of a long trial. The test, she said, was whether the evidence at trial let any rational fact-finder find each element proved. And then she said this:

All through the trial, she said, the defense had objected to the Commonwealth even presenting the evidence of the killings, on the ground that the defendant admitted the acts and would stipulate to them. The record on that point, she said, was voluminous.

Then she laid out what that record holds. Lindsay Clancy was the only adult home with three young children. Her husband testified she sent him out on the errands, to exactly the places she named, and her own phone showed the calls to the restaurant and to CVS, while he was on video at both locations during the window in which the children were killed. He came home and found the children, and found her. Her DNA was on the exercise bands, on the ends of the bands, the ends that had to be pulled. And within days of waking up in the hospital, she told a chaplain she had had hallucinations telling her she had to kill the children, and that she was glad they were safer now.

There was evidence of deliberate premeditation and of extreme atrocity or cruelty, she said. And the argument that the Commonwealth had not proved she did it, she called, in so many words, a laughable argument.

THE PROSECUTION'S REPLY, LIVE 3:30 PM ET, SEPT 30 Lindsay Clancy Prosecution Says the Duxbury Mom's Defense Never Disputed She Did It Until Now

Now let me do what we do here and hold both of these arguments up to the light.

On the law, the Commonwealth is on strong ground on the first question, and I think everybody in that room knew it. The standard for a required finding is built to favor the prosecution: the judge takes the evidence in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth. The question is not whether the defense raised doubts. It raised plenty. The question is whether a rational juror could have found the acts proved. A phone record placing the husband at two stores, video of him at both, her DNA on the bands, and her own statement to a chaplain are the kind of evidence judges point to when they deny these motions. This judge has already denied it twice on the same record.

But the defense's point about the investigation is also a real one, and it should not get lost in the word "laughable." A cup that the Commonwealth's own first witness said held crushed medication was never seized and never tested. That is a fact about how this case was investigated. It does not mean she did not do it. It means that on one specific question, the jury was left without an answer that competent police work could have given it. That is exactly what the Bowden instruction exists for, and whether the judge was right to handle the request the way he did is a fair question for any appeal down the road.

And the "first time" argument cuts less deeply than it sounds. It is true that the defense never fought the acts in front of the jury. It is also true that the reason it did not is the one-trial ruling. You cannot fairly hold a strategic choice against a defendant when the court's own ruling forced the choice. The burden of proof on every element never left the Commonwealth, no matter what the defense chose to contest.

The Second Question: Was She Criminally Responsible?

Reddington's second part was the one the whole trial was actually about.

If the Commonwealth clears the first hurdle, it still has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible. In Massachusetts that is the McHoul test: a person is not criminally responsible if, at the time of the conduct, as a result of a mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.

Reddington argued that what the defendant told the evaluating doctors was not evidence of the facts, the jury had been told, so what was left for the Commonwealth were its rebuttal psychiatrists, none of whom, he said, was qualified to give an opinion about postpartum psychosis. On the other side he put Dr. Phillip Resnick, and said no one is more qualified. Dr. Resnick testified that she was psychotic at the time. He pointed to another defense expert, who testified that a person in full psychosis can still carry out ordinary daily tasks.

Then he went after how the Commonwealth's theory moved during the trial. It opened, he said, on a mother who was sick of being a mother and wanted her life back. Then it backed away from that.

First, he said, the suicide attempt was fake. Then it was real. Then she might be ill, but she knew what she was doing. He mocked the questions he said the Commonwealth had sprinkled through its argument to the jury. Is there any evidence she was seeing a purple unicorn in the corner of the room? Could she text? Could she talk to her husband? Was she able to take care of the kids and build a snowman?

And then he asked the judge to set the law aside for a moment and talk like human beings. Why would a nurse, a mother who had never done anything wrong, kill her three children? Every one of the doctors, he said, agreed she had a serious mental disease or defect. The Commonwealth had not proved she did it, and it had certainly not proved she was not acting in psychosis. She should be found not guilty.

The prosecutor's answer on this part was quieter and more technical, and in some ways more important.

The law on criminal responsibility, she said, works differently from an ordinary required-finding motion. The issue only arises when the defense raises it. Once it does, the Commonwealth must prove responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt, but the evidence is still viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, and the defense's own evidence does not count against the Commonwealth unless it shows the Commonwealth's case to be conclusively wrong. So the defense's praise of its own experts, she suggested, was beside the point on this motion.

She conceded what she said nobody disputed: the trial evidence showed Lindsay Clancy with signs and symptoms of mental illness in the months before. Several providers. Treatment. Medication. Hospital visits. An inpatient stay at McLean. She asked the judge to confine himself to the trial evidence, and not to pretrial arguments or press conferences. But the Commonwealth did not have to disprove illness, she said. The focus is capacity, and the case law says plainly that not every defendant with a mental illness lacks criminal responsibility.

She walked through the kinds of evidence the SJC has said can prove responsibility: the circumstances of the offense, the defendant's words and conduct before, during and after, goal-directed behavior, a rational motive, and whether the person was oriented to time, place and person. That the defense called her psychotic was an argument it was free to make, she said, but the Commonwealth answered it with evidence of her conduct, of how others saw her, and of how she dealt with her medical providers as late as the day before, when she showed no signs of psychosis.

And she took on Reddington's human question directly. Motive is not an element of murder or of criminal responsibility, she said, but the Commonwealth had offered one. And it was not, she said, that Lindsay Clancy was a bad mother who wanted a new life. It was that she had come to believe she would never be the same person again, that she was frustrated with her care and its results, that she had decided she did not want to be here anymore and would take her own life, and that she would take the children with her because no one could care for them the way she could and she did not want them to suffer. Those words, she said, came from things Lindsay Clancy told different people, including staff at Brigham and Women's after that night. The Commonwealth's expert called it altruistic filicide. That, she said, is a motive, and on everything known about her at the time, a rational one.

Sit with that for a minute, because it is the heart of this entire case and it is where I think the honest questions live.

The Commonwealth's motive, in its own telling, is a mother who believed her children would suffer without her. The Commonwealth concedes she was mentally ill. The defense says that is a description of a psychotic mind, not a rational one. The Commonwealth says a mentally ill person can still act with a rational motive and be responsible for it. That is a real legal disagreement, and it is the exact disagreement twelve jurors could not resolve after days of deliberations.

And notice what the standard does on this motion. Because the evidence is viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, and the defense's experts do not count against it unless they show the Commonwealth conclusively wrong, a judge deciding a required finding on criminal responsibility is almost never going to take the question away from a jury when there is a battle of experts. That is the law. I am not saying the judge would be wrong to follow it. I am saying you should understand that the motion is built so that a genuine split among the doctors almost always goes back to a jury. The split in this case is exactly what hung the jury.

Under Advisement, With No Date

When the prosecutor finished, the judge did not rule.

Under advisement means the judge will decide it later, in writing, on his own schedule. There is no deadline in that phrase and none was given. A ruling on the required finding could land on paper any day, with no hearing and no cameras.

Here is my read. On the first question, the Commonwealth's evidence of the acts is strong on this standard, and this judge has already said no twice on the same record. I expect no again. On the second question, the standard makes it very hard for a judge to take criminal responsibility away from a jury when qualified experts disagree, and they did. I expect that answer to be no as well.

If I am right, the required finding is the undercard. The real fight in this case is the motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, and that fight turns on a piece of paper that almost nobody has seen.

The Note Nobody Outside the Sidebar Has Read

The second motion argued that morning is the one most people will skip. I think it matters more than anything else that happened in that courtroom.

The defense wants the jurors' notes and the sidebar transcripts from the trial released from impoundment. Martin G. Weinberg, the appellate and double jeopardy lawyer who filed an appearance for the defense on September 16, argued it as a question of the constitutional right to a public trial. Relying on the SJC's decision in Commonwealth v. Cohen and the Supreme Court cases behind it, he said the public-trial right reaches the court's own records, the documents a judge's decisions rest on. The right is not absolute, he acknowledged. But any exception has to rest on a particularized need, has to be the least restrictive option available, and has to come with the judge's findings.

The defense wants two things made public so it can rely on them openly in its motion to dismiss.

The first is the jury notes. Two notes sit at the center of whether this mistrial was truly necessary, or whether the court should instead have questioned or discharged a juror and let deliberations continue. One of those notes was read in open court on September 4. The other, the first of the two, sent on September 3, is still sealed, because it was handled at sidebar. The defense says that note put the court on notice and required questioning of the juror. And Reddington objected to handling it at sidebar. The defense says the sidebar transcripts show that objection.

The second is the sidebar transcripts themselves, from September 2, 3 and 4. Sidebars are not improper, Weinberg said, and many lawyers agree to them. But the defense filed its own motion to dismiss with the note's contents and the sidebar passages blacked out, and he told the judge he could identify no particularized need for any of it to stay sealed, other than the juror's name, which the defense agreed should stay redacted under the court's impoundment orders.

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Here is why this matters so much. Before a judge ends a trial with a mistrial over the defendant's objection, there has to be what the law calls manifest necessity. It is a high bar, and it exists because the double jeopardy clause protects a defendant from being put through a second prosecution for the same offense. If a trial is ended without manifest necessity, the defendant can argue she cannot be tried again.

Weinberg framed it as the cornerstone question left after the required finding: whether the Commonwealth gets to try Lindsay Clancy again. That turns on whether the mistrial was supported by manifest necessity, and on whether questioning the juror, or jurors, might have produced answers inconsistent with the one answer that juror gave to the single question the court asked. Under the Sixth Amendment and Article Twelve of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, he said, she was entitled to twelve impartial jurors, all following the court's instructions until deliberations ended. If she did not have that, the double jeopardy clause could bar a second trial.

The judge confirmed with him that the defense would agree to redact the juror's name and any other identifying detail from the notes. Absolutely, Weinberg said. That was the limit of the redaction the public-trial right would allow.

I laid out my own position on this in the commentary I recorded after the hearing, and I will say it again here. The defense says Lindsay Clancy may face a second trial because of how one juror was handled. The decision not to question that juror, and the decision to end the trial, rest on a note nobody outside that sidebar has read. How is the public supposed to judge whether that mistrial was necessary if the one piece of paper it turns on stays in the dark?

MY COMMENTARY ON THE SEALED NOTE (PART 75) Lindsay Clancy's Retrial Fight Turns on a Sealed Juror Note the Public Has Never Seen

The Commonwealth's Case for Keeping It Sealed

The prosecutor objected, and I want to give her argument its full weight, because there is a real principle in it.

The defense's own brief, she said, conceded that a public trial can yield to an overriding interest. The higher value here, she argued, is the integrity of the jury system itself. And then she tied it to what has been happening outside the courtroom:

Publishing notes a jury sent about particular people, and the lawyers' sidebar discussion of them, she said, would chill the next jury from sending a note at all. That concern is legitimate. Jury notes are one of the few ways a deliberating jury can talk to the court. If jurors come to believe their notes will end up in the newspaper, some of them will stop writing them, and the court will lose a window into problems it needs to see.

Then she did something that I think undercuts her own argument. In open court, on the record, she described this jury's split as the Commonwealth understood it: a lone holdout juror, allegedly looking for a guilty verdict, against jurors looking for not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. And then she asked the judge to flip it. Imagine a lone juror holding out for not guilty against eleven voting to convict, and the public getting to see the notes about that one person and knowing she was the one who would not hold the defendant responsible. "That would be a travesty," she said. The protection, in her argument, runs both ways.

She cited an SJC decision holding that the public has no presumptive right of access to lobby conferences or sidebar discussions, and asked the judge to deny the motion.

So here is the watchdog question, and I want to ask it of both sides.

To the Commonwealth: you described the split of this jury, from counsel table, in a public hearing, while arguing that the note describing it has to stay sealed to protect the jury. Once the prosecution has put the shape of the deliberations on the public record, what exactly is the sealing protecting? The defense has already agreed the juror's name and every identifying detail come out. What is left in that note that the public cannot see?

To the defense: the prosecutor's chilling-effect argument is not nothing. A juror in this case has already hired a lawyer. That tells you something about how exposed she feels. If releasing the words of a note makes it harder to seat and protect the next jury in this very case, that is a cost that falls on Lindsay Clancy too, if she is tried again.

My answer is the same one I gave in the commentary. Redact the juror's name. Redact anything that identifies the juror. Then release the rest, and the sidebar transcripts with it. The right to a public trial does not stop at the edge of the bench. If this mistrial was necessary, the record will show it, and the public will have one more reason to trust the result. If it was not, the public deserves to know that too.

The judge offered the defense the last word. Weinberg began to say that the Commonwealth's motion of the night before rested on the same premise, that the defense should not be blamed because the juror had gone on television and hired a lawyer who condemned Reddington's good faith. The judge cut him off. That was not the argument he had heard, he said, and anything about statements outside the courtroom would wait for November 2. Weinberg finished with one point: everything the prosecutor had described was already public except the actual words of the note, nothing in it would surprise anyone, and the reason to release it was an accurate court record.

The judge took that motion under advisement too.

"A Silent Movie With No Captions"

Those, the judge said, were the only motions he would decide that morning. Except that the Globe's motion for access to arguments and sidebar conferences overlapped so much with what he had just heard that he would rather hear it now than on November 2. The Commonwealth said its arguments would be the same. The defense said it was aligned with the Globe to the extent the Globe wanted the same notes and sidebars.

The lawyer for the Boston Globe and a Boston television station made a point I have not been able to stop thinking about. In a sense, he said, the Globe had already gotten some of what it asked for that very morning, because the substantive motions had been argued out loud, from counsel table, instead of at the bench.

He was careful. The Globe was not asking to ban sidebars or to follow the lawyers up to the bench. He agreed with the Commonwealth that the SJC has said there is no right of access to sidebars or chambers. But he drew two lines. Sidebars are acceptable when the defendant does not object. And there comes a point where holding the substantive arguments of a case at sidebar undoes the public trial altogether. His image for it:

Everybody understands how sensitive the issues in this case are, he said. But letting people who want to educate themselves hear the lawyers' arguments and the judge's questions helps the public understand the case and accept the legitimacy of the system.

That is the whole mission of this channel in two sentences. And it raises a question I think the court should have to answer: should it take a newspaper filing a motion for arguments like these to be heard in public? The defense objected to handling that September 3 note at sidebar. It was handled there anyway. Now the note, the argument about it, and the judge's reasoning on it all sit behind an impoundment order, and the most consequential ruling in this case, whether she can be tried again, is going to be litigated around them.

The prosecutor added one thing: anything about the individual juror's information should stay at sidebar, because a juror's privacy and a jury's right to reach a verdict without fanfare, unwanted attention or persecution should be sacrosanct.

That last word is where the morning came apart.

"I Am So Tired of Hearing Persecution"

Reddington stood up.

He said he was being painted as doing terrible things to the juror, when he had filed one motion and said nothing. Every comment he had made, he said, had been a response to people calling for his client's execution, public figures from the President on down, and the outlandish comments of others. The judge tried to bring him back to the Globe's motion. Reddington kept going. He said he was tired of hearing about him persecuting people. The judge hushed him, told him they were talking about the motion, and took the Globe's motion under advisement.

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Let me be fair to him first. The frustration has a basis in the record. Early in his own argument that same morning, he told the judge that politicians had said Lindsay Clancy should be executed. That is a real thing said about a woman who has never been convicted of anything, whose jury could not agree, and who remains presumed innocent. A defense lawyer who hears that and gets angry is not a defense lawyer I am going to lecture.

But look at where it happened. In front of the judge who is about to decide whether to bar statements outside the courtroom. On a motion about press access. Minutes after that same judge had already cut off a defense argument drifting toward public statements and said it belonged on November 2. The judge did what a judge should do. He drew the line again and moved on.

Who did that moment help? Not the client. Not while the defense is asking this same judge to throw the case out.

The Trial Date Nobody Would Pick

And then came the part that should concern everyone, on every side of this case.

The judge turned to scheduling. He was careful to tell the room, and anyone watching, what not to take from it:

Setting a date, he said, said nothing about how he would rule on any of the pending motions. But if this case has to move forward, it should move forward. Rather than wait thirty or sixty days to pick the next trial date, he wanted to pick it now and backfill the other dates from there.

He asked the Commonwealth where things stood. The prosecutor said the motions had to be argued and decided first, and that either side might have appellate rights from those rulings, which could take time. A date picked now, she said, might not be a real trial date.

Then the judge turned to the defense.

Think about that. The prosecution and the defense, who have fought over almost everything in this case, standing together on one thing: not setting a trial date. Both sides said they would rather wait for the rulings and any appeals.

The judge pushed back, and he had the history on his side:

The prosecutor answered that had not been the Commonwealth's position. And in the end the judge settled for telling everyone to come to the November 2 hearing prepared to pick a trial date. He said he was hearing from all sides how important it was to resolve this, and he gave his goal: to get this thing tried as soon as proper, without sacrificing anyone's rights. What he did not want, he said, was for it to get kicked down the road.

Reddington answered that it would not be punted, and then gave the line that tells you where this is really headed:

Everybody, the judge said, could look at their calendars.

Add it up. The jury was sent home on September 4. The next hearing is November 2. A retrial, if there is one, sounds like June at the earliest. That is roughly nine months between one jury and the next. Through all of it, Lindsay Clancy sits presumed innocent, charged with killing her three children, with no verdict. And through all of it, the family of Cora, Dawson and Callan waits too.

On the date, I think the judge was right. Pick one. The parties can always move to continue. A date on the calendar forces decisions: experts get scheduled, witnesses get notified, briefs get written on time. A case with no date drifts, and this case has already drifted enough. Both sides have legitimate reasons to want the rulings first, and the Commonwealth is right that an appeal from a ruling on double jeopardy could make any date meaningless. But the solution to uncertainty is a date that can move, and neither side would give the court one.

TOP MOMENTS OF THE HEARING, PREMIERE 8:00 AM ET, SEPT 30 Lindsay Clancy Post-Mistrial Hearing Top Moments: Three Motions, No Rulings

What November 2 Has to Answer

With that, the court set November 2 at nine o'clock and went into recess a little after eleven. No motion had been decided.

Under advisement, with no date for a ruling: the renewed motion for a required finding of not guilty, the defense's motion to release the jury notes and sidebar transcripts, and the Globe's motion for access to arguments and sidebar conferences.

Set for November 2: the defense motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, the juror's motion about the juror records and a limited inquiry, the Commonwealth's motion to bar prejudicial statements outside the courtroom, and the question of a trial date. The juror's request for impounded material waits on her memorandum.

So here is where I come down, one motion at a time.

On the required finding, the defense is entitled to hold the Commonwealth to every element, and it did. Every defendant is entitled to that. But this judge has already said no to this motion twice on this evidence, and the standard on criminal responsibility is built to send a genuine battle of experts back to a jury. I expect no. If the judge surprises everyone and grants it, the case is over, and that would be the biggest ruling of this entire prosecution.

On the juror note, release it with the juror's name and every identifying detail removed, and release the sidebar transcripts with it. The single most consequential question left in this case, whether Lindsay Clancy can be tried again, turns on what that jury said and how the court responded. That belongs in public.

On the outburst, the anger about what politicians have said may be fair. The room was wrong, and the timing was worse.

On the date, pick one.

And watch November 2 more closely than anything else in this case. That is the day the motion to dismiss gets argued, and it is the motion that decides whether there is a second trial at all. The Commonwealth will argue the jury was hopelessly deadlocked and the mistrial was the only option. The defense will argue the court should have questioned the juror behind that first note before ending the trial. Whoever is right, the public should be able to see the note it is all about.

One last thing, because it gets lost in all the procedure. This hearing was about motions and calendars and impoundment orders. Underneath all of it are three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan, and a mother who either killed them or was so sick she could not be held responsible for it. Twelve people heard every word of that trial and could not agree which. Whatever happens next, it should happen in the open, on a record everyone can read, as fast as fairness allows and no faster.

That is what the process owes them. All of them.

THE LIVE BROADCAST OF THE HEARING LIVE: Commonwealth v. Lindsay Clancy, the Status Conference After the Mistrial