Lindsay Clancy’s Lawyer Asks Trump For A Pardon

Three kids. Strangled and drowned by their own mother in Duxbury back in 2023. There is no softening that sentence, and the quote her own lawyer used to describe it, "a horrible, horrible thing," tells you the defense already knows there's no spinning this into something else. What they're arguing instead is that Lindsay Clancy wasn't in her right mind, that a cocktail of psychiatric medications and untreated postpartum psychosis turned a mother into someone unrecognizable to herself. That's a legitimate thing for a jury or a judge to weigh. It's the kind of case that should make people uncomfortable, because cruelty and illness can look identical from the outside and mean completely different things.

But asking Donald Trump for a pardon is a strange move, and not just because of the politics of it. Clancy was charged in Massachusetts, under state law, for state crimes. A president has no authority to pardon that. Federal clemency reaches federal convictions and DC cases, not a murder prosecution running through Plymouth County. Either her lawyer knows this and is making a public plea dressed up as a legal one, or there's real confusion here about how the American justice system is actually structured. Neither option looks great.

We'd guess it's strategy, not confusion. High-profile crimes generate high-profile appeals, and floating a presidential pardon gets headlines a routine competency hearing never would. That's a savvy way to shape public sympathy ahead of trial, but it also treats the presidency like a talk show call-in line, which it isn't. If there's a real case that Clancy was too sick to be criminally responsible, make it to a Massachusetts court in front of Massachusetts law. That's where this belongs, and it's the only forum with the power to actually decide it.