Lindsay Clancy’s Lawyer Turns To Trump With Request

A president can only pardon federal crimes. That's not a technicality, it's the whole ballpark, and it's why Kevin Reddington's plea to Donald Trump on behalf of Lindsay Clancy is either a profound misunderstanding of the Constitution or a media strategy dressed up as a legal one. Clancy was charged in Massachusetts state court for strangling her three children, Cora, Dawson and eight-month-old Callan. Nothing about that case touches federal jurisdiction. The president has no more authority to erase a Massachusetts murder charge than he does to overturn a parking ticket in Worcester.

That doesn't mean the underlying question, whether Clancy was criminally responsible given her documented postpartum mental health crisis, isn't worth taking seriously. Juries deadlock for real reasons, and a hung verdict here suggests genuine disagreement about culpability, not indifference to three dead children. That's a conversation for Massachusetts prosecutors, a retrial, or a governor's clemency process, none of which run through the Oval Office.

What this stunt actually does is use a national platform to reframe a horrific triple homicide as a referendum on presidential mercy, skipping past the actual legal machinery that exists for exactly this situation. If Reddington believes his client deserves leniency, there's a system for that argument, built by the state whose laws she's accused of breaking. Going on "Good Morning America" to lobby a president with zero authority here isn't advocacy. It's theater, and it treats a tragedy involving three small children as content.

We'd take the request more seriously if it were aimed at the person who could actually grant it.