Remove these foul creatures from public office immediately

Plymouth County, Mass. Assistant District Attorneys Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham

The prosecutors of Lindsay Clancy argued in an October 26, 2023 arraignment hearing that she “did not feel love or connection” toward one or more of her children — aged five, three, and eight months. They repeated this characterization of Lindsay’s unthinkable callousness all the way up to the start of her trial last month.

Also in that 2023 hearing, they claimed Lindsay did not really “slit her wrists,” and that she strategically “slid” out the window during her purported suicide attempt. The only reason she wound up paralyzed, they argued, was because she stupidly did not realize the ground would be frozen on a cold January night in Massachusetts. So her attempted suicide was fake, essentially, and this proved her malicious, premeditated, murderous intent.

In their July 27 opening statement at trial, the prosecutors declared Lindsay killed her three children because she was “selfish,” “controlling,” and “manipulative” — and she’d simply decided that she “no longer liked the life she thought she wanted.”

But as the trial progressed, a mountain of evidence emerged flatly contradicting the overwrought, arrogant, disparaging depictions of Lindsay the prosecutors had sought to convey. Not a single witness gave a shred of validation to their character-maligning efforts. Rather, each and every one of them did exactly the opposite. Her former husband, her former husband’s parents, every friend / acquaintance / medical provider the government could possibly muster — literally all of them unanimously said they had never known Lindsay to be anything other than a normal, caring, attentive mother.

So to salvage the maximally-vindictive charges they’d been so bizarrely invested in pursuing for three and a half years, the prosecutors finally changed course today. At closing arguments, they announced they are “not denying” that Lindsay “loved her kids” a great deal. They also admitted there is “no dispute” that she was “suffering from mental illness” at the time of the homicides.

That was the desperate last-minute pivot they decided to go with — despite the PROSECUTORS THEMSELVES being the ones who had previously “disputed” all of the above. Including at earlier stages of the grotesque livestreamed show-trial they insisted on convening. In their opening statement, they would allow only that Lindsay may have been “dealing with mental health issues” at some point “prior to the murders” — as though she was of perfectly sound mind during the “murders.” (NOTE: They should NOT have even been allowed to describe the homicides as “murder.” Whether the homicides constitute “murder” is literally the very legal question that the JURY is supposed to be deciding! As the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled, it is wholly “improper” for prosecutors to describe a homicide at issue as “murder” before jurors.)

Also conceded today by the prosecutors: there is “no dispute” that Lindsay legitimately attempted to kill herself. Which must mean everyone’s supposed to conveniently forget that their OWN EXPLICIT DISPUTE OF THIS VERY DETAIL is what guided their entire prosecutorial theory since 2023. Maybe if they had just made these concessions upfront, they wouldn’t have wasted untold time and state resources vigorously exacerbating such a terrible tragedy. Because aside from them, no one with any direct personal stake in the matter — namely the bereaved father — wanted a gory month-long inquisition beamed out on the internet for all to gawk at. The one time he ever talked to the media, in June 2024, Patrick Clancy said: “I wish there was a plea deal, and it was just done with.” Because he was convinced “I wasn’t married to a monster — I was married to someone who got sick.”

But the Plymouth County, Mass. DA’s office had other ideas. They insisted on inflicting the maximum retributive punishment on Lindsay, which required hauling Patrick to the courthouse and making him relive in graphic detail the moment he discovered his dead children’s bodies. They played his 911 tape, so everyone could hear him screaming in anguish. They dangled the children’s clothes in front of the jury, as though which onesie the baby was wearing when he was strangled to death was crucial information for assessing Lindsay’s criminal culpability. They flaunted around the autopsy photos of the children’s mangled corpses. They even had the strangulations re-enacted in a twisted exhibition. And then, as their arguments were systematically undermined, they grew increasingly desperate, and turned to a vulgar tangent on Catholic theology — trying to coax Patrick’s mother into saying Lindsay committed a “mortal sin,” and will thus burn in hell. Which was clearly a last-ditch attempt to guilt-trip any devout Catholics who might be on the jury. Invoking religious dogma in this manner is obviously forbidden, and the prosecutors were swiftly rebuked by the judge. But then they did it again.

This grisly taxpayer-funded fiasco was entirely avoidable. There were obvious commonsense ways to go about legally resolving such a tragic situation, without turning it into some kind of lurid retribution spectacle. That it turned out this way was the result of concerted, discretionary, and POLITICAL decision-making by a particular set of public officials. It was never about these officials just neutrally “doing their jobs.” Indeed, the US Supreme Court has defined the “job” of a prosecutor as follows:

The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done. As such, he is in a peculiar and very definite sense the servant of the law, the two-fold aim of which is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer. He may prosecute with earnestness and vigor — indeed, he should do so. But, while he may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones. It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.

Lindsay Clancy’s prosecutors fail this test in spectacular fashion. They are so beyond vile, it’s actually shocking. ADAs Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham, as well as their elected DA boss Timothy J. Cruz, need to be removed from office immediately, professionally and socially shunned, and prevented from ever holding any position of public authority again. They are despicable scumbags.

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