I was surprised to hear on a flight this week that Lindsay Clancy’s defense counsel, Kevin Reddington, had unleashed a torrent of criticism of my commentary on the trial. In the interview with Fox News reporter Bryan Llenas, Reddington even suggested that we meet and debate these issues. I wanted to briefly respond to Reddington’s criticisms.
I actually praised Reddington’s handling through the end of the trial, until I felt he blew the summation to the jury. I was also critical of his motions to substitute a holdout juror with an alternate as running against the overwhelming authority in the area. However, what triggered Reddington was not my commentary on his trial performance, but what he did outside of the courthouse when he attacked the holdout juror. It was a repugnant and unprofessional venting by counsel who should be reaffirming the right of every juror to stand with their convictions against not just the other jurors but the world.
Reddington responded to my characterization of his conduct in front of the courthouse as “reprehensible” by calling my criticism reprehensible and adding, “maybe Jonathan Turley should check out the record before he makes his accusations.”
The “record” supporting this criticism is, in fact, his self-aggrandizing performance outside of the courthouse when he first said that the hung jury was “no time to gloat” and then gloated about how he “crushed” the prosecution in securing an 11-1 result. Yet, my objection was not to chest-thumping. It was a tad ungracious but unfortunately not entirely uncommon. Rather, it was the targeting of the holdout that left me floored as a fellow criminal defense lawyer.
Reddington had previously lit up the courtroom (which was being aired nationally) with his attacks on the juror. Reddington only knew that the other jurors were unhappy with the juror and said that he refused to follow the law. That is a common complaint against a holdout juror. This case turned on the credibility of the defendant and almost visceral reactions to a case where three innocent children were strangled by their mother, who planned the killings by sending her husband on errands.
I was mildly critical of the courtroom attacks, but I give leeway to a defense counsel who is fighting zealously for his client in seeking an acquittal. It was taking that rage outside the courthouse that crossed the line for me.
Reddington slammed into the juror who was already identified as one of just three males on the jury. He knew the juror’s name would likely be disclosed in time, given the anger over the trial’s outcome.
We clearly disagree on what lawyers are expected to do in high-profile cases. This is not what I teach my students about the professional standards that govern our conduct as officers of the court. Most of those expectations are not directly enforced by bar or court proceedings. Rather, much of what we do is the result of self-regulation; seeking to reinforce the noble ideals of our profession.
Instead of reminding people that our system is based on this core belief in the right of any citizen to stand alone against the majority, Reddington shredded the juror as presumptively anti-disability and akin to a racist on the jury. In front of the cameras, he declared, “I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”
Reddington knew that he was playing to the mob. District Attorney Tim Cruz had just been heckled on the steps by women who protested throughout the trial in favor of acquittal of Clancy, with one yelling how Cruz “only cares about the three children. What about the Mom?”
Frankly, in the aftermath of the trial, the two things that surprised me most were not the verdict, but the absence of an immediate apology from Reddington for his gratuitous attack on this juror and the failure of Judge William Sullivan to publicly rebuke him for his comments.
While our disagreement focuses on the attack on the juror, Reddington returned to his claim that what this juror did was itself unethical and contemptible. This juror was not convinced by his arguments, but Reddington suggests that no reasonable juror could have reached such a view despite many in this country who saw his client as a troubled murderer, but a murderer nonetheless.
There was a good-faith basis for taking that view even if most people would likely see Clancy as not responsible by reason of insanity. The standard is not whether Clancy was medically ill. She was clearly a deeply disturbed individual who failed to receive adequate mental health treatment. However, you can be suicidal and mentally ill and still appreciate the gravity of your actions.
The defense position was not unassailable. The long list of medications ignored the fact that only a couple of those prescriptions would likely contribute to psychosis and it was not clear how many pills Clancy actually took. She also had a fairly unusual case of postpartum psychosis in terms of the passage of time and said that she first heard a commanding male voice for the first time just before she killed her children.
Most importantly, Clancy took steps that showed planning and control of her actions, including researching how long it would take her misdirected husband to return. She spoke with him on the telephone while she was carrying out the plan and kept him in the dark about her intent to kill their children.
Would that erase reasonable doubt in the minds of most jurors? Probably not. As I stated before the trial, the chances of getting a unanimous verdict in this type of case are slim. This is a visceral case, which is why I was not surprised that the jury asked only to see a couple of pieces of evidence. The views of most people were baked into this trial before it began, and frankly, that may have been true for some of the jurors.
Reddington has every reason to exploit those feelings and play to doubts among the jurors. What he did not have license to do was target and ostracize the one holdout juror. Rather than taking the high ground, he immediately ran for the lowest common denominator among a nation of rage addicts.
Yes, that is indeed reprehensible. To paraphrase Mr. Reddington, it is the type of thing that would keep most of us up at night.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
White liberal fragility!! A proud black man holds forth and speaks truth, and Massachusetts Klanswomen want to lynch him. I can’t breathe just thinking about the white matriarchy.
This is too rich, I’m sorry 😀
And don’t be lying to me about his domestic violence yada yada yada. She beat herself up and made him confess to it.
Brilliant. The people jumping through hoops to excusing domestic homicide are aghast at domestic violence. This is rich indeed.
Ya can’t make this stuff up, Kansas. Thank you, liberals, for being our muse 🙂
True or not. They are bringing up an event from 6 years ago – nothing to do with today.
OT: In five minutes, one can relearn what the old Democrat Party stood for. Those who stand for today’s Democrat Party stand for totalitarianism and have unwittingly adopted lies from the new crazies in control.
https://www.fox4news.com/video/fmc-s18zk16684825qmm
Total MAGA propaganda— the theme that the MAGA marketing team came up with is: “crazy vs. common sense”. MSNOW played a montage of MAGA media talking heads and Republicans repeating this line.
There are several problems with this theory— the few extremists that MAGA media harp on do not speak for the Democratic Party, which has not adopted their position. Secondly, the “crazies” are clearly the Republicans. There are many examples—Ken Paxton, Brandon Herrera, Max Miller. MAGA devotees include NeoNazis. the Proud Boys, White Supremacists, the 3 percenters and other degenerates who trashed the Capitol and who Trump pardoned.
Then, there’s Trump, increasingly desperate, profiteering off of the presidency, awarding no bid contracts to companies that his worthless children have ownership interests in, trying to bribe voters by saying he could just hand out $5,000 checks from the US Treasury to every adult citizen if Republicans keep control of Congress, getting Republicans to agree to cheat to help him keep the power he lied to get, calling for a midterm rally after the primaries, solely because his mental illness requires cheering crowds and continuing to insist that the Lincoln Reflecting Pool was damaged by vandals. These are just a few examples.
What a stupid nutcase you are. You didn’t even look at the video or know what it was before providing your usual rant. This was one man speaking, RFK, stating what the Democratic Party stood for under JFK. You disavow everything the Democratic Party stood for and changed your beliefs because some crazies gained control over your namesake, Democrat. Get it clear. There is no longer a Democratic Party; rather, crazies are now running it into the ground and trying to take the nation with it. Listen to at least the first 3-5 minutes to see what you may have believed just a few years ago.
Ahhh, yes.
RFK Jr.
The well-known heroin and cocaine dealer and addict.
Isn’t he the one who collects and eats road kill?
Isn’t he the one whose brain was eaten by worms that he got from eating road kill?
Isn’t he the one who cut the head off a whale and tied it to the roof of his minivan for a 5 hour drive home?
Isn’t he the one who collects the penises of roadkill raccoons?
Isn’t he the one that has been completely and utterly disowned by his own family including some of his own children?
And yet, according to you, the Democrats are the weird and crazy ones.
Your own weird and crazy rants align perfectly with craziness of RFK Jr., and the MAGA cult as a whole, which explains why you see this nutcase as a perfectly normal, rational human being.
Birds of a feather…. as they say.
“The well-known heroin and cocaine dealer and addict.”
You are a fraud. RFK was never a dealer and is no longer an addict. But you are a liar and slanderer, proven many times on the blog. Are the rest of your comments valid? They are not even worth looking at.
But what are you? An anonymous creature without morals or the courage to stand behind your beliefs. Birds of a feather; one can say that about most Democrats who are on the same page as you, morally and intellectually lost.
Kennedy admitted to drug addiction. There is no such thing as a “former” drug addict. Once an addict, always an addict, although some can successfully control the addiction. Relapse is always one step away from sobriety.
Many of his contemporaries at Harvard have publicly stated that they bought drugs from him. He was a drug dealer.
I note that you do not comment on his weird fixations with roadkill, the worms that ate his brain, or his weird obsession with raccoon penises. Apparently you do not find this unusual. Perhaps you are also a connoisseur of delectable roadkill dishes, and also collect animal penises.
Raccoon and bears penises contain a bone within them. In the hill country these bones are collected and used as twizzle sticks and decanter sticks in drinking and distilling alcohol. If you were half as intelligent as you think you are, you would know these things. However, you are not and it truly shows here daily.
RFK,Jr is NUTS—his own cousin, Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s own daughter, says so. She wrote a letter to members of Congress, begging them not to confirm him. RFK, Jr, a former heroin addict who admitted to snorting cocaine off of a public toilet seat, eats road kill, attempts autopsies on animals, cuts the penises off of raccoons, to “study”, and spreads lies about vaccines being unsafe and causing autism, despite multiple scientific studies proving that to be untrue. He is responsible for one of the worst outbreaks of measles in this country in decades because of spreading lies and misinformation about the measles vaccine.
RFK, Jr does NOT speak for the Democratic Party either from the past or in the present. He is outrageously unqualified to be the head of Health or anything else.
“RFK,Jr is NUTS—his own cousin, Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s own daughter, says so.”
That is really dumb. Have you heard Caroline stand up for what her father believed? No. She has a name, but has none of the grit of her father. This is what you call evidence: complete garbage.
You have finally said something correct “RFK, Jr does NOT speak for the Democratic Party”; congratulations. He speaks, at least what he spoke in the video, for the party of JFK that Democrats of today have abandoned. He has actually done a good job to date, better than the ones who injected our children and pregnant women forcefully with an unapproved vaccine.
Meyer, RFK Jr is a mensch. He’s still questioning authority, standing against the corporate task masters in big pharma, standing against corrupt and captured regulatory agencies, standing with working men and women, and promoting real democratic values (small d). The other party still hates him for that. What has changed is the identity of the parties. How interesting this political realignment has been.
Oldman, I never followed RFK. I wonder if any of his basic beliefs have changed at all and if he shows the living shift of the party. One can almost see a picture of him standing at the Democrat train as it moves away. I am sure he has some leftist ideas that I disagree with, but I never followed him closely enough to remember.
I like your characterization of him, ” RFK Jr is a mensch.”
The speech was amazing. The hate-filled detractors above will never listen to it. Their minds are closed and their souls are shriveled and ugly because all they know is hate. But RFK Jr is a breath of fresh air and doing real good with the increase in real foods over processed foods, the lowering of obesity rates, and the increases in longevity, all reversing 30-year trends in the other direction. His anecdotes were hilarious about being sued by the Dems to get his name off the ballot, then being sued again by them to keep his name on the ballot after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump, about his phone conversation with a very gracious Trump three hours after Trump was shot, compared to Harris refusing to even speak with him, and about the party of “no kings” anointing a queen that not a single voter voted for. Thank you for sharing, I have forwarded it to other people I know.
You don’t know anything about brain worm infested former heroin addict RFK Jr. See above post. Trump nominated him because he wants to capture the cachet of the Kennedy era, (which is why Trump wants his name on the JFK Center), but the rest of the Kennedys want nothing to do with him because he is nuts, knows nothing about science, spreads lies about vaccines and is grossly incompetent to lead a public health agency that is supposed to be dedicated to protecting the health of the American people. He has no background in science, medicine or public health. He has half- baked stupid ideas about medical science that he has no background in. People are literally getting sick and dying because of him. He has cut funding for cancer research and other scientific studies.
WHAT “corrupt government agencies” are you talking about and where is the proof?
“Trump nominated him because he wants to capture the cachet of the Kennedy era,”
You obviously don’t realize that Trump was a Democrat. He chose when and where he could run for President. As President, he is a counter-revolutionary trying to reverse the autocratic and dangerous Democrat Party now run by crazies, back in the direction of JFK’s Democratic Party.