Lindsay Clancy‘s wheelchair may be the most persuasive witness in her own murder trial, and it never had to testify, according to legal analyst Sara Azari’s breakdown of closing arguments.
Azari, a criminal defense attorney analyzing the case, said defense attorney Kevin Reddington reminded jurors he told them from the opening of the trial to watch the evidence and watch the manipulation.
Reddington then turned to Clancy’s suicide attempt on the night she is accused of killing her three children in their Duxbury home in January 2023, rejecting any suggestion it was staged or minor and telling jurors she made a very significant suicide attempt.
Clancy cut herself and went out a second-story window the night of the killings. She has been paralyzed from the waist down and wheeled into court in front of the same jury for five weeks.
“Every day of this trial that wheelchair has been arguing for her without a single word,” Azari said, describing the suicide attempt as the defense’s single best fact. “You cannot fake a severed spinal cord.”
Lindsay Clancy’s suicide attempt shows a mind ‘not in control’: Sara Azari
Both the prosecution and defense agree on what happened in the Clancy home. The dispute is over Clancy’s criminal responsibility. Massachusetts law asks not only whether a defendant appreciated the wrongfulness of her conduct, but whether she could conform that conduct to the law.
Azari said Reddington argued Clancy’s near-lethal attempt on her own life in the same hour as the killings is powerful evidence of a mind not in control.
Prosecutors have countered that the same act shows motive rather than madness — that Clancy intended to die and did not want to leave her children behind.
“Same fact, but two stories,” Azari said. “The wheelchair is the defense’s best witness, and she never had to take the stand.”
Azari said Reddington also displayed a “wish box” the Clancys bought on their honeymoon in Hawaii, containing slips of paper the couple filled out between 2017 and 2020 expressing hopes for healthy, thriving children.
- Lindsay Clancy watches at the jury leaves the courtroom to start their deliberations during her murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Mass., Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
- Defense attorney Kevin Reddington stands behind Lindsay Clancy. The Lindsay Clancy murder trial is held at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth on July 29, 2026. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
- Plymouth, MA – July 29: Patrick Clancy on the stand. The Lindsay Clancy murder trial is held at Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth on July 29, 2026. (Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
- Defense attorney Kevin Reddington cross examines witness Dr. Avram Mack during Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial at Plymouth Superior Court, Monday, Aug. 24, 2026 in Plymouth, Mass. (Greg Derr/The Patriot Ledger via AP, Pool)
She said the exhibit functions as a character exhibit “doing legal work,” establishing a before-and-after baseline for the defense’s argument that Clancy suffered a personality break.
“Hard to sell a jury on selfishness while they are looking at a decade of handwritten wishes for her kids,” Azari said.
Lindsay Clancy trial: Wish box, journals cited as evidence of mental decline
According to Azari, Reddington also presented a posterboard of Clancy’s own writings from late 2022, which he said document intrusive thoughts and a deteriorating mental state, with her handwriting degrading by January into what he called “chicken scratches.”
Azari said Reddington listed steps Clancy took before the killings: researching postpartum support, calling a suicide hotline, seeing multiple providers and voluntarily admitting herself to a psychiatric hospital — before asking jurors what more she had to do.
Azari called it the most legally efficient stretch of the defense’s closing, since the writings were created before Clancy had any reason to fabricate symptoms.
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague has conceded Clancy was mentally ill and attempted suicide but argued the only legal question is whether she knew right from wrong and could control her conduct.
Azari said the prosecution holds the stronger legal theory, while the defense holds the stronger human narrative — an asymmetry she said favors the defense more than expected given the government’s burden to disprove mental incapacity.
She added that a first-degree murder conviction on all three counts is no longer the outlier it appeared to be earlier in the day, since the state’s two-theory structure gives jurors who reject the premeditation argument a second path via the manner of the killings.
Jurors have for multiple days, telling a judge on Sept. 1 they were so far.
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