Lindsay Clancy’s Lawyer Could Teach Trump a Thing or Two About the Law

Kevin Reddington’s media appearances this week Tuesday capped off a big summer for him. Reddington, who has practiced law in Massachusetts for 50 years, won sudden fame for his swashbuckling defense of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury nurse accused of killing her three children in 2023.In a hard-fought trial, Reddington argued Clancy wasn’t criminally responsible for the murders because her mental illness had eclipsed her moral discernment. As the trial ended with the jury deadlocked 11–1, with the majority evidently voting not guilty, Reddington was also knighted on social media for his passionate defense of women’s mental health. But what stood out in Reddington’s post-trial interviews has not been his advocacy for women. It’s his advocacy for civics. For him to promote the duties of citizenship, at such a low point for our constitutional democracy, was somewhat startling. You could almost find a shred of faith in the benighted American experiment.What Reddington said that deserves our attention came in two parts. First, George Stephanopoulos pressed him on his earlier boast that he had “crushed” the prosecution. After the trial, Reddington had indeed flexed outside the courtroom. “That was bravado,” he said now. “I could have been more circumspect.” This dialing back of his earlier bluster was not just good manners. It’s how due process works. The Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution safeguard an adversarial system in which legal opponents fight hard, aiming to, yes, crush each other’s arguments. This is why courtroom trials play like thrillsports in America. But then comes the rule of law. When a jury—or an electorate—renders a decision, both sides absolutely must turn “circumspect” and accept the legal outcome. Reddington’s emphasis on deference to the rule of law stands out during a decade in which Donald Trump’s chronic refusal to accept any law that disfavors him, most notably the outcome of the 2020 election, has caused the slow-rolling constitutional crisis that continues to engulf the nation. On September 4, in typical fashion, Trump blew past the presumption of innocence on the subject of Lindsay Clancy, recklessly claiming she’d have to “pay a price” because she’d done a “horrible, horrible thing.” Trump will always choose vigilantism over the rule of law.Reddington also spoke insightfully about the holdout juror. This is the person, remember, whose refusal to vote with the majority cost Reddington a massive courtroom victory—and a lifetime of book and movie deals. If Trump were in Reddington’s place, this juror would be identified, maligned, and threatened. But Reddington did nothing of the kind. “I would defend that individual’s right to be a holdout forever,” he said. “That’s part of our judicial system,” he went on. “I respect that.”(Enlightenment 101: “I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”) In a constitutional democracy, individuals campaign, compete, advocate, and argue. And when it comes to capitulating to a consensus or a decree, an American is indeed empowered to be a “holdout forever.” To make this point to Stephanopoulos, Reddington even cited Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, the patriotic 1957 film used (once upon a time, at least) to teach high schoolers about the duties of juries, constitutional rights, and the freedom to dissent.But Reddington then rounded on the subject of the law itself. His concern, he said, was that the holdout evidently “refused to apply the law of reasonable doubt” during the deliberations. In her own post-trial appearances, the jury’s foreperson has further said the holdout harbored full-fledged reasonable doubt but still wouldn’t vote to acquit. This procedural twist deserves more attention. Who decides if a juror’s doubt is reasonable? If a juror acknowledges having reasonable doubt but won’t acquit, is he engaged in some form of individual nullification? These are the kind of thorny questions that should be discussed in civics classes, along with a screening of the Lumet film. They get at some of the Constitution’s founding conceptions of universal rationality, individual rights, due process, and how deliberation works.The jury mechanics in American common law can seem chaotic to Europeans. After all, their civil-law courts rarely use juries at all. Instead, judges in France and Germany hand down decisions not after unruly debate among peers but on the strength of their intime conviction, or strong private belief. But Americans tend to trust juries that boisterously deliberate more than judges who solemnly reflect. Public polling shows that about half of Americans trust a jury to be fair, while only 23 percent place that same trust in a single judge. What’s more, the fastest way to raise people’s trust in the judicial system seems to be to have them serve on juries. According to a recent report by Duke Law School, people who do jury duty come to trust the judicial system more and see U.S. courts as more legitimate. The idea that a democracy should have “a government of laws, not men” is still hype music in Massachusetts, where John Adams codified it and wrote it into the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Among the government’s laws are the ones that guide due process. Due process gives authority to the law of the land, while also protecting individuals from it. Much reporting on the Lindsay Clancy trial has focused on the extrajudicial chatter and tinfoil-hat speculations that have no place in our justice system. Rather than appealing to Trump to pardon Lindsay Clancy—as he did on Good Morning America—Reddington should condemn reckless conspiracy-mongering, which could lead to Trump-style vigilantism or preempt a fair retrial. Meanwhile, Trump’s manful efforts to rig the midterms may continue to make a mockery of the Constitution. But during America’s 250th summer, and during a trial about a terrible tragedy, we got a glimpse of what civics is supposed to be, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, 10 miles from Plymouth Rock.