Lindsay Clancy Retrial Forces a Question the DA Won't Answer Publicly

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

Tony Brueski (0:08)

About the Lindsay Clancy case, stepping away from the legal tactics, we have to look at the massive emotional toll of this mistrial. With lives ruined and a retrial possibly hanging over Lindsay and Patrick Clancy's heads, we have to ask what does continuing this trial actually help? Bob Motta is with us, defense attorney, host of Defense Diaries, and Robin Drake, retired FBI special agency for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. Bob, there's obviously some consideration that DAs take into their charging decisions from the family, especially when the victims are the family members. And this is a case where the family is standing by the perpetrator of the crime, the people who have the most to lose, the people who lost the most, are standing by going, yes, this is horrible, but we understand how this happened. And this is not truly who this person is.

So prosecuting, put them away in jail, you're not going to have the thousands of victim impact statements from, you let them burn if you have quite the opposite in this sort of case. Why is it in your estimation here that that there is this vitriol in the state of Massachusetts and Cruz to push this the way that he did in round one? Was it a complete miscalculation of how this will end? Was there a political end to it for election in some way, shape or form? I don't know the answer to that. In many cases, that tends to be a piece.

Or is this something else entirely? I just to follow the letter of the law, she did this, we must prosecute this way. I know first degree you have to. But again, charging decisions, it could have been charged in a lesser and we wouldn't have to go this far.

Bob Motta (2:00)

I mean, look at our chat. Yeah. Our chat is why, because people that just, again, I always talk about it. And when I'm saying, when you're in a court of law and you're trying a case, and we're always talking about that thing that is really, really hard to do, which is to take your emotion out of the equation when you're sitting there as a juror, because you have to just look at the facts and apply the law. Because every single person, when you're looking at it from just a fundamentally human concept, are destroyed by the facts that these kids were killed by the person that was supposed to protect them over anybody else on the planet. So when you start there, some people can't leave there.

And that's where Cruz is sitting there like, all right, I've got the torch and pitch for a crew.

They're part of my constituency.

And he might not be hearing the other side of it quite as loud at that point. You know what I'm saying? And so from the front end, you've got a mother who killed her three children. I'm going murder one because she killed her three children. I'm tough on crime, like this can't go unchecked. Like they'll flame throw me. But the obligation of any prosecutor is to look deeper.

That's the thing. And that's the thing that I've been fighting with prosecutors about for decades. Look deeper. Like everything's not always. There's nothing that happens in this world. And we've talked about this, all three of us, many, many times, that is black and white. We live in the fucking grays, man. And every single case that walks into those courtrooms lives in the grays. No, this is not, it's not the same as, as Yates down in Texas. Yates was a different situation. I had no idea that she was part of some kind of weird religious cult, you know? Like, and she was definitely psychotic in a different way. Well, people were like, she tried to kill herself like three times, she was really, every case is different, you know? And at the end of the day, why he made the decision, I don't know, man.

Tony Brueski (4:26)

And I guess that's an interesting thing when we look at this with people and the folks that are not looking at this from an individual situation. Because, I mean, it's just, it's just a fact. Every case is different. Every person is different. If they miss the class in school, every person is a different snowflake. We're all different. So you're going to have different elements to every case. But it seems so many just want to look at this from the same lens of everything and every person acts the same. You check this box through that type of person. Unfortunately, the ability to look beyond that does elude a lot of people. And I'm not, and that's not to say that if you think that you should be in prison, that you're wrong. You're entitled to your opinion without a doubt. But as long as you're able to look at the facts of the case and understand them and not just pretend they don't exist, that's where the problem lies here. Another piece of this, obviously you have Patrick, you have Lindsay, Patrick being exposed to so much bullshit in this entire case. Obviously, he's now in his attorney finally, coming out and saying, guess what, we're coming for you. If you're going out there saying that he killed the kids, well, we're going to have some consequences for those actions. I've been saying this since this started. I was shocked by people doing this, like, yes, go after them, please.