Lindsay Clancy's Own Witness Said She Killed Out Of WHAT?

Tony Brueski (0:00)

This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

Tony Brueski (0:17)

Let's go over to the defense. Reddington's defense never argued Lindsay didn't kill her children and argued she couldn't have stopped herself. That the medications and the system that prescribed them broke her brain before she ever walked into that basement.

The case played out inside the courtroom and obviously has touched millions of people judging by everyone's reactions. But how did the defense do with the jury at the end of the day? That's what we're breaking down. Defense attorney extraordinaire and a host of defense diaries. Bob Motta is with us from Massachusetts, where he's been in the courtroom every day. And Robin Dreeke, retired FBI special agency for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. The defense, yeah, if you've been following Bob, you have seen the fanfare because my God, it's all called for with Reddington. Holy crap.

You said early on to me, I'd like an attacks. It's like watching Matlock in real life or something of that nature. And yeah, I mean, my God, this guy, this is how you do it. You know, you were in the courtroom. Give me your thoughts on how he did with the jury. Obviously, we know how it read out here to a lot of people of a certain mindset on this, but how did it land in there? That's what really matters.

Bob Motta (1:52)

As always with him in particular, I mean, they're paying rapt attention. The guy can command a room.

Tony Brueski (1:59)

Yeah.

Bob Motta (2:00)

He's a fabulous storyteller. He's like, he's just got that gift of being able to have jurors want to hear what he has to say. Now, whether or not he's convincing all of them as to what he's saying is a different question altogether, but it's never a matter of like, this guy makes me want to go to sleep. You know what I mean? It's like you're watching him. He's entertaining. He's passionate.

He's knowledgeable about the facts of the case. All those things exist when you're watching him. I thought his closing was powerful.

If I were to give a critique, it was a little scatter shot. He would bounce around.

Robin Dreeke (2:46)

That's what Todd was saying too. Yeah.

Bob Motta (2:48)

I mean, but look, I too am a guy who does not read from the script when I'm doing a closing. What happens when you're giving a lengthy closing, is shit pops into your head as you're speaking. Right?

It's not winging it, because he's been thinking about this closing forever. But the first rule that my father gave me, who was a defense attorney, trial attorney, is like never read from a piece of paper at trial, ever.

So I've taken that and lived by that my entire life in terms of practicing law, and Reddington is an old school guy who lives and dies by that. And so he had his concepts, his overarching concepts.

He had the five or six things that he wanted to hit, specifically in terms of contradictions that were made by Commonwealth during their case. Obviously, the bands, the exercise bands not being nodded, all the different things that he felt that they were disingenuous about, that they were trying to manipulate the jury about. He really focused on that, focused less on the experts and the criminal responsibility in terms of kind of arguing that to the jury, you know? And it's, look, and it's easy to sit here in armchair quarterback, you know? If I had been able to have an earpiece in his ear and a little microphone sitting in a back room, I would have been like, hey man, this is the time you got to drive home the concept of psychosis. Don't be married to just postpartum psychosis. Allow for the jury to think about psychosis that was brought on maybe by the medications. There was a combination of the fact that she had stopped breastfeeding in October, that she's on this polypharmaceutical cocktail for four months, was her brain fried early on from the Zoloft. Leave yourself the ability to be able to give the jury multiple things, hang their hat on in terms of the mental illness. Because one thing that was taken off the table by the prosecutors in their opening, and well, not by their opening, but in their closing was the fact that there's no dispute that she had a mental disease or defect. We all are in agreement with that. What we're suggesting is she was bipolar too, that she was well within her faculties, that the evidence that we have in terms of the Google searching, and the planning that that just shows us that she knew right from wrong, that the planning in and of itself was to evade getting caught, not by the law enforcement initially, but by her husband. So they're dying on that hill. I thought Red addressed it somewhat because that can play both ways. But it was almost a little bit like an afterthought wherein mid-closing argument, Reddington says, you know, in the Google searches, you know, she's not trying to find out how long he's going to be gone because she wants him away. She's trying to Google how long he's going to be gone for how quickly he's going to get back.