Prosecutors Never Offered Lindsay Clancy What Before Trial?

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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

Tony Brueski (0:08)

Let's go here. The district attorney, did they paint themselves into a corner right from the start by going for the first degree murder? I mean, should this have been something lesser to begin with? Or would that, you know, sometimes you go in with a harder charge, assuming that that jury is going to end up with a lower one.

So you do, you know, you go in harder. You got three children are dead. I mean, is it politically possible for an elected prosecutor to offer a plea deal without facing some sort of massive backlash, even if proving cold blooded premeditation was always a huge gamble? But notice the word political gets mixed into there. So the motivations of how you're prosecuting a case don't necessarily rest on the laurels of the case or what's right or wrong if you're adding the word political into the conversation.

Robin Dreeke (1:05)

Yeah, political always seems to come in at some point because every time we look at trying to understand why certain people are making certain decisions when it comes to prosecuting what cases they're going to prosecute, there's usually some sort of election coming up. I mean, we just dealt that with that out in Vegas with the West's Faces case, right?

But in this case, so, and here's why I don't, again, my conjecture on this one, I don't think politics played a huge part of this. So it goes to the original question, why go for first degree murder when you have a lot of other options on this?

Here's what I think, and this is based off of what we're seeing, and if you go online and you pull up stats on how people are standing on this case, if you're in the camp like a lot of people are, 100 percent guilty, premeditated, no such thing as her having a psychotic break because it's not exactly Andrea Yates like, and so she's wrong, she's guilty, and she should be behind bars. I believe this is exactly, and anyway, the people that think that by and large are law enforcement and prosecutors. I know there's a lot of other people in there, but people that lean hard towards law enforcement, justice and prosecution side oriented people, they're typically on that side. So if you live inside an echo chamber of that, like the prosecution does here, they're talking to law enforcement, they're talking to other people, they're looking past cases because this case is so rare. They're saying themselves, of course, we're going to go for first degree murder. Why wouldn't we? She's guilty. When you look at their courtroom demeanor, what was really telling to me for the two prosecutors in the room was when the entire courtroom is falling apart in emotion, because we had Bob Mott on the inside, it wasn't just Lindsay Clancy collapsing on herself, bawling, shaking, but everyone else dealing with that same high emotions, looking at the pictures of the murdered children and everything, they listened to the 911 call. The only two people not to be losing their shit were the two prosecutors. And so how can that happen? How can they be like that? Well, they think she's a performative. When you think someone's performing and they don't really feel that emotion and you just see them as a vile human being, their emotions don't impact you whatsoever, typically. And so again, pure conjecture, I don't know them, I don't live inside their heads, but my conjecture on this is the reason they went for first degree murder is they completely 100% believe in an entire echo chamber that this is exactly the only thing that fits in their mind and anything less would be wrong.

Tony Brueski (3:41)

Well, I mean, I feel like that's I think how we had such vitriol through this whole case from the beginning is because there really wasn't, I don't know, a lot of minds being changed or ability to hear the evidence in this case and have an opinion swayed. I don't think a lot of people went into this middle of the road. I could be wrong. I'm sure there's some, but I don't know that a lot of people were middle of the road in this to begin with and being willing to be swayed. I feel like a lot of people went in with their direction they were going. And then the echo chamber started on any side and it just fortified that even harder and each side gets louder at each other. But at the end of the day, also both sides not hearing each other. I think it's funny in some ways when you get to talking with people on this, if you have a different opinion, everybody agrees, yes, it's horrible, the children are dead.