Politics
DA Who Never Does Plea Deals Suddenly Very Interested In Doing A Plea Deal
By Sean Vanity, . BSN Network. Satire.
PLYMOUTH, MA. The Plymouth County District Attorney's office has built its reputation on a simple, morally unambiguous promise: no plea deals, ever, under any circumstances, full stop. That promise is now, according to multiple legal observers, completely negotiable.
The occasion for this institutional soul-searching is the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, in which Clancy stands accused of strangling her three children in January 2023 while allegedly in the grip of a medication-induced mental state her defense described as akathisia. The jury could not reach a verdict. The DA's office must now decide whether to retry the case, and apparently whether its famous principles are the kind of principles that bend when things get expensive and embarrassing.
"This could be the exception," veteran defense attorney Robert Jubinville told reporters, deploying the single word that quietly destroys every policy ever announced by every institution that has ever announced one.
The Plymouth County DA's office declined to confirm or deny that it was considering a plea agreement, which legal experts noted is itself a form of confirmation.
"When an office that never makes deals stops saying it never makes deals, that's the deal," said one attorney who asked not to be named because he is, apparently, the only person in Massachusetts capable of stating the obvious.
The DA's no-deal reputation was not accidental. Plymouth County prosecutors have historically treated plea negotiations the way a vegan treats a steakhouse: they will drive past it, they will acknowledge it exists, but they will not go inside. This posture earned the office considerable praise from victims' rights advocates and considerable eye-rolls from defense attorneys who had to prepare for trials that could have been resolved in a conference room.
Lindsay Clancy, for her part, faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted at retrial. Her defense has maintained throughout that she was not in control of her actions, that her doctors had prescribed a cocktail of psychiatric medications that produced a physiological crisis her mind could not override. Whether that argument persuades a second jury is now an open question. Whether the DA's office wants to find out is apparently also an open question, which was not supposed to be a question at all.
The optics of a retrial are not favorable for anyone. A second jury would hear the same medication records, the same expert witnesses, the same account of a woman who called 911 herself after the attack and was found with self-inflicted wounds. The first jury looked at all of that for weeks and still could not agree. Prosecutors know this. They also know that their press releases from the last decade contain the phrase "this office does not negotiate" in several different fonts.
A spokesperson for the DA's office issued a statement saying the office "remains committed to justice for the victims and their family," which is the institutional equivalent of saying nothing while appearing to say everything.
Clancy's husband, Patrick Clancy, has publicly expressed support for his wife and has asked prosecutors not to pursue the death penalty, which Massachusetts does not have, a detail that did not stop it from being mentioned in coverage approximately four hundred times.
Legal analysts say a plea deal, if it materializes, would likely involve Clancy pleading guilty to lesser charges in exchange for a defined sentence rather than life, allowing the DA's office to secure a conviction, avoid a second unpredictable trial, and quietly retire the no-deals policy to wherever policies go when reality disagrees with them.
No agreement has been reached. No agreement has been formally proposed. The DA's office has not changed its position.
It has merely indicated that its position might change.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.foxnews.com/us/lindsay-clancy-da-rarely-plea-deals-case-could-exception-veteran-attorney-says