The depth of its emotional force, legal analysts say, could shape how jurors view the rest of the trial, vividly illustrating the horror of the killings. But it also risked drawing a backlash, however slight, against prosecutors for presenting such disturbing evidence.
“It is inconceivable that the prosecution would not play the 911 recording for the jury,” Jack Lu, a retired Superior Court judge, said Thursday. “They were always going to play the 911 tape.”
The playing of the call was such a potentially explosive move that days before the trial started, Judge William F. Sullivan ruled the news media and the public could not record or distribute the recording when it was played for the jury.
And on Wednesday, before jurors heard the recording, Sullivan reminded the jury of its responsibility to decide a verdict based on the evidence and the law, and not emotion.
Former Suffolk district attorney Daniel Conley, now an attorney at Mintz, said 911 recordings are routinely introduced because they capture events as they unfold, before witnesses have time to reflect or shape their accounts.
“It’s not unusual for prosecutors to introduce the initial 911 call to really give some context to what that first witness observed and saw,” Conley said Thursday.
The law generally recognizes such statements as especially reliable, he noted, because they are made under the stress of startling events. In legal terms, they are often admitted as “excited utterances,” an exception to the hearsay rule, he said.
Lindsay Clancy, 35, has admitted to killing her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — in the family’s Duxbury home in January 2023.
She has pleaded not guilty under what’s commonly known as the insanity defense. Her attorney maintains she was so deeply in the throes of postpartum depression and psychosis at the time that she lacks criminal responsibility for her actions.
This leaves the jurors to determine not whether she killed her children, but whether she was legally responsible.
In pretrial filings, prosecutors argued the 911 recording had significant value as evidence beyond Patrick Clancy’s emotional reaction. They said the call captured Lindsay Clancy responding to questions about the children’s whereabouts and also documented that Patrick was able to “quickly” remove the exercise bands his wife used to strangle the children. That, they argued, supports their theory that the killings were deliberate and carried out with “extreme atrocity and cruelty.”
Still, the recording’s emotional power was impossible to ignore.
Mark Eiglarsh, a defense attorney in Florida and former prosecutor who has closely followed the Clancy trial, said prosecutors understand how evidence like a 911 call can affect jurors.
“The prosecutor’s secret weapon in cases like this always is sympathy,” Eiglarsh said Thursday. Judges instruct jurors not to decide cases based on emotion, he added, but “they’re not robots.”
Eiglarsh said there is always some risk jurors could view especially graphic or emotional evidence as an attempt to appeal to sympathy rather than reason.
“It is possible,” he said. “The argument could be made, ‘Look how they’re attempting to appeal to your sympathies, it’s so transparent.’ ”
He said prosecutors often accept that the benefit of such evidence outweighs the risk.
Lu sees little danger in that calculation.
“In my opinion, it is near-impossible that it will backfire on the prosecution,” he said, adding that he believes “such evidence will not be deemed unfairly prejudicial on appeal.”
Conley, meanwhile, said his experience over 25 years as a prosecutor is that jurors generally take judges’ instructions seriously.
The proceedings on Wednesday, just the second day of the trial that is expected to last six to eight weeks, also highlighted a strategy by Lindsay Clancy’s lawyers that experts praised.
During cross-examination, defense attorney Kevin Reddington approached Patrick Clancy with gentleness. At one point, he told Clancy to let him know if the questioning became too difficult and offered to pause if necessary.
Conley said that was a smart move by Reddington because Patrick Clancy is perhaps the most sympathetic witness in the courtroom.
“The last thing he wants to do is go after Patrick Clancy,” Conley said. “That would . . . almost certainly have a backlash with the jury.”
Eiglarsh agreed.
“It is precisely how I would handle him,” he said.
Patrick Clancy also described his ex-wife’s deteriorating mental health, her psychiatric treatment, and a statement she later made about hearing a male voice telling her to kill the children and herself, testimony that could support key parts of the insanity defense.
Patrick Clancy has also publicly said he forgives Lindsay and has asked others to do the same. The couple has since divorced, and Patrick has remarried.
Lu said there was little strategic value in confronting such a witness.
“Law students could learn a lot from watching this cross-examination,” he said, describing it as a “friendly, unpretentious, un-lawyerlike cross-examination.”
“There was little or nothing to be gained by being mean to this witness that has lost his children,” Lu said.
He noted her attorney has argued that failures in Lindsay Clancy’s mental health treatment, including overmedication, contributed to the tragedy. Given Patrick Clancy’s public statements of forgiveness, Lu said, there was no reason for Reddington to alienate a witness who might be receptive to aspects of that theory.
“What good would it do to be confrontational to the father of these children?” Lu said.
Legal analysts say neither the 911 recording nor Patrick Clancy’s testimony is likely to determine the outcome on their own.
Conley said the case will probably turn on competing psychiatric experts and whether prosecutors persuade jurors that Lindsay Clancy understood her actions were wrong despite her mental illness.
For Lu, the challenge jurors face is broader. He said jurors often make decisions through both rational and emotional processes, and emotionally devastating evidence can be difficult to compartmentalize.
“Very strong emotional decision-making factors are more likely to overwhelm very strong rational decision-making factors,” he said.
Nick Stoico can be reached at [email protected].
