Kevin Reddington appeared on Good Morning America on Tuesday, in his first interview since the Lindsay Clancy case ended in a mistrial. Asked what comes next, he bowed his head and made a direct appeal to the President of the United States, asking him to consider a pardon for his client.
It was a sincere moment. It was also, from a legal standpoint, roughly equivalent to asking the commissioner of Major League Baseball to overturn a parking ticket.
There are two problems, and they stack.
Problem one: wrong government.
Article II of the Constitution grants the President the power to pardon offenses against the United States. Federal offenses. That is the entire scope of it, and it has never been anything else.
Lindsay Clancy was tried in Plymouth County Superior Court under Massachusetts state law, by a Massachusetts prosecutor, before a Massachusetts judge. Nothing about the case touches federal jurisdiction at any point.
The clemency power over a Massachusetts case belongs to the Governor of Massachusetts, acting with the advice and consent of the Governor's Council.
That would be Governor Maura Healey.
So the pardon request went out on national television, to a president who has no authority whatsoever over the case, while the one official in America who actually holds that power is a Democrat who was not mentioned.
Problem two: there is nothing to pardon.
This is the part that should have been caught before the camera turned on.
A pardon forgives a conviction. Clancy does not have one. The jury deadlocked, the judge declared a mistrial, and the case simply stopped. No verdict was entered. Legally, she stands exactly where she stood before the trial began.
You cannot pardon a mistrial. There is no finding to forgive, no sentence to commute, no judgment to vacate. The request is not merely aimed at the wrong official. It is aimed at a thing that does not exist.
Reddington said after the deadlock that he would absolutely try the case again if it came to that, and the Commonwealth is free to retry her. That is the actual next step, and everybody in that courtroom knows it.
Why he probably did it anyway.
Give him this much. Reddington is not a stupid man. He has been trying cases in Massachusetts for decades and he knows the pardon power better than the average GMA viewer does.
Which suggests the appeal was not aimed at the Justice Department. It was aimed at the public, and specifically at the segment of it that has followed this case for three years and believes Clancy was failed by a medical system before she was failed by anyone else. A televised plea builds pressure. Pressure influences whether a district attorney decides a retrial is worth it.
That is a legitimate strategy. It is just not a legal argument, and the two should not be confused by anyone reading coverage this week.
What has not changed.
Cora. Dawson. Callan. Three children, one of them eight months old.
Twelve jurors sat through twenty-two days of testimony, more than eighty witnesses, over three hundred exhibits, and roughly thirty hours of deliberation before telling the court they could not reach agreement. Whatever anyone thinks about the outcome, those twelve people refused to fake a verdict they did not have. That is the system working, not failing.
The question of whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible remains open. It will stay open until either a prosecutor declines to retry her or another jury answers it.
What will not resolve it is a pardon.
Not from this president. Not from any president. And not for a case that never produced a conviction in the first place.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
- Article Source:
news.basedapparel.com
- Photo:
