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The lead defense attorney for Andrea Yates — the Texas mom who drowned her five young children while in the throes of postpartum psychosis in 2001— said the mistrial declared in Lindsay Clancy‘s high-profile murder trial could ultimately benefit the accused killer mom.
George Parnham, 85 — the lawyer credited with securing Yates’ infamous not guilty by reason of insanity verdict — said Friday’s decision could offer the defense a leg up for several reasons.
“Give me a hung jury and a mistrial every day of the week,” he told The Post.
The mistrial was called after jurors spent nearly 40 hours deliberating, resulting in an 11-1 decision deadlock that Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington slammed as a “real shame” because he “kicked the sh-t” out of the prosecution.
Parnham said he understands Reddington’s frustration because a mistrial “disrupts the whole process” and said he believes the attorney was within arm’s reach of securing an acquittal for Clancy in the killings of her daughter Cora, 5, and sons Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
“Eleven to one, you’re surely hoping that you don’t get a mistrial with the holdout, but the other side is that if the case is retried, you have the advantage,” he explained.
Having gone through a full trial for his client, Reddington now has insight into the prosecution’s strategy and will have court transcripts from Clancy’s first trial at the ready to check witness testimony for contradictions and inconsistences, Parnham said. If witnesses’ stories were the change, that could be grounds to have their testimony disqualified, he said.
But Parnham expects the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office and Reddington will reach an agreement instead of heading to retrial, saying he doesn’t think prosecutors want to run the risk of retrying her case since the jury was mostly in Clancy’s favor.
“I think in all probability, the resolution, if it happens, will not be a not guilty by reason of insanity acquittal,” he said.
He predicts that she will likely be convicted of lesser charges and be incarcerated for “a short period of time,” although he believes that she should have been found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Parnham referenced Yates’ case, in which a jury initially found her guilty instead of insane for drowning her children in the bathtub of her home just outside of Houston.
But the 2002 capital murder conviction was thrown out after it emerged that a forensic psychiatrist for the prosecution gave false testimony. A second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. Yates remains at Kerrville State Hospital for treatment.
“We came back, retried it and they acquitted her,” he said.
Yates’ groundbreaking murder trial bears striking similarities to the Clancy case — in which the 36-year-old Massachusetts mother strangled her three children to death, Parnham said.
Both mothers have said they suffered postpartum psychosis and neither had any “ulterior motives” for killing their children — such as money or revenge against the father, according to Parnham.
“You eliminate all the possibilities of ulterior motives and you end up with the undeniable fact that mental illness is the reason these situations occurred,” he said.
Yates was 37 on June 20, 2001, when she killed her children — Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months.
She waited for her husband, Rusty, to go to work before drowning them, one by one, then called 911, according to testimony.
“I’ve worked on a lot of capital murder cases but when a mother and child are involved, it’s a totally different perspective,” he said. “Jurors are perplexed and astonished really.”
Clancy’s attorney “has done an excellent job talking to jurors” about postpartum psychosis, which is extremely rare and hard to diagnose, he said.
Parnham, who still visits Yates every two months, said she’s likely aware of Clancy’s high-profile case, though they haven’t discussed it.
He said Yates is making progress with her mental health, and has asked him to visit her kids’ final resting places.
“I’ll go out and give flowers to the graves. She’s so grateful that someone is doing that for her children,” he said.
He sometimes brings her food from Cracker Barrel, said she likes to read and is occasionally tasked with helping other patients.
“I love her like a daughter,” he said.
Clancy told her husband she heard a male voice telling her to “kill her children and kill herself,” a psychologist testified during the trial.
Prosecutors contend she was in control and knew right from wrong.
Clancy is due back in court on Sept. 29.
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