Lindsay Clancy's Lawyer Asks Trump for a Pardon, Barry Morphew Lasts One Day on House Arrest, and Two Women Killed by Their Caregiver

0:03 Calaroga Shark Media. Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Shark Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Wednesday, September 9th, 2026. Yesterday morning, Kevin Reddington sat down on national television and asked the President of the United States to pardon Lindsay Clancy. I'm going to explain briefly why that cannot happen, not why it should not happen, why it is not legally possible, and why a defense attorney with 50 years in Massachusetts courtrooms knows that perfectly well. Then we go to Colorado, where Barry Morphew has had a genuinely remarkable week. On Wednesday, a judge confined him to his house with no exceptions. By Thursday night, he was in handcuffs. He is currently in the Boulder County Jail, and prosecutors are now asking that his $ 3 million bond be thrown out entirely. And then to Pomona, California, where a man who was paid to look after elderly women was sentenced last week to two consecutive life sentences without parole for killing two of them in the same bathroom half an hour apart. Let's get into it. Quick recap for anybody who has been away. On Friday afternoon, after seven days and roughly 38 hours, the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case deadlocked and Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial.

1:33 Jury notes indicated the panel was split 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal. Sullivan has set September 29th to figure out what happens next, and Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not said whether he will retry it. On Friday at the White House, President Trump was asked about the case. He called it a shame and a horrible tragedy. He said it looked like a hung jury and that there would be another trial. He said she did a horrible thing, that it could not be worse, and that there would be a price to pay, and that the price would be a mental institution or jail or something. And on Tuesday morning on Good Morning America, Kevin Reddington responded to that directly. He said that perhaps the president, who felt compelled to speak out about this case, would consider his client. He addressed him directly and said he hoped he would consider this young lady, the type of person she is, and what she has been through, and consider a pardon. Now here's the thing. The president of the United States cannot pardon Lindsay Clancy. Not today.

2:37 Not after a conviction. Not ever. The pardon power comes from Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, and it is written narrowly. It applies to offenses against the United States. That means federal crimes. Lindsay Clancy is charged under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in a Massachusetts courthouse by a Massachusetts district attorney. No president has any authority over that, and no president ever has. In Massachusetts, clemency runs through the governor. A petition goes to the parole board sitting as the advisory board of pardons, which makes a recommendation to the governor. And if the governor decides to act, that decision still requires the consent of the governor's council, an elected body most people in that state could not name. And there is a second problem underneath the first one. There is nothing to pardon. A mistrial is not a conviction. Lindsay Clancy has not been convicted of anything. You cannot pardon a person who is awaiting a decision about whether they will be tried again. So what was that? Kevin Reddington has been practicing criminal law in Massachusetts for about 50 years. He knows every word of what I just said. He has probably explained it to clients. That request was not a legal maneuver, because there is no legal maneuver there to make. It was a message, and it had exactly two audiences. Because a pardon request that cannot legally be granted is not a filing.

4:05 it is a press release with a constitutional costume on. The first is the president who put himself into this case voluntarily on Friday and who has an enormous megaphone. The second is Timothy Cruz, the district attorney who has to decide in the next three weeks whether to spend another six weeks and an enormous amount of public money retrying a case that 11 jurors were ready to walk away from. Cruz is not gonna be moved by a television appearance. But he is a politician as well as a prosecutor, and a president weighing in from a podium changes the temperature around a decision that was already going to be unpopular whichever way it went. And Reddington said the quiet part in the same interview. He said he is willing to listen to Cruz, that he has known him for 30 years, and that he hopes after this trial they could work something out acceptable to both sides.

4:56 That is the actual news out of that appearance, not the pardon, the word resolution. And one more thing about the pardon request that I do not think is cynical, only sad. Reddington also said in that interview that he did not know much about postpartum depression before he took this case. That is an honest thing for a lawyer to admit on national television, and it is also the entire problem in one sentence. One of the most experienced criminal defense attorneys in Massachusetts had to learn this from scratch at 75 because a woman he was representing had killed her children. A couple of other things from that interview, asked whether he regretted saying Cruz was crushed, Reddington said he does not regret it at all, though he allowed he could have been more circumspect and simply said he did a good job. And he disclosed something we did not know, that to his knowledge, the 11 jurors who agreed were at not guilty by reason of insanity, not manslaughter, not a compromise, an acquittal. That number, if it is right, is what Cruz is looking at on his desk right now.

6:00 And I want to be fair to Cruz here because he is going to take a beating this month and some of it will be unearned. He said Friday that the first degree charges were warranted and appropriate. He also revealed that his two prosecutors were doxed and endured weeks of threats and ridicule for doing their jobs. And he brought it back to where it belongs, saying his office was at that courthouse because Cora, Dawson and Callen are not. He is not a villain for having charged this case. Three children were strangled. A prosecutor who looked at that and filed nothing would have been derelict. The question in front of him now is different, and it is harder. It is not whether the charge was right. It is whether a second jury, hearing the same 84 witnesses and the same six experts, is going to come out anywhere different from the first one. Cora Clancy was five. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. September 29th is the date. Someone has to say their name.

7:00 When we come back, Barry Morphew got put on house arrest and was in a jail cell about a day later. Suzanne Morphew was 49 years old. She was a mother of two daughters. She disappeared on Mother's Day in May of 2020 in Chaffee County, Colorado, after reportedly going out for a bike ride. Her remains were not found until September of 2023, 45 miles from her home, by investigators looking for something else. There was no sign of trauma. But investigators say her bone marrow contained traces of a chemical cocktail used to tranquilize wildlife. Prosecutors allege that Barry Morphew was the only person in that area, other than wildlife officials, authorized to use those chemicals. He was charged in 2021. That case was dismissed in 2022. a grand jury indicted him again in 2025. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, he denies killing his wife, and he is presumed innocent. His trial is set for next summer.

8:10 He was released on a $ 3 million bond over the objection of prosecutors, who argued he had the means and the motive to run. The conditions were narrow. Stay home in Southern Colorado except for medical appointments and emergencies, work, meetings with his lawyers, and court. Wear GPS. Now here is the week he just had. On August 26th, at about 7.30 in the evening, there was a hit and run in Denver at 8th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard. Two vehicles were struck, one of the drivers recorded video. A private citizen with no connection to any of this saw a news report about it and emailed the judge in Morphew's murder case. Judge Amanda Hopkins watched the video herself.

8:53 And in a written order, she said that the person in that footage is very clearly the defendant. The order describes a truck driving aggressively before striking two vehicles. A man refusing to give his name or identification, saying he has no insurance. Offering the other driver $ 300 cash, being refused. Then trying to buff the scratches out of her car with his hand and his t-shirt. And then, when she said she was calling police, leaving, nearly hitting someone and going over a curb on his way out. On Wednesday, September 2nd, Hopkins ordered him confined to his home at all times, no exceptions. Not medical appointments, not work. If there is a medical emergency, he calls 911 and leaves in an ambulance. She was also careful about what she could not do. Under Colorado law, she explained, a court cannot independently revoke bond without a probable cause finding on a new felony, and no court with jurisdiction over the Denver incident has made one. Prosecutors or a bonding commissioner have to ask, and Morphew gets a hearing first. So prosecutors went and got the GPS data, and what they say it shows is this. On August 28th, Barry Morphew drove from his home to Denver International Airport, arriving late morning.

10:10 He left the airport almost immediately. Then he spent time in areas of hotels and a mall, and then GPS puts him in the area of the alleged crash. His attorney told prosecutors he was not working at the airport and that it is possible he was picking up his daughter. District Attorney Ann Kelly's response was that going to the airport for any purpose other than work is a breach of his bond and that it presents an extreme flight risk. She asked for a warrant. On Thursday night, Boulder County Sheriff's deputies arrested Barry Morphew and booked him into the Boulder County Jail. He had been on house arrest for roughly a day. Read that sequence again. Wednesday, a judge orders him to stay in his house at all times, no exceptions, and explains on the record that she is doing it because she watched a video of him leaving the scene of a crash. Thursday night, deputies put him in handcuffs for failing to comply with that order. One day, a bond hearing was set for yesterday afternoon in Alamosa District Court, and prosecutors are now asking that the bond be revoked outright rather than merely tightened. Let me be precise about the presumption here, because it matters. Barry Morphew has not been charged with anything arising from the Denver incident.

11:25 Denver police say the case is still under investigation and that they were working to contact the registered owner of the truck. He is presumed innocent of murdering his wife. None of what I just described has been proven anywhere. But look, I'm going to be honest with you about the picture. An airport. That is the detail. Of all the places a man on a $ 3 million bond, accused of killing his wife, with prosecutors on record calling him a flight risk, could drive to on a Friday, he drove to an international airport. And according to the state, he was not supposed to be there. There is an innocent version of that. His lawyer offered it, and it is a completely ordinary thing. He picked up his daughter.

12:07 Fathers do that every single day. If that is what happened, it is a bond violation and nothing more sinister than that. And there's a playbook for this, which is that when you are out on bond in a murder case, you do not go anywhere you cannot justify on a piece of paper. You go to work, you go to the doctor, you go to your lawyer, and you go home. That is the deal. $ 3 million is what the deal cost. There is also a piece of this that has nothing to do with Barry Morphew and everything to do with how pre-trial release actually works in this country. The whole justification for letting somebody out on bond in a murder case is that technology can watch them, so a cell does not have to. The ankle monitor is the reason a judge can say yes. And in this case, prior monitoring reports had reportedly shown no violations at all. Whatever the GPS recorded on August 28th, nobody flagged it in real time. It only got looked at because prosecutors went and pulled the data after a stranger emailed a judge about a news report. The monitor was on his ankle the entire time. It worked exactly as designed and it caught nothing. Because a device that records where you are is not the same as a person who notices. Suzanne Morphew has been dead for six years. Her body lay in the ground for three of them before anybody found her.

13:26 The man charged with killing her will not face a jury until next summer, and this week the question in front of a Colorado judge was not whether he did it, but whether he can be trusted to stay in his own house until then. Suzanne Morphew, someone has to say her name. When we come back, two women, one bathroom, 30 minutes. Monica Moon Lee was 75 years old. She used a walker. She had dementia. He Sook Park was 83. They both lived at a place called Happy Homes Care, a small residential facility for elderly women on Sapphire Canyon Road in Diamond Bar, California. It operated out of a house.

14:17 Neighbors have said as many as six people lived on the property. On the morning of June 24, 2023, the overnight caregiver on duty was a man named Jeon Chun Lee. Shortly before seven in the morning, prosecutors say he ushered Monica Moon Lee into the bathroom and killed her with a plastic bag and electrical tape. 30 minutes later, he did the same thing to He Sook Park in the same bathroom in the same way. Deputies found both women that day. Lee was arrested. He confessed quickly. On August 20th of this year, a Los Angeles County jury convicted him of two counts of first degree murder and found the special circumstance of multiple murders to be true. That special circumstance is what took life without parole off the table as a maximum and made it the floor. Then came the part that makes this case relevant to everything else on this show lately. Lee's defense was not guilty by reason of insanity. In California, that gets tried in a separate phase, after guilt. So on August 27th, that same jury came back on the sanity question, and they rejected it. They found he was legally sane when he did it. I want you to hold that next to the first segment of this show for a second. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, 11 of 12 jurors were prepared to find that a woman was not criminally responsible. In Pomona, California, 12 of 12 found that a man was. Same legal concept. Two juries.

15:41 Two completely different outcomes. That is not a flaw in the system. That is the system. Criminal responsibility is decided case by case by ordinary people looking at a specific person on a specific day. And it produces different answers because the cases are different. Anybody telling you there is a clean rule here is selling something. And notice which way the split ran, because it cuts against the lazy assumption. The sympathetic defendant with the documented psychiatric collapse got 11 jurors ready to acquit. The man with the confession and the search history got 12 who said no. Juries are not soft on insanity defenses. They are skeptical of them, and they should be, and occasionally one of them is real.

16:25 On Thursday, in a Pomona courtroom, Superior Court Judge Mike Camacho sentenced John Chun-Li to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He said there was overwhelming evidence of guilt, and there was one piece of that evidence I keep thinking about. Detectives searched Lee's phone. Among what they found were Google searches about choking someone. and a search asking what the sentence is for murder in California, and a search asking whether people convicted of first-degree murder get treatment for their illnesses. That third one is the one that stays with you. Somewhere in that record is a man looking up what happens to him afterward. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said afterward that these two women's lives were taken by the very person expected to keep them safe. And that is the whole thing, and it is why this segment is on our show today.

17:18 Nobody was paying attention to Monica Moon Lee and He Sook Park. I do not mean their families. I'm sure their families loved them. I mean the rest of us. Two elderly women were killed inside a licensed care facility in a residential neighborhood by the person the state and their families trusted to be alone with them overnight. That happened three years ago, and I would guess almost nobody listening to this had heard about it until right now. There is no documentary about Happy Homes Care. There were no crowds outside that Pomona courthouse. Nobody flew in from another state. Nobody wore a color. And I think I know why, and I do not like the answer. Two women in their 70s and 80s, one of them with dementia, living in a converted house on a suburban street, are the least visible people in this country. They had already been moved out of view once. Then somebody killed them, and they stayed out of view. There are roughly 30,000 assisted living facilities in the United States and well over a million people living in them. Most of those places are fine. The people working in them are overwhelmingly doing hard and badly paid work with real care. But the residents are, almost by definition, people who cannot easily report what happens to them. And some of them cannot report anything at all. We have spent six weeks in this country arguing about one courtroom in Massachusetts, and I include this show in that. Meanwhile, a jury in Pomona quietly did the work, took a sanity phase seriously, and gave

18:50 two women who could not defend themselves the only thing anybody could still give them. If you take one practical thing from today, take this. If you have somebody in a care facility, the people who do this work are overwhelmingly decent and underpaid and doing a job most of us could not do. This is not an indictment of them. But you are allowed to show up unannounced. You are allowed to ask questions. Every state has an elder abuse reporting line, and in Los Angeles County, that number is 1-877-4R-SENIORS. Monica Moon Lee was 75 and had dementia and used a walker. Hee Sook Park was 83. Someone has to say their names, and almost nobody has. That's the show for Wednesday, September 9th. If this was useful, send it to one person. That is the whole engine here. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment on the Diamond Barcade. Tomorrow we have Brian Koberger's motion to remove the judge who sentenced him and a surgeon in Florida who goes on trial Monday with no lawyer and no jury.

20:08 And Friday is September 11th, the 25th anniversary. We are going to do something different that day and look at it entirely through the law. Because there is a legal story there that almost nobody tells. I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Massachusetts case, a mistrial is not a verdict. Lindsay Clancy has not been convicted of anything and has not been acquitted of anything. Our description of the jury split and of the 11 jurors' position comes from defense attorney Kevin Reddington, both in open court and in his television interview. Jury deliberations are secret, no juror has spoken publicly, and the court has not confirmed any numerical split. Treat those figures as reported rather than established. The Plymouth County District Attorney has not announced whether he will seek a retrial. Our description of the presidential pardon power reflects Article 2, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, which extends that power to offenses against the United States. Massachusetts' clemency procedure runs through the Advisory Board of Pardons, the Governor, and the Governor's Council. On the Colorado case, Barry Morphew has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and is presumed innocent. He has not been charged in connection with the August incident in Denver. and police there have said the matter remains under investigation. The description of that incident comes from a judge's written order and from prosecution filings, not from any finding of fact.

21:39 His attorney has said he was not working at the airport and may have been picking up his daughter. Sources have differed on the dates involved, with the alleged crash reported as August 26th and the airport trip as August 28th, and some accounts placing both on the same day. We have described them as reported and separately. On the California case, Jianchun Li has been convicted and sentenced and retains the right to appeal. Accounts of his age at various points in the case have differed. The description of what happened at the facility comes from prosecutors and from the court record. This episode discusses the killing of elderly people in a care setting, child deaths, and postpartum mental illness. If you suspect abuse or neglect of an older or dependent adult...

22:24 Every state has an Adult Protective Services reporting line, and the National Eldercare Locator can connect you to it at 1-800-677-1116. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.