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Ratko Mladic Dies; Closing Arguments Begin in Lindsay Clancy Trial. Aired 11-11:30a ET

Aired August 27, 2026 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Happening now: breaking news. We're about to hear from the U.S. attorney general about what the U.S. Justice Department is now calling a major gang takedown operation.

And three U.S. Secret Service officials, including the agency's communications chief, now on leave during a misconduct investigation. Why did they have their security clearances stripped away?

Welcome to our viewers here in the United States and around the world. I'm Wolf Blitzer. Pamela Brown is off. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

Let's begin this hour with the breaking news. Closing arguments are now under way in the Lindsay Clancy triple murder trial. Right now, prosecutors just started giving their arguments. And here's some of what Clancy's defense just presented to the jury.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN REDDINGTON, ATTORNEY FOR LINDSAY CLANCY: How does this turn into this? How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Clancy has pleaded not guilty to murdering her three young children. Her attorneys do not deny that she killed them, but they argue she should not be held criminally liable for their deaths. They say she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time.

Juries will also be able to consider first- or second-degree murder or manslaughter if they find her guilty.

CNN's Jean Casarez is over at the courthouse in Massachusetts.

Jean, what else have we heard from Clancy's attorney so far? JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, he's angry. He's very angry,

saying this was a needless prosecution, that prosecutors put this innocent woman on trial.

Jurors, according to our producer in the courtroom, are completely focused on the closing arguments. Lindsay Clancy has a tissue in her hand, and at points she is dabbing her eyes with that tissue. She's quivering a little bit. You see her shoulders going up as if she is taking a breath.

But the prosecutors have now started their closing arguments, saying that definitely Lindsay Clancy was mentally ill, but she knew right from wrong when she strangled her children. Let's go in live and listen to some of those closing arguments.

JENNIFER SPRAGUE, PLYMOUTH COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS, DISTRICT ATTORNEY: ... wants to get back to where she was, but she had discussions with her providers about how these medications work, and that it takes time for them to get into your system, and it takes time for them to work.

She even texted her mother about that, about how she knew that she had to be patient, that it took weeks for the amitriptyline, for example, to get into her system and worked. And she knew all of this, and she just -- she couldn't be patient. She couldn't wait. She wanted it faster.

She even told Dr. Tufts -- it's a note in the records -- that she knew the problem was that she wasn't focusing on one provider and following one plan. She knew that going from doctor to doctor, practice to practice, South Shore to MGH to different programs, not the best way to deal with the situation.

She said it in her own words to Dr. Tufts. We need to stick with one provider and stick with one plan to see if it works. And she actually turned down help from at least two locations at various points. We talked a lot about the Women and Infants records.

And you don't have to believe what I say about them or the witnesses say about them or defense. You can look at the records themselves. Page nine, it tells that -- it says right there -- Patrick was the one who said overmedication was the issue, not the doctors there, not the people evaluating her.

What they put was depression, R.O., rule out, adverse medication effects. That means they have to look into it to see if medication's a problem. But there's a difference between an adverse effect, a symptom, or a problem with a medication, and being overmedicated, taking too much of a medication, which is taking too many at one time.

There's a difference there. And Women and Infants never said she was overmedicated. What they also don't do is turn her away. It's not that she went there and they said, can't help you, go away. They told her -- it's in the records -- based on the onset of her symptoms, they weren't sure if it was postpartum or peripartum. They saw she had an issue.

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They wanted to help her. It says there, we offered her -- they offered her three programs. They offered her the inpatient medical management program. They offered her a partial hospitalization program for general mental health. And they offered her an outpatient program.

It shows they put a lot of thought into that, into offering her this care, when they gave her three separate options, considering she's a young mom, maybe she doesn't want to be away from home. But we will give her the option of being in the hospital and getting her medications right.

But we will also give her the option of the partial hospitalization, where she can be here during the day and go home to her kids in the evening, and then that third option of being an outpatient and being able to be at home with their kids and come in for appointments.

It was very thoughtful of them. It was very well-planned out to give her these three options. And it's kind of the exact opposite of just turning someone away and saying, go away, we can't help you. And her response, I'm going to talk to my provider about it for guidance.

And she goes to Dr. Tufts. She sees Jollotta at some point. You look at the records, she never discussed those options with them. She told them that Women and Infants turned her away and said she didn't qualify for the program. She didn't discuss those three programs that they offered her.

So, basically, they give her this offer of help, three different forms of help, and she says, no, doesn't want to do them, and doesn't discuss them with her provider. And also that first time she goes to Mass General to the emergency room, they offer her a bed at McLean, and she turns it down.

She wants help. No one's saying she doesn't want help. But she's making these decisions and doing these things that aren't helping her get help, that are turning away help, because she wants the help in a certain way, in a certain time frame.

And all during this time, between September and December of 2022, she's interacting with friends, with family, teachers, gym staff, the nanny, people at gymnastics, interacting with them in public spaces, in public ways, driving her kids around, all throughout that time, able to know the difference between right and wrong, able to conform her behavior to the law and to the requirements of society and interacting with others and presenting herself as a functioning adult, a functioning mom.

You know that she knew the difference between right and wrong during that time because she had those thoughts at the beginning of December of harming her kids, and she told Patrick and her mother about them. But who she didn't tell is important and very telling. She didn't tell a single provider, not Tufts, not Jollotta, not Jennifer McAllister, not Dukes, no one at McLean, no one at MGH, no one at South Shore.

Didn't tell any of them. And why? Because the police might... CASAREZ: There's quite a difference in delivery here, because the defense so angry at every point with that closing. The demeanor here with the prosecutor, much more subdued, kind, emotional.

Once the closing argument is completed by the prosecution, the jury will get the absolute final instructions. They will then begin to deliberate.

But with all the focus on Lindsay Clancy and the doctors and the health care system and right from wrong, we cannot forget the victims in this case, three innocent children, Cora, 5 years old, Dawson, 3 years old, and Callan, 8 months -- Wolf.

BLITZER: So heartbreaking. So heartbreaking, indeed.

Jean Casarez, thank you very much for your reporting.

And joining us now, the criminal defense attorney Elyse Hershon.

Elyse, what do you think about what we just heard? We heard from the defense, now the prosecution, their closing arguments. They each have about an hour to make their final points.

ELYSE HERSHON, CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Good morning, and thanks for having me back on your show.

Great recap and reporting by Jean, as usual.

So, essentially, there's very -- and she's right. There's a very different tone between the defense and the prosecution, and there should be. The prosecution, although they softened their tone for the first time in this trial from -- in their closing, they have spent the entire trial, just what Jean was saying earlier, vilifying mental illness, calling Lindsay an exaggerator, a liar, and a cold, calculated killer.

It's very obvious throughout this trial that the prosecutor coming out and saying it was a fake suicide and that she was an overwhelmed mother as some sort of motive to kill her children did not land with the jury, did not land with the court of public opinion. And they have continued to push this narrative throughout the whole trial.

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That in turn has unified really across the globe for Lindsay Clancy. How can people unify behind a mother who killed her children? Because she is also a victim here.

And attorney Reddington spent a lot of his closing not just denigrating the prosecution, at one point pointing to them directly -- the judge had to sort of refocus him to the jury -- but denigrating them and really kind of appropriately saying that they have really come at this and turned Lindsay Clancy, the victim, into a killer, and she's not.

The prosecution is again, I think, alienating people with this approach to closing, that she didn't really want help, that she wasn't trying hard enough to get help. She saw so many doctors. She tried so many medications. She checked herself into a voluntary psych hospital. I just think the prosecution is not doing well here.

BLITZER: The jury during the course of the trial, as you know, Elyse, heard from multiple expert witnesses who had very differing opinions on Clancy's mental state. How might they make sense of these different testimonies? I'm talking about the jury.

HERSHON: It's something that they're going to have to weigh. The judge is going to tell them again that they can weigh expert testimony however they want to.

They can decide who to believe. Just because somebody gets up there and says they're an expert doesn't mean the jury has to accept and weigh each of them equally.

Something very significant that attorney Reddington did in his cross- examination of two of the three of the prosecution's rebuttal witnesses, a psychiatrist who works with the FBI, and a psychologist who said -- both said that Lindsay is criminally responsible, attorney Reddington got both of them to admit that the defense expert, Dr. Resnick, is the guy, the guy in filicide, when parents kill their children, in deciding and evaluating whether someone's malingering, meaning exaggerating symptoms, and also in postpartum psychosis.

So he very powerfully got the prosecution's experts to say that the defense expert was world-renowned and they have studied him. So that puts the defense in a much stronger position, despite the fact that they don't have to prove anything here.

Again, Massachusetts, the prosecution has to disprove mental illness and disprove that she wasn't overcome by her suffering, whether it was psychosis or something else. So, the prosecution, I don't think is going to get there.

BLITZER: We will see what happens.

Elyse Hershon, thank you very much for your expert analysis.

And we're going to continue, of course, to monitor the closing arguments in court and bring you updates as they happen.

And, by the way, if you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, there are resources available at all times. Call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. There you see it, 988.

Still ahead, this just in: A notorious war criminal known as the Butcher of Bosnia has just died. We will have details.

You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.

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BLITZER: And this just into THE SITUATION ROOM.

CNN has now learned that the notorious general known as the Butcher of Bosnia has died in prison at the age of 84. Ratko Mladic was convicted of genocide for his role in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia's non-Serb population back in the early 1990s. Mladic was serving a life sentence for those war crimes.

CNN's international diplomatic editor, Nic Robertson, is joining us right now.

Nic, you were working as a much younger news producer in Bosnia back in 1995. I remember those days well. What stands out to you about Mladic's death and his brutal criminal legacy?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC EDITOR: Yes, Wolf, it was alongside our fellow colleague Christiane Amanpour.

And we witnessed every day the utter brutality in the way that Mladic led his forces, the Bosnian Serb forces, in this civil war. The war lasted from 1992 to 1995. It came as the former Yugoslavia broke up. But this was absolutely brutal. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. The capital, Sarajevo, was under siege from Ratko Mladic'S forces.

And these -- one of the things I remember there was the relentless hell that he ordered to be rained down on those civilians in the city there. There were tanks. There was artillery. There was mortars. There were snipers picking off civilians on the streets below.

Mladic was in charge of that. He perhaps will be remembered mostly for the brutal killing of more than 7,000 Bosnian men and boys in the town of Srebrenica. It was a U.N.-protected enclave. I remember going there in 1992, and it was a terrible state then.

They were literally ripping up bed sheets to try to patch up the injured in a makeshift hospital that was in the basement of a library. They were there stuck. The Bosnians were there stuck for three years. Eventually, Mladic and his forces overran it, took the men and boys, executed them, marked them -- buried them in unmarked graves.

I think that's one of the biggest things that stood out.

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RATKO MLADIC, FORMER BOSNIAN MILITARY OFFICER (through translator): Don't be don't be afraid. No one will do anything to you.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): This is how the world will remember Ratko Mladic, calming crowds of civilians ahead of the biggest mass murder in Europe since World War II, a genocide he engineered, and would go on the run for a decade-and-a-half before being captured and brought to trial.

It was July 1995 in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. The country's bloody civil war was in its third year. Mladic commanded the Bosnian Serb army. His forces brutally slaughtered more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica.

Mladic's central and blood-soaked role in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia began years earlier, a frontline commander in 1991 spearheading Serb forces against Croatia. Over the previous three decades, he had risen rapidly through the ranks of the Yugoslav army. But it was Bosnia's battlefields that made him hero to many Serbs, defender of their dwindling fortunes.

He was born in 1943 during the Nazis' World War II occupation, close to the crucible of much of his later killing, Bosnia's capital, Sarajevo. He grew up imbued with Serbian ideology of orthodox Christian faith and defense of ethnic kin. He got his chance in May 1992.

Bosnia's Serbian political leaders picked him to head their forces. Bosnia's Muslim leaders wanted independence, for Serbs to remain part of Yugoslavia. Mladic laid siege to Sarajevo, shelling and sniping its poorly prepared civilian population.

More than a quarter-million people died in the course of the three- year war, leading to charges of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity against Mladic. When peace came in 1995, Mladic went on the run. In the early 2000s, he was still drawing an army pension in Belgrade.

There were reports of sightings, rumors of arrest, a stroke, even suicide. But, eventually, in the summer of 2011, he was captured living on a Serbian farm with a cousin.

MLADIC (through translator): I am General Ratko Mladic.

ROBERTSON: At last he was bought into the dock in the tribunal in The Hague. His right arm appeared limp, almost useless. During the hearings that followed, he would complain of fatigue and illness, citing past heart problems.

But Mladic remained combative and uncooperative.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Mladic, if you could...

ROBERTSON: He was removed from court during his sentencing, shouting: "It was all lies."

In November 2017, he was convicted, handed life in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity. His death ends one of the darkest chapters in Europe's recent history.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERTSON: And I think one of the most enduring memories I have of Ratko Mladic is sitting there in that courtroom at The Hague in the Netherlands.

He was separated by survivors of some of his victims, mothers, wives of those men and boys that he killed in Srebrenica, separated just by a thin sheet of glass and a few feet. And he turned and he looked at these women. And there was no contrition, no apology, nothing.

In fact, what he did was, he drew his finger across his throat like this, looking at those women, as if to say, you could be executed too. That was Mladic. That was the man who stood on trial. That was the man who told the world his story and that gesture about what he felt about his crimes.

BLITZER: All right, Nic, I want you to stand by.

I also want to bring into this conversation CNN's chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour.

Christiane, as all of us remember, you reported extensively on this war. I was CNN's White House correspondent at the time. And I remember all these White House officials praising you, your award-winning reporting on Ratko Mladic and all the other developments in that war.

What are your thoughts now, now that he has died?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Finally is my thought, and justice finally for the victims in some manner has been has been arrived at.

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Yes, he was sentenced to life in prison. Yes, he was caught and put in front of an international criminal tribunal to be held accountable and to be judged and sentenced. He was very lucky that The Hague did not have a death sentence, unlike the sentences that he meted out to thousands and thousands of Bosnians over four years-plus.

He was responsible for the massive, long siege of Sarajevo, in which he basically tried to starve, shoot, snipe, and mortar into death all the people who lived in Sarajevo particularly. It was called ethnic cleansing, and then eventually it was adjudicated as genocide, what he did in Srebrenica.

And this is important because this wasn't just a civil war in which people were killed. This was an absolute plan masterminded and supported also by the president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, who was also captured, who was also handed over, who was also tried. He died in prison.

All the top Bosnian Serbs and their patrons in Serbia have mostly been adjudicated, held accountable, and are all dead now. This is probably of little comfort to the victims. And you heard Nic talk about the mothers, the mothers of Srebrenica; 7,000 of their husbands, their sons, their nephews, 7,000 boys and men of Bosnian Muslim origin were slaughtered without so much as the ability to defend themselves.

I remember this horrendous videotape that Mladic's own television crew took of him when his troops finally reached the so-called U.N. safe haven of Srebrenica on July 11, 2000 -- 1995. And he came up to those people who were behind wire, and he basically said, don't be afraid. He said it in Serbian. Don't be afraid. Nothing's going to happen to you.

And he had his henchmen hand out some candies. And then, in fact, they were separated from the women, and they were marched into the forests, and they were killed, and they were put into mass graves. And we found some of them. We found some of the survivors.

We, the journalists, over four years held this man and his henchmen accountable, and, at least, at least we recorded in real time his and all the other Serb and Bosnian Serb crimes during this war. And, finally, the journalists, all of us, all of us together, our work all together did something good.

It brought some justice in a war that we were faced with, the first such war, the first such crimes in Europe since World War II. We grew up in the age of never again. And again was happening in Europe, and the world actually didn't want to pay attention.

And it was only at the end of this spate of crimes that had lasted nearly four years in July of 1995 that the world said, that is one massacre too many, and we are going to intervene. And so they did. The United States led a quick NATO -- sort of NATO operation to -- not to attack civilians, but to attack their military emplacements, which they had used to besiege Sarajevo and other towns.

And in two weeks, these people folded. They cried uncle and they folded. Why did it take so long for the West to get involved? And, thereafter, the United States led a diplomatic effort, the Dayton accords, finally under the guidance of then special envoy Richard Holbrooke during the Clinton administration.

And to this day, this peace lasts. And it's not perfect, but it lasts. And it's a really important reminder of what can happen when force backed by -- rather, diplomacy backed by force can actually cause and bring about the end of a slaughter, such as the one that we all witnessed.

And CNN was massively important in bringing this to the world every single day for four years, and including the final -- the final results, which were the peace, and then the accountability of these people.

Mladic was -- and I'm not a psychiatrist -- but he was a sociopath. He was a psychopath. I interviewed him, and he was a sneering, horrendous person. You looked into his eyes, and they were -- they were -- they...

BLITZER: I think we just lost our connection with Christiane.

She did an amazing job. She always does an amazing job. She worked very closely with Nic Robertson during those critically important days when Ratko Mladic was simply slaughtering all these mostly Muslim young men and boys for no reason other than the fact that they were Muslim, and he was going after them. And now he has died.

Christiane, thank you very much, Nic Robertson to you as well. Appreciate your excellent, excellent coverage. Up next: the Kennedy Center conflict here in Washington, the latest

effort to put President Trump's name on the venue, and who's now fighting it in federal court.

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