A judge on Friday declared a mistrial after jurors couldn’t agree on whether to find Lindsay Clancy guilty in the 2023 killings of her three children.
Judge William Sullivan read a note from the jury’s foreperson, which said: “It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision, and will not be able to.”
The defense was given time to request an emergency stay on the declaration. This stay was denied by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Clancy, 36, was charged with first-degree murder. Authorities said she strangled her children, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan, in their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home and then jumped through a second-story window. She survived with spinal injuries that left her paralyzed.
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Clancy’s lawyers didn’t deny that she killed her children — but the defense argued that she was not criminally responsible, as she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Her lawyers said she was overmedicated, citing Clancy’s prescriptions, her medical history and journal entries with suicidal thoughts.
Prosecutors alleged that she planned the killings and was fully aware of her actions.
Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz said there would not be a decision made Friday on if there would be a retrial.
Speaking to reporters Friday, Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, said if he was Cruz, “I would probably say I don’t think I want to do a retrial because he’s going to lose.”
He called Clancy a “fantastic, wonderful individual,” who “sat there through seven weeks of a trial, where nobody had anything bad to say about her except for the two prosecutors and apparently Tim Cruz.”
“It’s not right what she had to go through because she grieves the loss of those three children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan,” Reddington said.
This case, Reddington said, “shows clearly and unequivocally the woeful deficiency that women have when they’re pregnant, when they have babies, and God forbid, when they’re on medication because of postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis.”
Cruz, meanwhile, said outside the courtroom that the case has “has always been about getting justice for those three little babies.”
“Children were murdered, and it is our job to seek justice,” he said.
The case, Cruz said, “is not about the health care system, about how women are treated in it, or what diagnoses there are in the DSM, or what there are not.”
“Those are all important issues. They stir up emotion, and sometimes they stir up anger,” he said. “This case, however, was about Lindsay Clancy and what she did on Jan. 24, 2023, and the cruel and calculated killing of three innocents.”
Jury deliberations
After 26 days of proceedings, the trial moved to jury deliberations, which came with its own headlines. There were 12 jurors and six alternates.
On Tuesday, Sept. 1, following four days of deliberations, jurors sent a formal note to Judge William Sullivan, stating they were deadlocked and unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Sullivan instructed the jurors to continue deliberating, pointing to the lengthy trial and extensive evidence, including 85 witnesses and 300 exhibits.
“I brought you back out because I know that this was a long trial, all right? I know there were over 80 witnesses; there were over 300 exhibits,” Sullivan said. “But because of that, I’m gonna ask you to go back out, keeping in mind all the instructions that I gave you to go out and to continue your deliberations at this time.”
The jurors spent five more hours deliberating, then went home for the day before returning for a fifth day of deliberations on Sept. 2. After more deliberations, the jury returned deadlocked for a second time. Sullivan read the “Tuey-Rodriguez” charge, encouraging the jury to continue working toward a consensus.
In addition to convicting Clancy, jurors also had the option to convict Clancy of lesser charges — second-degree murder or manslaughter — or deem her not guilty due to lack of criminal responsibility.
During the trial and deliberations, Clancy was held at Tewksbury Hospital in Massachusetts.
Reddington had a box of letters supporting his client “from all over the world” while walking into the courthouse on Thursday, the sixth day of deliberations, The Associated Press reported.
“It’s just amazing. She reads them all,” he said.
On Thursday, there was a heated sidebar, where Reddington said the jury foreperson’s note indicated one juror was refusing to follow the judge’s instructions. He asked Sullivan to remove that juror.
“The court has an instruction from the foreperson of that juror that’s been working for a week now saying that there’s one juror who refuses to listen to the law that you’ve given him or her on reasonable doubt,” Reddington said.
Sullivan refused, saying he couldn’t side with one juror or the other 11 without knowing what was happening inside the deliberation room.
The jurors ultimately were split 11-1 on Clancy’s case. In their emergency appeal Friday, the defense asked the court to excuse that juror, NPR reported, writing that their “reasoning reflects a bias against those who suffer from debilitating mental illness.”
Reddington on Friday had harsh words for the holdout juror.
Others on the jury “know that they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was,” Reddington said.
“You could see how defeated they were sitting there, and I got a funny feeling that they would have gone on for another week if they had to. So, I hope that guy can sleep well at night,” he said.
Details from the trial
In his closing argument on Aug. 27, Reddington held up photos of Clancy, her children and ex-husband.
“This is what they had. This is their family. How does turn into this? How? Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got,” Reddington said.
Reddington said Clancy was in the “depths of despair” before the deaths of her children, describing “horrible” intrusive thoughts, and showing writings of hers that he said were “nothing other than little chicken scratches because her mind was gone.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague, meanwhile, said while there’s no dispute Clancy was suffering from mental illness, “that’s not the issue in this trial.”
“What’s on trial here, what the issue is here, is what Lindsey Clancy did the night of Jan. 24, 2023, and what her mental state was at the time,” Sprague said.
Sprague argued Clancy had “more access to treatment and care and support than a lot of people do,” including health insurance, treatment at multiple specialty programs, and help from both her and her ex-husband’s family.
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