A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial Friday in the case of Lindsay Clancy after jurors said they could not reach a unanimous verdict over whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three children in 2023.
Judge William Sullivan announced the mistrial after reading a note from the jury foreperson saying deliberations had reached an impasse.
“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 note said.
Clancy’s defense was given time to seek an emergency stay of the mistrial declaration, but the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied the request.
The mistrial follows days of difficult deliberations in a case that centered not on whether Clancy killed her children, but whether she could be held criminally responsible for their deaths.
Clancy, 36, was accused of strangling her three children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan — inside the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023. She then jumped from a second-story window, suffering spinal injuries that left her paralyzed.
Her attorneys did not dispute that Clancy killed the children. Instead, they argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible for her actions.
The defense pointed to Clancy’s prescriptions, medical history and journal entries documenting suicidal thoughts, arguing she had been overmedicated and was experiencing severe mental illness.
Prosecutors acknowledged that Clancy struggled with mental illness but argued she understood what she was doing and planned the killings.
Jury repeatedly reports deadlock
The trial lasted 26 days and included testimony from 85 witnesses and roughly 300 exhibits before the case went to the jury.
After four days of deliberations, jurors told Sullivan on Tuesday, Sept. 1, that they were deadlocked and unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Sullivan sent them back to continue deliberating.
“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 jury deliberated for another five hours before leaving for the day.
When jurors returned Sept. 2, they again reported being deadlocked. Sullivan then delivered a “Tuey-Rodriguez” charge, an instruction encouraging deadlocked jurors to continue working toward a unanimous decision.
Jurors had several possible verdicts available to them. In addition to a murder conviction, they could consider lesser charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter, or find Clancy not guilty because she lacked criminal responsibility.
Clancy remained at Tewksbury Hospital during the trial and deliberations.
On Thursday, defense attorney Kevin Reddington arrived at the courthouse carrying a box of letters supporting Clancy that he said came “from all over the world.”
“It’s just amazing. She reads them all,” Reddington said.
Dispute erupts over juror
Tensions over the jury's deliberations became public Thursday when Reddington argued that a note from the foreperson suggested one juror was refusing to follow Sullivan’s instructions.
Reddington asked the judge 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 declined to remove the juror, saying he could not take the side of either the individual juror or the other 11 without knowing what was occurring inside the jury room.
On Friday, Reddington filed a motion seeking an order ending sidebars and requesting that “all related proceedings will be handled in open court.”
Ultimately, the jury's inability to reach a unanimous decision brought the trial to an end without a verdict.
Mental state at center of trial
The central question throughout the trial was Clancy’s mental state on Jan. 24, 2023.
During closing arguments on Aug. 27, Reddington displayed photographs of Clancy, her children and her ex-husband while arguing that medication and inadequate medical treatment contributed to the killings.
“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 described Clancy as being in the “depths of despair” before her children's deaths and said she suffered from “horrible” intrusive thoughts. He also showed jurors some of her writings, describing them as “nothing other than little chicken scratches because her mind was gone.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague countered that the existence of mental illness itself was not in dispute.
“That’s not the issue in this trial,” Sprague said.
“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,” she said.
Sprague argued that Clancy had extensive access to treatment and support, including health insurance, multiple specialty treatment programs and assistance from both sides of her family.
