Lindsay Clancy trial ends without a verdict for a sixth day after drama in the courtroom

Lindsay Clancy trial ends without a verdict for a sixth day after drama in the courtroom

PLYMOUTH, Mass. — The deadlocked jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial went home without a verdict Thursday in a dramatic sixth day of deliberations, after the jury’s foreperson sent the judge a note saying a single juror won’t follow the court’s instructions about reasonable doubt.

Details of the jury room conflict weren’t revealed by the judge and only briefly discussed in open court, but they raised the possibility that a single holdout was standing in the way of a verdict on whether the Massachusetts mother is criminally responsible for killing her three children.

The jury will return Friday to see if it can reach a decision. Before sending the jury home, the judge refused the defense’s request to remove one of the jurors following heated discussions among the parties.

Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, doesn’t deny strangling her children in the basement of their home in 2023 before trying to take her own life. Her attorney argues that postpartum psychosis led to her actions, while prosecutors say she knew what she was doing when she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy, ages 5, 3 and 8 months.

Clancy’s livestreamed trial has generated intense interest, with reporters and spectators packing the courtroom. The case has also sparked deep public divisions over her culpability and the issues around maternal mental health after childbirth.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

While the jury has twice sent the judge notes saying it couldn’t agree on a verdict, this is the first time it has indicated possible tension or acrimony in the deliberation room.

Clancy’s attorney Kevin Reddington said in court that the jury foreperson sent another note Thursday complaining to the judge that one juror was refusing to listen to the law on reasonable doubt.

Judge William Sullivan, after receiving the jury’s note, brought in each juror individually and questioned them in private. The judge then reread his instructions on reasonable doubt before sending them back to continue deliberating. Reddington told the judge he should have dismissed the juror from the case.

“If we come back here in a half-hour with a mistrial because of a juror that has just spurned the instructions of this court, it’s a shame — it’s a real shame,” Reddington said, referring to a possible deadlocked jury.

Reddington said afterward outside the courthouse that the juror would be questioned by the judge Friday. “There’s a person who has doubt but will not listen to the judge’s instructions,” he told reporters.

Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague said in court that she believed Sullivan's instruction was appropriate and no further action was necessary.

Sullivan said removing a deliberating juror is a sensitive undertaking.

"I don’t feel it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations,” the judge said. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to say, ‘I agree with one juror or the 11.’ I have asked if they are able to follow my instructions. They swore earlier that they could.”

At one point and for the first time in the trial, Clancy was brought to join a sidebar conversation with the judge. Paralyzed from the waist down after her suicide attempt, Clancy uses a wheelchair, which Reddington himself pushed to the front of the courtroom.

“She has a right to know what’s going on,” he later told reporters.

Signs there was a growing chance of a hung jury and the trial ending without a resolution surfaced on Wednesday when Sullivan explained to the courtroom that jurors were stuck for a second time.

Sullivan told the jurors not to abandon their own convictions just to reach a verdict, but urged them to seriously consider opposing views and reassess their positions if appropriate.

If the jury ultimately can’t agree on a verdict, the judge could declare a mistrial. Prosecutors would then have to decide whether to put Clancy on trial again, drop the charges or try to negotiate a plea deal with her lawyer.

If the jury decides Clancy was criminally responsible for her actions, it could convict her of either murder or manslaughter. If she is acquitted, a judge could still order her confined to a mental health facility if an evaluation determines that she poses a danger to the public.

Throughout the trial, Clancy has received letters of support “from all over the world,” defense attorney Kevin Reddington said Thursday. “It’s just amazing. She reads them all.”

Jurors have heard testimony from relatives and doctors about how Clancy’s mental health declined in the months before the killings and how her treatment included several medications and a short stay in a psychiatric hospital.

Medical experts hired by the prosecution and the defense reached sharply different conclusions about her psychiatric state when she killed the children.

Patrick Clancy has said in interviews that he forgives his now ex-wife, whom he views as ill rather than evil.

Clancy strangled the children with exercise bands in their home’s basement, then cut herself and jumped from a second-floor window. Her lawyers say she heard a voice telling her to kill the children so she could end her own life.

The prosecution argues she deliberately sent her then-husband on errands to get him out of the house, and prosecutors have questioned the seriousness of her suicide attempt.

Associated Press writers Ed White in Detroit, Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut, and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed.

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