Judge refuses to dismiss juror in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, mother accused of killing three children

The judge leading the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a mother who killed her three children in the USA in 2023, refused, this Thursday (3), to remove a juror who, according to the defense lawyer, was preventing the jury from reaching a verdict.

The jury ended the sixth day of deliberations on the case without a unanimous decision — necessary in criminal trials defined by jury in the US. Clancy's defense does not deny the murders, but argues that she should be considered innocent due to non-imputability, that is, that she could not answer for the crimes due to alleged mental insanity.

The 12 jurors were dismissed and told to return on Friday (4), less than an hour after Judge William Sullivan, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, received a note from the jury and instructed them again on what would constitute "reasonable doubt" so that the group could not reach a decision.

The note was not read aloud in court. After the jurors left the courtroom, defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked one of them to leave.

"If we come back here in half an hour with a mistrial because a juror simply disregarded this court's instructions, that will be a shame," Reddington told the judge, who refused the motion to leave.

The jury had sent notes to Sullivan on Tuesday and Wednesday saying they could not reach a unanimous decision. On both days, the judge instructed the jurors to continue deliberating.

If the jury does not reach a verdict and Sullivan declares a mistrial, prosecutors will have to decide whether to submit the case to a new trial, which has already included more than 80 witnesses and more than 300 documentary and material pieces of evidence.

Reddington, who has maintained that Clancy acted under the influence of postpartum psychosis, told reporters outside the courtroom that he expects the jury to return a verdict this Friday.

"When a note that's already with the judge says that 11 jurors have made a decision and one juror doesn't agree to apply the principle of reasonable doubt, I think that shows where they are at," he said.

Clancy, 36, could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole if found guilty of first-degree murder. If found not guilty due to imputability, she could be admitted to a state psychiatric hospital for evaluation.

She admitted to strangling her three children to death on January 24, 2023, using elastic exercise bands in the basement of the family's home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury. She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-floor window in an attempt to take her own life, which left her paraplegic.

During the trial, Reddington tried to convince jurors that Clancy was in the midst of a psychotic break when he killed Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months old.

Testimony from family members, including Patrick, Clancy's ex-husband and the children's father, showed how she faced mental health problems in the months following the birth of her third child, repeatedly seeking treatment from health professionals who prescribed her a series of medications.

Prosecutors do not dispute that Clancy, a former nurse-midwife at Massachusetts General Hospital, faced mental health issues.

But they argued that she was capable of understanding that killing her children was wrong and yet she intentionally chose to do so, deciding to kill them because she had decided to take her own life and was convinced that they would suffer without her.