The jury in the murder trial against Lindsay Clancy told the judge this Tuesday that it could not reach a unanimous decision on whether to convict this Massachusetts woman of killing her three young children in her home in 2023, a tragedy that, according to her lawyer, occurred while she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Judge William Sullivan, in Plymouth (Massachusetts), asked the jurors to continue deliberating after receiving the note in which they communicated their block. Deliberations have now entered their fourth day, in a trial that began almost six weeks ago.
"After many hours of deliberation, we are not able to reach a unanimous decision," the jury noted in the note, according to Sullivan.
The judge stressed that this is a long trial, with more than 80 witnesses and more than 300 documentary evidence.
"Therefore, I am going to ask you to deliberate again, keeping in mind all the instructions that I have given you, and to continue with your deliberations at this time," he said.
The trial, broadcast on television, has reignited the debate that has existed for years in the United States about how the mental health of women after childbirth is addressed and how the country's judicial system responds when mothers kill their children.
The note is only the second the jury has sent since deliberations began. On Friday, jurors asked to see the prescription bottles and the knife Clancy used to cut himself, according to his attorney. On Monday they did not ask any questions.
No one disputes that Clancy, 36, strangled his three children to death in January 2023 using elastic exercise bands in the basement of his home in Duxbury, a suburb of Boston. She then injured herself with a knife and jumped out of a second-story window in a failed suicide attempt that left her paralyzed.
Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, tried during the trial to convince the jury to find her not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing that she was a loving mother who was in the middle of a psychotic episode when she killed five-year-old Cora; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months, on January 24, 2023.
Clancy, who had worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted of first-degree murder. If she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, she will be committed to a state psychiatric hospital for evaluation.
During the trial, prosecutors focused on evidence showing that, shortly before the murders, Clancy sent her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, to pick up a food order and go to a pharmacy, after calculating on her phone how long it would take to return home.
When he returned, he found his wife lying on the ground in the backyard, with cuts on her wrists and neck. After emergency services arrived, Patrick Clancy testified that he ran to the basement, where his wife had told him the children were, and found them with elastic bands tied around their necks.
He and other witnesses testified that Clancy later told them that he had heard a man's voice telling him that if he did not act, he would lose his chance. Reddington maintained that this showed she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the tragedy, after months of dealing with mental health issues.
