Jury Deadlocks Again in Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial, Mistrial Looms

The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial was sent home for the day without a verdict after once again telling the judge that they are unable to reach a decision on whether she is criminally responsible for killing her three children.

Jurors sent a note to Judge William Sullivan at around 2:15 p.m. ET on Wednesday, their fifth day of deliberations, stating for the second day in a row that they have not been able to come to a unanimous decision.

Sullivan ordered them to keep trying, giving them what's known as a Tuey-Rodriguez charge. The special set of instructions, also called a "dynamite instruction," ask jurors to rethink their position and "consider that it is desirable that the case be decided."

"You have been selected in the same manner, and from the same source, as any future jury would be," Sullivan said in court. "There is no reason to suppose that the case will ever be submitted to twelve persons who are more intelligent, more impartial, or more competent to decide it or that more or clearer evidence will be produced."

"It really is designed to encourage the jury to take one last look at things and really try," Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University, told USA Today.

The jury resumed deliberations for a few hours before the judge sent them home for the day and ordered them to resume deliberations for a sixth day on Thursday.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.

Jurors heard testimony from relatives and doctors about how her 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.

What happens if they can’t reach a verdict?

A mistrial will be declared and the case essentially goes back to the same status as before the trial, with the 36-year-old charged with murder and held at a psychiatric hospital awaiting resolution of the criminal case.

Lindsay Clancy will likely go back on trial, but prosecutors have options

Prosecutors will decide whether to try again with a new jury. If they do, the jury selection process will begin again and a new trial will be scheduled. Prosecutors could also offer a plea deal to Clancy, said Brad Bailey, a Boston defense attorney and former prosecutor who is not involved in the case.

“Any time the threat of a retrial with murder one hanging over the client is re-interjected, defense lawyers will, at the very least, explore whether or not there’s any interest in a resolution,” Bailey said.

Clancy doesn’t deny strangling her children at their home south of Boston but says postpartum psychosis led to her actions. After the killings, her husband found her badly injured in the yard, where she landed after jumping from a second-story window. She was left paralyzed from the waist down.

Prosecutors argue she knew what she was doing.

Though less likely, the district attorney’s office could decide to not retry the case.

“Sometimes they decide not to, because of the sense that there may be the same result each time they try it, and because of the expenditures involved in trying the case to begin with, particularly when you have expert witnesses,” he said. “Those are going to be expensive cases.”

Bailey expects her defense attorney to aggressively lobby against another trial, making a case to the district attorney’s office along the lines of: “‘Why are you doing this to this poor woman? She’s still clearly obviously suffering. She’s been punished with her paralysis and, worse than that, the loss of her three children.’”

A conviction could mean life in prison for Clancy, while an acquittal might lead to confinement in a mental health facility.

Karen Read was another high-profile mistrial in Massachusetts

Karen Read was charged in the 2022 death of her Boston police officer boyfriend. Jurors in her 2024 trial deadlocked on the fifth day of deliberations, leading to a mistrial.

Prosecutors chose to retry the case, but a different jury last year found Read not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter charges.

Like Read's case, Clancy's has drawn a divided public reaction.

Clancy's livestreamed trial drew attention to maternal mental health after childbirth and was closely watched by a polarized public. Clancy’s sympathizers saw her as a loving mom who had realized something was badly wrong in the months ahead of the killings and sought help, including checking herself in to a psychiatric hospital. Her detractors said she deserved to be punished for an evil and selfish act.