Holdout juror preventing verdict in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial, lawyer says

A single juror in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial is preventing the jury from reaching a unanimous verdict, her lawyer said in court on Thursday, after deliberations stretched into a sixth day over whether to ‌convict the Massachusetts woman of killing her three young children. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington made that statement shortly after the jury sent Judge William Sullivan in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a note that prompted him to re-instruct jurors on what would constitute "reasonable doubt."

After the jury was sent back to continue deliberating, Reddington moved to have a holdout juror removed, saying a note from the jury's foreperson indicated "there's one ‌juror who refuses to listen to the law that you've given him or her on reasonable doubt." "If we come back here in half an hour with a mistrial because of ‌a juror that has just spurned the instructions of this court, it's a shame," Reddington told the judge, who declined to remove the juror.

The jury sent Sullivan a note a day earlier that said, "After much deliberation, we are still unable to come to a unanimous decision." They sent a similar note on Tuesday. But on both days, the judge instructed them to continue deliberating. If the jury does not reach a verdict and Sullivan declares ⁠a mistrial, prosecutors ​would need to decide whether to retry ⁠the case, which has included more than 80 witnesses and more than 300 exhibits.

Asked during a lunch break about his thoughts on the state of the deliberations, Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz told reporters outside the courthouse ⁠that "we'll hang on and find out." On the question of whether prosecutors in his office would retry the case if it ended in a mistrial, Cruz said only: "I'll talk when this is all over."

MENTAL HEALTH STRUGGLES Clancy, ​36, faces life in prison without parole if convicted of first-degree murder. If found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, or reason of insanity, she ⁠could be committed to a state psychiatric hospital for evaluation.

She has admitted to strangling her three children to death on January 24, 2023, with exercise bands in the basement of their home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury. ⁠She ​then cut herself with a knife and jumped from a second-story window in an attempt to take her own life that left her paralyzed. During the six-week trial, defense attorney Kevin Reddington sought to convince jurors that Clancy was in the midst of a psychotic episode when she killed Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan.

Testimony from family members, including Clancy's now ex-husband, ⁠Patrick, showed how she had struggled with her mental health in the months after the birth of her third child, repeatedly seeking treatment from healthcare providers who prescribed her a ⁠myriad of drugs. Prosecutors do not dispute that Clancy, ⁠a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been dealing with mental health issues.

But they argued she was able to appreciate the wrongfulness of killing her children and intentionally chose to do so anyway, opting to kill them because she had decided to ‌kill herself and was convinced they ‌would suffer without her.