The judge in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial declared a mistrial Friday after the jury failed to come to a unanimous decision following seven days of deliberation.
“It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to,” a note from the jury’s foreperson said, read aloud by Judge William Sullivan to the courtroom.
After a last ditch attempt by Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s lead defense lawyer, to stop Sullivan from declaring a mistrial, the court returned in the afternoon, at which point the judge declared the mistrial.
WATCH: Judge declares mistrial in Lindsay Clancy murder case
Watch the clip in the player above.
Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, doesn’t deny killing her children before trying to cause her own death by suicide in 2023. But she pleaded not guilty, arguing that she cannot be held criminally liable because her mental state was impaired at the time of the murders.
Her defense team argued Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare but severe condition, and that the care she received for her illness fell short. Experts for the prosecution testified that they came to a different diagnosis, and that she is criminally responsible for the killings.
The struggle for the jury to reach a unanimous decision “is a microcosm of how many of us are struggling to think about this case,” Daniel Medwed, criminal law professor at Northeastern University, said in an email.
“The jury in a case like this really acts as a proxy for the moral sense of the community,” David Rossman, criminal law expert and emeritus professor at Boston University said in an email.
He said even though the jury was given a legal framework through which to reach a decision, “there’s an overwhelming moral quality to the ultimate decision the jury is asked to make.”
What did the jury say about not reaching a verdict?
Throughout days of deliberation, the jury returned several times telling the judge they could not reach an agreement.
On Wednesday, Sullivan had read jurors what is known in Massachusetts as the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction or “dynamite charge,” which is designed to encourage jurors to keep deliberating even after they have said to be at a deadlock.
“There is no reason to suppose that the case will ever be submitted to six persons who are more intelligent, more impartial, or more competent to decide it than you are, or that more or clearer evidence will be produced on one side or the other,” Sullivan told the jury.
Heather Cucolo, an expert in mental health law and a professor at New York Law School, said this instruction is usually seen as a “last effort to avoid a mistrial.”
“The purpose is to encourage jurors to reexamine their positions, consider differing viewpoints, and work toward a unanimous verdict without abandoning their sincerely held convictions,” she said in an email.
On Thursday, the jury’s foreperson indicated to Sullivan that there was one holdout juror who refused to follow the law on reasonable doubt.
Watch the clip in the player above.
Reddington asked for the juror to be dismissed. Sullivan disagreed saying he couldn’t side with “one juror or 11.”
WATCH: Judge sends deadlocked Lindsay Clancy jury back after defense seeks 1 juror’s removal
Instead he told jurors he wanted to remind them that they are “required to follow my instructions on the law as I gave them to you,” and reread his instruction on reasonable doubt before asking the jury to resume deliberations.
On Friday, Sullivan said he didn’t feel he had “any choice but to declare a mistrial,” after reading the letter from the jury’s foreperson that said they were unable to come to a decision.
What did the defense say?
Before Sullivan declared a mistrial, defense attorney Reddington pressed the judge earlier on Friday to again read the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction to the jurors and tell them to continue deliberating. Sullivan refused.
Soon after, Reddington called the decision to declare a mistrial a “travesty” and asked to file an emergency motion with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Sullivan gave Reddington an hour to file the appeal.
Reddington requested for Sullivan to investigate whether the holdout juror was able to follow the law saying the “juror’s reasoning reflects a bias against those who suffer from debilitating mental illness.”
A judge from the state Supreme Judicial Court denied Reddington’s request.
After the mistrial declaration, Sullivan scheduled a status hearing for Sept. 29.
Reddington said Friday that Clancy was “not good” following the mistrial declaration, adding that she would be ready for the possibility of a retrial.
He told reporters that Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz “knows that he was crushed. He doesn’t have a case.”
What did the prosecution say, and what happens next?
The prosecution will now decide whether to retry Clancy’s case.
“There’ll be no decisions made today regarding that,” Cruz told reporters Friday outside the courthouse.
Watch the clip in the player above.
Legal experts told PBS News they expect the prosecution will choose to go to trial again.
However, they could also choose to offer Clancy a plea deal or to drop the charges.
Whether the prosecution should choose to retry the case should come down to whether justice would be served via reprosecution, Medwed said.
“Ideally, the retrial calculation should be about the merits of reprosecution, not necessarily the chances of ‘winning,’ of securing a conviction,” Medwed said. “Prosecutors win whenever justice is served — and that might include declining to prosecute in certain instances or taking a worthwhile case to trial that results in an acquittal.”
Medwed said prosecutors would need to factor in the resources required in retrying the case.
“After all, resources are not limitless; pursuing one case might mean delaying another,” he said.
Before the jury’s decision, Reddington said he was ready for a retrial.
“I’ve got witnesses lined up. We’re all set. So let’s go,” Reddington told reporters.
What challenges might there be in retrying the case?
There are several hurdles to retrying a case, Cucolo said, including dealing with fading witness memories or inconsistencies in presentation of information.
The high-profile nature of Clancy’s case accentuates the challenges. The trial has dominated headlines and drawn significant national attention, making it particularly difficult to find unbiased jurors, legal experts told PBS News.
“The goal is not necessarily to find jurors who haven’t heard about the case,” Medwed said. “But rather jurors who can seemingly put aside what they’ve already heard and look at the evidence with equanimity.”
Lawyers in the case will have to use the jury selection process to “skillfully” detect potential jurors who have hidden biases, Rossman said.
“I would expect some people to be less than candid because they want to be on the jury in such a notorious case,” he said.
Massachusetts isn’t new to this.
In 2024, a judge declared a mistrial in the case of Karen Read, who was accused of killing her boyfriend, after a jury failed to come to a consensus. The prosecution chose to retry the case, which had garnered a lot of attention on social media, and the second jury found Read not guilty.
