By Jacki Thrapp,
Jackson Richman
& Stacy Robinson
Contributing Writers
The judge in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, who killed her three children in 2023, declared a mistrial on Friday after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Judge William Sullivan had earlier paused a formal mistrial ruling to give Clancy’s defense attorneys an opportunity to file an emergency appeal with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The appeal was denied, following a brief hearing.
In an emergency hearing via Zoom on Friday afternoon, the defense had asked the state’s top court to order the judge to remove a holdout juror or inquire into their ability to apply the law.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz told reporters that his team had not yet decided whether to pursue a second trial. The next hearing in the case is set for Sept. 29.
“Children were murdered, and it’s our job to seek justice,” he said. “I appreciate the fact that there are strong feelings and opinions tied to this case. However, our job is to set aside our feelings and focus solely on the facts.”
The mistrial ruling came after the deadlocked jury entered its seventh day of deliberations following a nearly six-week trial.
Earlier in the day, the judge rejected a request by the defense to dismiss one juror who refused to side with his 11 colleagues. On Thursday, the jury foreperson sent a note to the court, and, according to defense attorney Kevin Reddington, it indicated that one juror was not properly applying the concept of reasonable doubt.
Sullivan told the court on Friday that a relevant case says “the discharge of a deliberating juror is a sensitive undertaking, fraught with potential error.”
Since the holdout juror had not refused to deliberate and was not physically sick or unwilling to follow the rules, there was no reason to dismiss him, Sullivan said.
After deliberating briefly, the jury foreperson reported in a note that “with a heavy heart” the jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Following the judge’s declaration, Reddington told reporters that his client and her family were “Not good.”
“They know that they were robbed by one man for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors. … So I hope that guy can sleep well.”
Clancy admitted to strangling her children with exercise bands in the basement of her Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on Jan. 24, 2023, while her then-husband was running errands. She then cut her wrists and neck and jumped out of a second-story window in a failed suicide attempt, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
Clancy was charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
Prosecutors said she intentionally planned and carried out the three deaths of her children, knowing it was wrong.
Clancy’s former husband, Patrick, was the prosecution’s first witness and testified that she shared having intrusive thoughts of harming their kids and taking her own life ahead of the killings. He said she even allegedly heard a voice encouraging her to kill.
“She heard a man’s voice telling her that if she didn’t do it now, she would lose her chance, or something like that,” Patrick Clancy testified.
Analysis of her phone data showed she made online searches for hallucinations, psychosis and suicide in the weeks leading up to the killings.
A note on her phone revealed she had fears about how her kids would grow up.
“I’m terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development,” Clancy’s note read. “Our generation is inundated with information about every aspect of parenting. … It’s insane. For the last five years, I’ve just filled my mind with all things parenting and it’s just unhealthy.”
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague accused Clancy of planning the deaths by sending her then-husband to pick up food and adding a second errand — picking up medicine at a pharmacy — when she realized there wasn’t enough time to complete the killings during the first task.
A forensic psychologist who testified in the trial, Kirk Heilbrun, said Clancy did not have acute psychosis when she killed her three children. Acute psychosis is when someone has lost touch with reality and does not know what is real and what is not.
“The way she described this as happening is that she heard a voice that she’d never heard before, experienced a hallucination and she’s never experienced it since. But she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children,” Heilbrun said. “To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about. Very unusual.”
Heilbrun said he concluded that Clancy killed her children because she wanted to take her own life but didn’t want to leave them behind.
“One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, ‘Go to God, baby. Go to God,’” he said. “That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.”
Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist, testified that Clancy was “clearly psychotic” on the day she killed her kids and was not in control of her actions.
“It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings,” he said.
Reddington urged jurors to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, insisting that his client’s “mind was gone” and the killings were part of postpartum psychosis.
“This young lady is not guilty of the killing of her children because she was suffering from a disease and defect, as his honor instructed you,” Reddington told jurors in closing arguments on Aug. 27. “And they’re not going to be able to prove otherwise.”
Reddington said Clancy sought medical help and spent five days at a hospital in January 2023, but the treatment was not effective.
During trial, including closing arguments, Reddington blamed Clancy’s actions on what he called “lousy medical care” and the effects of the medication Clancy was taking.
“My God!” he said. “What does she have to do? She was reaching out for help and she was not getting it.”
Clancy did not testify during the trial.
Allison Lespasio, a registered associate clinical social worker based in California, said that the case has sparked a nationwide conversation on women’s mental health after childbirth and how the health system treats those issues.
Postpartum psychosis usually develops around two weeks after giving birth and can make a mother experience hallucinations, hearing or seeing things that are not there, delusions, changes in mood, and paranoia, said Lespasio, who is not associated with the case.
Reuters contributed to this report.
