A Massachusetts judge said Sept. 4 that he intends to declare a mistrial in Lindsay Clancy’s triple-murder case after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict, but he temporarily stayed the ruling to allow the defense to seek emergency relief from the state’s highest court.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A Massachusetts judge said Friday that he intends to declare a mistrial in the murder case against Lindsay Clancy after jurors remained deadlocked following seven days of deliberations, but he delayed formally entering the ruling for one hour so the defense could pursue an emergency appeal.
Judge William Sullivan paused the mistrial decision to give Clancy’s attorneys an opportunity to seek intervention from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
The development came after a nearly six-week trial over the January 2023 deaths of Clancy’s three children at the family’s home in Duxbury.
Earlier Friday, Sullivan rejected a defense request to remove a juror whom attorneys said was refusing to join the other 11 members of the panel.
The dispute over that juror intensified after the jury foreperson sent a note to the court Thursday.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington said the communication indicated that one juror was not properly applying the legal standard of reasonable doubt.
Sullivan declined to remove the juror, citing the legal risks involved in dismissing someone after deliberations have begun.
He told the court Friday that a relevant case says “the discharge of a deliberating juror is a sensitive undertaking, fraught with potential error.”
The jury’s inability to reach a unanimous verdict brought the trial to the brink of a mistrial after days of deliberations over whether Clancy was criminally responsible when she killed her children.
Clancy has admitted that she strangled the children with exercise bands in the basement of the family home on Jan. 24, 2023, while her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, was away running errands.
She later cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window in what prosecutors described as a suicide attempt.
The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down.
Clancy was charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
The central issue at trial was not whether she killed the children, but whether she was legally responsible for her actions at the time.
Prosecutors argued that Clancy deliberately planned and carried out the killings while understanding that what she was doing was wrong.
The defense maintained that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Patrick Clancy, who was the prosecution’s first witness, testified that his former wife had disclosed intrusive thoughts involving harm to the children and herself before the killings.
He also testified that she reported hearing a voice telling her to act.
“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.
Evidence presented at trial showed that Clancy had searched online for information about hallucinations, psychosis and suicide in the weeks before the killings.
Investigators also found a note on her phone describing fears about her children and her own parenting.
“I’m terrified of something happening to my kids or doing something wrong to mess up their development,” the 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 argued that Clancy had created an opportunity to kill the children by sending Patrick Clancy out to get food and then adding a second errand involving medicine from a pharmacy when she realized the first trip would not give her enough time.
The prosecution also relied on testimony from forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, who said he did not believe Clancy was experiencing acute psychosis when she killed the children.
“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 testified that, in his assessment, Clancy killed the children because she intended to die by suicide and did not 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,’” Heilbrun said. “That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.”
The defense presented a sharply different psychiatric assessment.
Forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick testified that Clancy was “clearly psychotic” when she killed the children and lacked control over her actions.
“It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings,” Resnick said.
Reddington urged jurors during closing arguments Aug. 27 to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing that postpartum psychosis had destroyed her ability to act rationally.
“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. “And they’re not going to be able to prove otherwise.”
Reddington also argued that Clancy had repeatedly sought medical assistance before the killings but did not receive adequate treatment.
He said she spent five days in a hospital in January 2023 and blamed both her care and the medications she was taking for contributing to her deteriorating mental condition.
“My God!” Reddington said. “What does she have to do? She was reaching out for help and she was not getting it.”
Clancy did not testify in her own defense.
The case has also drawn broader attention to postpartum mental illness and the treatment available to women after childbirth.
Allison Lespasio, a registered associate clinical social worker in California who is not involved in the case, told The Epoch Times that the proceedings have contributed to a national discussion about postpartum mental health.
Postpartum psychosis is a rare but severe psychiatric condition that can emerge after childbirth and may include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and significant changes in mood.
Whether those symptoms rendered Clancy legally insane was the question jurors were ultimately unable to resolve unanimously.
As of Friday’s courtroom proceedings, Sullivan had indicated that he intended to declare a mistrial, but the formal ruling remained temporarily stayed while the defense sought emergency review from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
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