Moments after the judge declared a mistrial, Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney referenced the explosive Karen Read case as he fought to keep the deadlocked jury from going home for good.
Kevin Reddington pitched a last-second request for Judge William Sullivan to poll jurors on where they stood in their deliberations. He argued that the trial judge had the “discretion to require a jury to return a verdict for charges on which they have agreed before declaring a mistrial.”
That power, the defense attorney said, came from a ruling by the state’s highest court in the Read case, which Reddington argued, “we are all pretty much familiar with.”
“I am asking that the court … entertain the jurors as to whether or not there has been a decision on Murder 1, Murder 2 … anything like that,” Reddington told Sullivan, “and if that’s the case, then I’d certainly argue that double jeopardy is attached, and those charges cannot be prosecuted again.”
Clancy was charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of strangulation or suffocation in the deaths of her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. The Duxbury mom does not dispute the killings at their home in January 2023, which preceded a paralyzing suicide attempt from a second-floor window.
Rather, her defense has argued she suffered from postpartum psychosis and lacked criminal responsibility.
A deadlocked jury stood at 11-1 following roughly 38 hours of deliberation.
Plymouth District Attorney Tim Cruz did not say Friday whether his office will retry the case.
In his attempt to keep the jury deliberating, Reddington highlighted another rule that he argued “permits the judge to poll the jury when a verdict is returned and before the verdict is recorded; however, a judge is not required to accept a partial verdict before declaring a mistrial.”
Sullivan rejected the request after an objection from Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague, who said she believed the Clancy deliberations were a “different scenario” from Read’s.
The jury in Read’s 2024 mistrial reached a “verdict on some charges and not on others,” the prosecutor said.
“Here,” Sprague said, “where we have had a jury who has been deliberating for six-and-a-half days who’s come back on multiple occasions saying that they are deadlocked … I don’t think anything else is required at this point other than the declaration of a mistrial, unfortunately.”
Read was charged with the murder of Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, her boyfriend at the time, whose body was found frozen in the snow outside a Canton home in the early morning of Jan. 29, 2022.
Over two trials, which concluded in June 2025 with her acquittal on all charges save for drunken driving, her attorneys alleged a law enforcement conspiracy to frame her for O’Keefe’s death and to protect third-party conspirators who they say were actually to blame.
Following the first trial, Read’s attorneys argued that several jurors reached out after the mistrial to say that they were only hung on the OUI manslaughter charge and were ready to acquit on the other charges.
The defense argued that no other juror disputed the claim and that to continue to try her on these charges would count as double jeopardy.
“The jury clearly stated during deliberations that they had not reached a unanimous verdict on any of the charges and could not do so,” SJC Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote in an opinion. “Only after being discharged did some individual jurors communicate a different supposed outcome, contradicting their prior notes.”
“Such posttrial disclosures cannot retroactively alter the trial’s outcome — either to acquit or to convict,” the justice added.
Reddington has ties to the Read case, which is now making its way through civil courts. The attorney represented Jennifer McCabe in 2023, when Read’s defense began claiming that the Canton woman was partly culpable for O’Keefe’s death.
“My client, Jennifer McCabe, has been vilified in pleadings. They are spinning it,” Reddington told the Herald at the time. “It’s going nowhere. The whole scenario is baseless.”
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