Lindsay Clancy’s trial has officially ended in a mistrial after jurors remained unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
PLYMOUTH, Mᴀss. – Lindsay Clancy’s grueling murder trial came to an end Friday when the judge officially declared it a mistrial over a lone juror holdout – despite her lawyer’s desperate 11th-hour bid to block the outcome.
“Members of the jury, at this point I’m going to declare that the jury is ᴅᴇᴀᴅlocked and I am going to declare a mistrial,” Plymouth Judge William Sullivan said after over 38 hours of deliberation across seven days.
“I understood how hard everybody worked on this case, I understood that you all gave everything you could and probably more than you thought you could — so on behalf of myself I just want to thank you so much, you should be proud for what you did, you braced for that duty, you performed that duty,” the judge said.
He had been ready to call in the jury to declare a mistrial when Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, dramatically begged him to hold off so he could file an emergency appeal to stop the decision.
The judge reluctantly granted the defense lawyer just one hour for the Hail Mary legal maneuver
But prosecutors must still officially decide whether to try the case a second time, negotiate a plea deal with Clancy, downgrade the charges — or drop them altogether.
Reddington previously indicated Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz could downgrade the charges to second-degree murder. The hypothetical scenario would allow Clancy to choose a judge rather than a jury to oversee her retrial — an option not afforded to her with first-degree murder charges, Reddington said.
However, outside court Friday, Cruz said, “no decisions will be made today,” on how his office would proceed with the case.
But the DA insisted the case was about Clancy’s “cruel, calculated killings of three innocents” and about “getting justice for those three little babies.”
Clancy is due back in court on Sept. 29 for a hearing.
The jurors were hopelessly ᴅᴇᴀᴅlocked for days on whether to convict the 36-year-old mother of fatally strangling her kids, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, on Jan. 24, 2023.
Reddington argued at trial that Clancy shouldn’t be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis and hallucinated a voice telling her to carry out the killings and to kill herself.
– but Reddington’s last-ditch bid to Mᴀssachusetts’ highest appeals court was ultimately struck down.
The mistrial doesn’t mean Clancy gets to go free, however — she will instead remain at Tewksbury Hospital, where she has been held for the past three years, until her potential retrial — which Sullivan announced could be as soon as this fall.
It was revealed by Reddington that one male holdout juror was stopping the group from reaching a unanimous verdict.
The 12-person jury – composed of three men and nine women – sent out two prior notes on Tuesday and Wednesday telling Sullivan they were at an impᴀsse. Both times the judge told them to keep at it, invoking a “Tuey-Rodriguez” charge following the second notice.
Just one day later, on Thursday, the female foreperson wrote a note claiming there was just one holdout juror who Reddington alleged “refuses to listen to the law” on reasonable doubt.
Sullivan then questioned each juror one by one, asking if they could follow his instructions, which they all said they could. He then brought out the dozen jurors as a group and reread the portion of his instructions on reasonable doubt.
But Friday morning, Reddington pleaded with Sullivan to take aside that one holdout juror and grill him — a request the judge denied, saying Thursday’s note “does not indicate that this is a person who has refused to follow the law.”
The defense attorney claimed the juror lied to Sullivan when he said he could follow the judge’s rules on the law.
For nearly a week before the trial kicked off, the lawyers and the judge worked to narrow down some 300 potential jurors to the 18 who sat for the entire trial. It wasn’t until the trial concluded that the six alternates were selected to sit out while the final jury deliberated.
The jury heard five weeks of at times excruciating testimony, starting with Clancy’s then-husband, who described how her mental health declined in the four months before the killings.
Patrick Clancy — who has since relocated to New York City and remarried an infertility specialist — told the jurors about how his ex-wife relentlessly sought help from doctors to address her crippling insomnia, anxiety, depression and thoughts of killing herself and harming the kids from September 2022 through January 2023.
Lindsay Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, was prescribed 13 powerful psychiatric medications over the course of those months, which Reddington argued exacerbated her spiraling mental state.
She regularly met with a psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Tufts, who also testified and endured blistering cross-examination by Reddington.
Lindsay Clancy further sought help from two perinatal clinics and she even checked herself into a mental insтιтution for five days, just weeks before the killings, according to testimony. She also called a suicide H๏τline twice, the jury learned.
While Reddington blamed Clancy’s doctors, who he claimed misdiagnosed and overmedicated her, prosecutors alleged she carefully planned the killings, including sending Patrick Clancy on two errands so she could carry out the horrific crimes.
When he returned home about an hour later, he discovered a horrific scene — Lindsay Clancy clinging to life on the ground in their backyard and their children lying motionless on the basement floor, he testified.
Lindsay Clancy used exercise bands to strangle the siblings before she cut her wrists and neck, downed some of her prescription meds and threw herself from her bedroom window on the second floor of their home.
She injured her spine in multiple places in the fall and is now paraplegic and wheelchair bound.
“She killed the kids,” Patrick Clancy could be heard screaming in anguish on a 911 call played for jurors.
The moment was one of many times Clancy broke down in tears throughout the excruciating trial.
She also sobbed through testimony of three medical examiners who conducted autopsies of her kids and when the pajamas they wore that night were displayed in court for the jury.
Lindsay Clancy’s ex-mother- and father-in-law, her sister, and parents were all called to testify at trial, painting a picture of her as a devoted and loving mother. They also detailed her struggle with her mental health during that time.
The jury learned that Lindsay Clancy texted her mother, Paula Musgrove, in October 2022, begging her to come stay with her because she was “really sick.”
However, prosecutors claimed Lindsay Clancy was lucid enough to carefully plan out how she would get away with the killings that day, sending her then-husband to CVS and to pick up takeout food, so he couldn’t stop her.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague argued none of Lindsay Clancy’s healthcare providers “ever saw signs of psychosis, ever. So they were all wrong?”
Both prosecutors and Reddington called psychiatrists to offer dueling opinions about Lindsay Clancy’s mental state at the time.
Defense witness and renowned psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick testified that she couldn’t be held criminally responsible because she heard a command voice telling her to commit the horrible acts and “it was almost like she was a puppet and someone was pulling the strings.”
On the other hand, prosecution witness Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a forensic psychiatrist, claimed there were “inconsistencies” in Lindsay Clancy’s account of hearing the voice and in her and Patrick Clancy’s differing timelines — leading him to question the truth of the hallucination claim.
Lindsay Clancy was “methodical, quite controlled and organized,” Saathoff claimed of her actions that day.
Lindsay and Patrick Clancy both have pending lawsuits against her doctors, which claim she received negligent treatment and was overmedicated by them, leading to the killings.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention H๏τline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
