The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial ended its second day of deliberations without a verdict and will resume Monday.
Jurors, nine women and three men, sent a note to the judge on Friday asking to examine the blood-stained knife Clancy used to slash her wrists and neck in a suicide attempt hours after her three children died in January 2023. They also wanted another look at bags of empty prescription pill bottles recovered from the family’s nightstand in Duxbury, Massachusetts. The panel had already spent roughly ten hours deliberating across two days before being dismissed for the weekend.
Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, told the court he had personally found the pill bottles. “I was able to grab this,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t the police have grabbed this? You can see they’re all empty. You can see when they were prescribed. You can see what they are. You can see what she took.”
Reddington has argued throughout the trial that Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, was overmedicated and suffered “because of the d–n medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.” The defense contends she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, hearing a male voice urging her to kill her children and then herself.
Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague did not dispute that Clancy struggled with her mental health or that she tried to take her own life. “That’s not the issue in this trial,” Sprague said in closing arguments.
“The issue is whether, at the time she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan, she knew the difference between right and wrong, and whether she could conform her behavior to the requirements of the law.”
Sprague, 47, instead argued Clancy was “depressed” and “exhausted,” telling jurors: “She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged. But those kids, those kids were her protective factor. Those kids were keeping her from ending her misery. So she had to remove the protective factor.”
Reddington countered that prosecutors had “ripped the soul out” of his client, who he described as “scared” and “nervous” awaiting the jury’s decision. The panel must weigh whether Clancy is guilty of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, or not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility over the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan.
Prosecutors say Clancy intentionally killed her children with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s home, then slashed her wrists and throat and jumped from a second-story window, a fall that left her paralyzed from the waist down. More than 80 witnesses took the stand during the closely watched trial, including medical experts, friends, police officers, and Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick. The jury is scheduled to resume deliberations Monday at 9 a.m.