A Massachusetts judge officially declared a mistrial Friday in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial after a lone juror refused to budge, despite her lawyer’s emergency appeal to block the outcome.
Plymouth Judge William Sullivan made the call after the jury spent more than 38 hours deliberating across seven days and sent three notes saying they were deadlocked. “Members of the jury, at this point I’m going to declare that the jury is deadlocked and I am going to declare a mistrial,” Sullivan said in court. The judge thanked the panel for their service, telling them, “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 36-year-old mother will remain at Tewksbury Hospital, where she has been held for three years, until a new trial that could come as soon as this fall. Sullivan set her next court date for Sept. 29 to schedule that retrial. Whether prosecutors actually pursue a second trial remains an open question — Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz told reporters outside court Friday that “no decisions will be made today.”
Cruz, however, made clear where his office stands on the gravity of the case. The DA insisted the prosecution is about Clancy’s “cruel, calculated killings of three innocents” and about “getting justice for those three little babies.” His office must now choose between a retrial, a plea deal, downgraded charges, or dropping the case entirely.
Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, had fought desperately to prevent the mistrial. Earlier Friday, Sullivan was ready to bring in the jury when Reddington begged for an hour to file an emergency appeal to Massachusetts’ highest court. The judge reluctantly granted the brief window, but the Hail Mary bid was struck down. Reddington had wanted Sullivan to single out and grill the holdout juror, claiming the man lied when he told the judge he could follow instructions on reasonable doubt. The lawyer said the juror “refuses to listen to the law.”
The jury — three men and nine women — first signaled trouble Tuesday, then again Wednesday, telling Sullivan they were at an impasse. Both times the judge ordered them to continue, issuing a “Tuey-Rodriguez” instruction after the second note. By Thursday, the female foreperson wrote that a single male juror was blocking consensus. Sullivan questioned each juror individually, and all said they could follow his instructions, so he reread the reasonable-doubt standard to the full panel. The deadlock held.
The trial that ended in this stalemate stretched five weeks and featured at times excruciating testimony. Patrick Clancy, who has since moved to New York City and remarried an infertility specialist, described for jurors how his then-wife’s mental health cratered in the four months before the killings. She sought help relentlessly, he testified, struggling with crippling insomnia, anxiety, depression, and thoughts of killing herself and harming the children from September 2022 through January 2023. The former labor and delivery nurse was prescribed 13 powerful psychiatric medications during that period, which Reddington argued worsened her spiral. She met regularly with psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Tufts, visited two perinatal clinics, checked into a mental institution for five days, and called a suicide hotline twice — all in the weeks before the tragedy.
Reddington’s central argument was that Clancy suffered severe postpartum psychosis and should not be held criminally responsible. Defense witness Dr. Phillip Resnick, a renowned psychiatrist, testified that she heard a command voice telling her to commit the acts and “it was almost like she was a puppet and someone was pulling the strings.” Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague pushed back hard, noting that none of Clancy’s healthcare providers “ever saw signs of psychosis, ever. So they were all wrong?” The prosecution’s forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Gregory Saathoff, called Clancy’s actions “methodical, quite controlled and organized” and found inconsistencies in her account and the timeline that undermined the hallucination claim.
On Jan. 24, 2023, prosecutors alleged, Clancy carefully planned the killings by sending Patrick on two errands — to CVS and to pick up takeout — so he could not intervene. He returned about an hour later to find her clinging to life in their backyard and their children motionless on the basement floor. Clancy had used exercise bands to strangle Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, then cut her wrists and neck, swallowed prescription medication, and jumped from a second-floor window. The fall left her paraplegic and wheelchair-bound. Jurors heard Patrick’s anguished screams of “She killed the kids” on a 911 call. Clancy broke down repeatedly during the trial, sobbing through autopsy testimony and the display of her children’s pajamas. Her parents, sister, and former in-laws testified to her devotion as a mother and her mental health struggles, including a text to her mother in October 2022 begging her to come stay because she was “really sick.”
Reddington has suggested that if Cruz retries the case, he might downgrade charges to second-degree murder — a move that would let Clancy opt for a bench trial rather than a jury. Both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy have pending lawsuits against her doctors alleging negligent treatment and overmedication led to the killings.
Lindsay Clancy is due back in court on Sept. 29 for her new trial date to be set.
