Lindsay Clancy murder trial: judge set to call mistrial after jury deadlocks – live updates
The judge has said he has no choice but to declare a mistrial after the jury remained deadlocked in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for the killing of her three young children at her home in 2023.
He was about to bring the jury back into the courtroom after jurors, after almost 40 hours of deliberation, said in a note on Friday that “with a heavy heart” it could not reach a unanimous decision.
However, the judge said he will hold off on formally declaring a mistrial to give the defense an hour to file an emergency appeal.
We’ll bring you all the latest updates as we get them.
Key events
In asking the judge to hold off on formally declaring a mistrial, Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington said he wanted to take an appeal directly to the Massachusetts’s highest court regarding the apparent holdout juror.
“I believe that this is a situation where there is a clear and present danger that this individual, for some reason ... is taking a position that’s intractable regardless of proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Reddington said.
This is the note the judge read out from the jury:
It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to.
Earlier this week, the 12-person jury – made up of nine women and three men – came back twice to say that it could not reach a verdict and was sent back to deliberate by the judge both times.
This third declaration of deadlock comes a few hours after the judge declined to remove a juror who, according to a letter from the jury foreperson on Thursday, had acknowledged doubt about the case but would not follow the law.
This dramatic turn of events, as the judge was about to declare a mistrial and call the jury back in, comes after Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, asked for an emergency stay.
The judge, William Sullivan, has given him one hour to do so.
The jury was sent out over a week ago to decide whether the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse is criminally responsible for fatally strangling her three children – eight-month old Callan, five-year-old Cora and three-year-old Dawson – in January 2023.
Over the past six weeks, the trial, which has been called “America’s saddest murder trial”, has renewed nationwide attention on postpartum mental healthcare. Clancy’s defense maintains that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis – a condition estimated to affect around two women per 1,000 births – and therefore should not be held criminally responsible for her actions.
Prosecutors from the Plymouth county district attorney’s office, meanwhile, argue that Clancy’s actions were planned and deliberate.
The judge has said he has no choice but to declare a mistrial after the jury remained deadlocked in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for the killing of her three young children at her home in 2023.
He was about to bring the jury back into the courtroom after jurors, after almost 40 hours of deliberation, said in a note on Friday that “with a heavy heart” it could not reach a unanimous decision.
However, the judge said he will hold off on formally declaring a mistrial to give the defense an hour to file an emergency appeal.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.