Both the prosecution and defense acknowledged that Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in January 2023
Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Clancy, 36, was charged with the murder of her three young children: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan
- The children were found in the basement of their Duxbury, Mass., home in January 2023
- The five-week trial has been held in Plymouth County Superior Court
After nearly 17 hours of deliberations, the jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has yet to reach a verdict.
If the Massachusetts jury of 9 women and 3 men tasked with deliberating Clancy’s criminal responsibility in the deaths of her three young children can’t agree on a verdict, the judge could attempt to avoid a mistrial by sending the jury back to deliberate, says legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani.
“There’s a chance the judge will say, ‘Go back and continue deliberating,’” he tells PEOPLE. “And then, if they come and they say, ‘We’re hopelessly deadlocked. No further deliberation will be fruitful.’ If they start saying those types of things, the judge is going to declare a mistrial.”
If the judge declares a mistrial, the prosecution will then have to decide whether to retry or dismiss the case.
“There’s no double jeopardy if they retry the case because no verdict was reached,” says Rahmani, who believes that prosecutors would retry Clancy.
The 36-year-old is charged with murder for killing Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan with exercise bands in the basement of their Duxbury, Mass., home in January 2023.
After the killings, Clancy cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window in a suicide attempt, which left her paralyzed from the waist down.
“It is almost 100% certain that the prosecution will retry the case,” Rahmani adds. “There are three dead children, and the political pressure on the prosecution to retry the case will be overwhelming. Not refiling the case is how district attorneys get voted out of office. I’m not saying that charging decisions are always made for political reasons, but when you deal with elected officials, public sentiment matters.”
“Not prosecuting means that Lindsay Clancy goes free,” he says. “This is not insanity where she would spend time in a psychiatric facility. She would be a free woman.”
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Rahmani says a retrial generally favors the prosecution.
“The defense no longer has the element of surprise,” he opines. “The prosecution knows how the defense witnesses will testify. They can better prepare. In this particular case, I think the prosecution can learn from their mistakes. And I think they overextended themselves and they over promised at the beginning of the trial and they took a more balanced approach at the end of the trial. I think they could potentially do a better job. But this is a very tough case. I can’t recall a case where the facts aren’t really in dispute. There’s reasonable people who look at this case and can view it very differently. So I think it’s going to be a hard case to get 12 out of 12 people beyond a reasonable doubt. If it mistrials once, it may well mistrial again.”
Prosecutors argued that Clancy deliberately killed the children, while Clancy’s defense maintained the former labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital was not criminally responsible because she suffered postpartum psychosis at the time of the deaths.
During closing arguments, prosecutor Jennifer Sprague didn’t dispute Clancy’s mental health struggles or that she attempted to kill herself.
“That’s not the issue in this trial,” Sprague said. “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 argued Clancy killed her children because she was “depressed.”
“She was exhausted. She was done. She didn’t want to try anymore. She felt damaged,” Sprague told the jury. “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.”
Credit: David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty
“And I’m not saying she was happy about it,” Sprague continued. “I’m saying it was what she had to do to end her misery.”
Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s attorney, said prosecutors “ripped the soul out” of Clancy during the proceedings.
He held up a photo of Clancy with her then-husband Patrick and their children and another photo of her in the hospital after the deaths. He then asked how the family went from the first photo to the second.
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“Because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got,” he told jurors.
During the second day of deliberations, jurors asked to see the bloody knife Clancy used to cut her wrists and neck during the suicide attempt, along with bags of empty prescription pill bottles found inside the home.
“Reading the tea leaves, for me, I think it helps the defense,” says Rahmani. “Obviously, the prescription bottles, that’s evidence of mental illness. The knife is evidence of a suicide attempt. Now, I know the prosecution argued that it was a superficial wound with the knife but it’s not like the jurors are asking about the exercise bands that were used to kill the kids. That would be bad for the defense.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs to talk, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org 24/7.
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