Jurors said they were deadlocked on the fourth day of deliberations in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murder after strangling her three children.
“After many hours of deliberation, we are unable to come to a unanimous decision,” the jurors wrote in a note read by the judge in open court about an hour after deliberations resumed on Tuesday.
Judge William Sullivan sent them back to the jury room, noting that he knows the trial was long and taxing, with more than 80 witnesses and more than 300 exhibits. “But because of that, I’m going to ask you to go back out” to keep trying to reach agreement, he said.
Entering the day, jurors had spent about 17 hours discussing the case, with only one brief request to the court about viewing evidence. They started deliberations on Thursday afternoon after more than four weeks of often wrenching testimony at the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass.
Judge Sullivan has so far gaveled the court into session each day at 9 a.m. and sent jurors home at about 4 p.m. He dismissed them on Monday with the words: “Stay the course.”
Ms. Clancy, 36, does not deny killing her children with exercise bands in 2023, but she has pleaded not guilty. Her lawyers have argued that she should not be held legally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Kevin Reddington, Ms. Clancy’s defense lawyer, said the jury had asked on Friday to look at a knife and prescription pill bottles that are thought to be connected to Ms. Clancy’s suicide attempt. The jurors do not appear to have made any other requests.
Mr. Reddington argued that Ms. Clancy had been overmedicated for severe postpartum mental illness and had hallucinated a male voice commanding her to kill her children and then herself.
Jennifer Sprague, a prosecutor, told jurors that Ms. Clancy made a series of premeditated choices before killing Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Those included asking her husband to leave the house and strangling the older children first because they were more likely to resist.
“You know, to a moral certainty, she is guilty,” Ms. Sprague said.
For a guilty verdict, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Clancy both committed the crime and was criminally responsible for it. If jurors find Ms. Clancy guilty, they must choose among first-degree murder, second-degree murder and manslaughter.
The option of a manslaughter verdict could potentially help jurors reach consensus, and make the prospect of a hung jury less likely.
Judge Sullivan instructed jurors that Ms. Clancy would not be criminally responsible if she had a mental disease or defect that prevented her from controlling her actions or from understanding that they were legally or morally wrong.
In the months before the killings, Ms. Clancy was reporting persistent, disturbing and intrusive thoughts. She was prescribed a plethora of psychiatric medications. At the beginning of January 2023, she self-admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she stayed for five days.
On the night the children were strangled, Ms. Clancy’s then-husband, Patrick Clancy, said he found her lying injured in the backyard. Ms. Clancy had cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window of their home, leaving her partially paralyzed.
The last week of trial testimony came from rebuttal witnesses brought by the prosecution to respond to claims made by the defense.
The expert witnesses provided their assessments about Ms. Clancy’s state of mind at the time of the killings. They said the killings were not necessarily the result of psychosis.
Mr. Reddington, however, said during closing arguments that Ms. Clancy had repeatedly sought help for her deteriorating mental illness but that doctors had failed her.
Ms. Sprague countered, saying that the case was “not about our mental health system, or how it treats women.”
Jenna Russell and Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.
The post Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial: Jury Struggling to Reach a Verdict appeared first on New York Times.
