Jurors in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial are expected to return for a sixth day of deliberations on Thursday, after growing indications that their impasse could prove unbreakable.
The judge presiding over the case, William Sullivan, read them what is known as a “dynamite charge” on Wednesday afternoon, in a last-ditch attempt to break their deadlock, and then sent them home a little over an hour later.
The jurors, nine women and three men, have now deliberated for about 30 hours over five days, and twice told the judge that they could not come to a unanimous decision as to whether Ms. Clancy should be convicted of murdering her three children.
A hung jury would result in a mistrial, and Judge Sullivan has urged the jurors to keep trying. On Wednesday, he read a set of instructions saying that they should work toward consensus and “consider that it is desirable that the case be decided.”
He has also thanked jurors for their work, noting the extent of the evidence and witness testimony presented during the monthlong trial, which featured often heart-wrenching details.
In the event of a mistrial, prosecutors would decide whether to try Ms. Clancy all over again in front of a different jury, for first-degree murder or less serious charges. Considering their options could take a week or more, experts have said.
Earlier on Wednesday, the judge spoke to the jurors one by one in court, shortly before the arraignment of a woman who had been accused of videotaping them in a restricted area.
The woman, Dawn Light, 56, is a retired nurse with no criminal record who had been trying to get an image of Ms. Clancy on her phone and did not mean to film the jurors, her lawyer said.
Ms. Light, who was arrested on Tuesday and charged with intimidation, entered a not guilty plea on Wednesday.
If the trial were to end with a hung jury, it would be the second such outcome in a high-profile Massachusetts murder case in two years.
In July 2024, a jury deadlocked after five days in the first trial of Karen Read, who was accused of killing her boyfriend, a Boston police officer, by hitting him with her vehicle. Ms. Read was acquitted by a different jury at her retrial in 2025.
Rosanna Cavallaro, a Suffolk University law professor, said that judges “walk a tightrope” when they read the formal “dynamite” instructions to a deadlocked jury.
The goal is to nudge the jurors forward toward consensus, she said, “without making them feel coerced by a judge’s criticism.”
Some states, including Massachusetts, have revised the instructions used by judges in such scenarios to make the language less coercive, experts said. Critics of the practice said it risks pushing jurors with minority views to abandon their moral convictions, tainting the verdict.
Kevin Reddington, Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, said on Tuesday that he doesn’t think Ms. Clancy is emotionally prepared to endure another trial but that he would continue to represent her.
When a reporter asked on Tuesday if Ms. Clancy would consider pleading guilty to a less serious charge, like manslaughter, Mr. Reddington said, “Cruz drives the bus,” referring to the county’s district attorney, Timothy Cruz, who brought the original case.
Ms. Clancy, 36, doesn’t deny strangling her children with exercise bands in 2023 at their home in Duxbury, Mass., an affluent suburb of Boston. But she has pleaded not guilty, and her lawyers have argued that she should not be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Mr. Reddington has said that she tried repeatedly to get help when she began to experience intrusive thoughts after the birth of her third child. But she was overmedicated, he said, and hallucinated a male voice commanding her to kill her children and herself.
Jennifer Sprague, a prosecutor, told jurors that Ms. Clancy had made a series of premeditated choices before killing the children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Those included asking her husband to leave the house and deciding where and how to kill the children, as well as whom to strangle first.
Ms. Clancy’s husband at the time, Patrick Clancy, said he had found her lying injured in the backyard after the killings. Ms. Clancy had cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window of their home, leaving her partially paralyzed.
The trial has drawn crowds of demonstrators, including many women who see Ms. Clancy’s struggles to get help as an indictment of the health care system’s approach to maternal mental health care.
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.
Judge Sullivan has 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.
If jurors find Ms. Clancy guilty, they must choose among first-degree murder, which would send her to prison for life, or less serious charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter, which could carry significant prison time but also leave open the possibility of parole.
If found not guilty by reason of insanity, Ms. Clancy would be sent to a secure psychiatric institution.
Jenna Russell and Remy Tumin contributed reporting.
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