The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial never reached a verdict. After six weeks of testimony and seven days of deliberation, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in Plymouth County Superior Court, ending — for now — the case against the 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse accused of killing her three children.
Clancy faced three counts of first-degree murder for strangling Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old, in the basement of the family's Duxbury home in January 2023, then attempting suicide herself. She never denied doing it. The trial turned entirely on why: her defense argued a severe, undertreated case of postpartum psychosis left her not criminally responsible for what she did, while prosecutors argued she knew exactly what she was doing and made a choice.
The jury didn't buy either side cleanly enough to agree. They reported being deadlocked three times. On Wednesday, Judge Sullivan gave them what's known in Massachusetts as a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction — the formal push to keep trying, telling jurors not to "abandon your own convictions just to reach a verdict," but reminding them that no future jury would be "more intelligent, more impartial or more competent" than the one already in the room. They went back to the table anyway and still couldn't land on an answer.
Thursday brought the moment that told everyone how this was likely to end: the jury foreperson sent word that one juror was, in defense attorney Kevin Reddington's phrasing, "refusing to listen to the law" on reasonable doubt. Reddington asked the judge to remove that juror. Sullivan wouldn't do it. "I don't feel it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations," he told the courtroom, and sent them back for a seventh day instead. It didn't change anything.