Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old. In January 2023 their mother strangled them, then attempted suicide. Lindsay Clancy admitted the killings at her trial this year. The question was what the law should make of them — whether postpartum psychosis had taken from her the capacity the law requires, whether she was guilty of murder or not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility. The jury never answered.
On September 4, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. The jury had sent several notes saying it was deadlocked and that a single juror was preventing the panel from unanimously finding Clancy not guilty. It is worth pausing on that construction. Eleven jurors, by the most public account, were ready to acquit. One was not.
On Tuesday, the case returns to court for a status conference, and the month of uncertainty around it is expected to narrow into a schedule. The parties will address the defense’s motions to stave off a second trial, its attempt to obtain more information about the holdout juror and — if Plymouth County prosecutors decide to retry Clancy — the calendar for doing so. Prosecutors have not announced their decision.
The weeks since the mistrial have not been quiet. Several jurors have given interviews describing the deliberations. The children’s father, Patrick Clancy, sat for a “60 Minutes” interview, having spent the trial as the subject of what CNN described as rampant online conspiracy theories. “The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful – for Patrick, for his family, and for all of us,” his attorney said in a statement earlier this month.
If they tried the trial again the way they did, nine times out of ten, I think a jury would come back with not guilty by reason of insanity. No doubt in my mind.
That was juror Nick Dargie, speaking to ABC News — a view legal experts told CNN both sides must now weigh as they game out whether a second jury would land where the first nearly did. District Attorney Tim Cruz, heckled by Clancy supporters outside the courthouse when the mistrial was declared, struck a defiant tone. The first-degree murder charges, he said, were “warranted and appropriate.” “In the end, I bring it all back to the child victims in this case – Cora, Dawson, and Callan,” he said. “This was and has always been about getting justice for those three little babies.”
There may yet be a way out of a second trial. Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, has signaled openness to a negotiated resolution, though he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper he would never accept any deal under which his client served jail time. Legal experts and Massachusetts lawyers, per CNN, are skeptical the parties can find common ground.
Absent a deal, the defense has asked the court to end the case itself. One motion seeks dismissal of the charges outright, arguing a retrial would violate Clancy’s double jeopardy protections because Sullivan declared the mistrial without “manifest necessity” — the high legal standard that requires every alternative to a hung jury to be exhausted first. The judge, the defense wrote, improperly refused repeated requests to question the foreperson or the holdout. “Respectfully, the Court’s rejection of the multiple requests for judicial inquiry constitutes legal error which led, inexorably, to the mistrial being declared without manifest necessity.” The filing faults the judge’s “well-intentioned” but “limited” questioning of jurors on the sixth day of deliberations, when he called them to the bench one by one and asked under oath whether they could follow the law as instructed. “The Court should have instead probed the foreperson’s specific complaint in order to make a reasoned decision as to how best to proceed.”
A second motion asks Sullivan to enter a finding of not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility himself, on the ground that the prosecution never proved criminal responsibility in the first place. “The Commonwealth had to prove that a woman all six experts agreed was mentally ill nonetheless kept the capacity the law demands. It did not,” Reddington wrote, referring to the mental health experts who testified for both sides. Sullivan denied two similar motions — routine filings in criminal trials — during the proceedings.
Then there is the holdout. Several jurors have told reporters he failed to engage with the panel and scrolled on his phone during deliberations. The foreperson told NBC10 Boston the juror refused to find Clancy not guilty even while acknowledging he had reasonable doubt — a violation of the law, in the foreperson’s account. The holdout, in a statement this month, said his fellow jurors misrepresented his position and that he stood by his reading of the evidence: it showed Clancy was guilty.
The defense now wants the court to investigate. Its motion — which does not name the juror — asks for his cellphone records from the hours in the deliberation room, his juror questionnaire, and background material tied to his stated experience with the law. The judge should then, Reddington wrote, question him about his jury-selection answers and “the use of a mobile telephone or receipt of outside information during deliberations,” in a limited inquiry that would not touch the substance of the deliberations. The defense suggested Sullivan might also question Juror 10 — Dargie, who told ABC News the holdout “wouldn’t engage” and spent time “scrolling on his phone” — and asked that other material be preserved, down to the surveillance footage from the hallway outside the deliberation room.
The holdout has his own lawyer now. Edward Paltzik called Reddington’s motion “disgusting,” an attack on the juror and on the Constitution itself. “If the new normal is that jurors are going to face brutal reprisals for disagreeing with a defense attorney,” he wrote on X, “you can kiss the Sixth Amendment goodbye.”