A defense attorney blocked a mistrial declaration with an emergency appeal to Massachusetts’ highest court.
The Lindsay Clancy murder trial lurched toward collapse Friday, then pulled back from the edge when defense attorney Kevin Reddington made a last-minute move to stop it. Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan had told attorneys he was ready to declare a mistrial after jurors reported for the third time that they could not reach a unanimous verdict.
Reddington asked the judge for time to file an emergency motion with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court seeking to block that declaration. Sullivan agreed, giving Reddington one hour to make his case to the state’s top court before the mistrial would become official.
As originally reported, the jury had spent more than 36 hours deliberating across seven days after hearing testimony from 85 witnesses. Sullivan had already sent jurors back twice after they told him they were deadlocked. Both times, he ordered them to keep trying. On Friday morning, they returned with the same answer.
Clancy admitted to killing her three young children inside the family’s Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. The victims were 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan. Her defense team did not dispute that she carried out the killings. Instead, attorneys argued she was not criminally responsible because she had been overmedicated and was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time.
Signs of a deep divide within the jury surfaced Thursday when the foreperson sent Sullivan a note claiming one holdout juror was refusing to follow the court’s instructions on reasonable doubt. That message suggested an 11-to-1 split as deliberations pushed toward a breakdown. Reddington urged Sullivan to address the dispute directly, but the jury returned Friday with yet another declaration of deadlock.
The judge moved to end the trial without a verdict, then paused that process to allow the defense’s emergency appeal to proceed.
Prosecutors have not stated whether they would retry Clancy if the case formally ends in a mistrial.
The outcome of Reddington’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court remained the deciding factor in whether the trial would continue or officially come to a close without resolution.
