Jury deadlocks twice in Lindsay Clancy triple child murder trial in Massachusetts

A US judge has issued a "dynamite charge" after jurors deadlocked for a second time in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three children in 2023.

Mistrial looms as jury stalls again in Clancy child killings case

A US judge has ordered jurors back to deliberations for a final push after they deadlocked for a second time in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, TheJournal.ie reports, raising the prospect of a mistrial in one of the country's most closely watched criminal cases.

Clancy (36) does not deny strangling her three children — Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months — at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023. She claims, however, that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis at the time, which her defence argues removes her criminal responsibility.

On the fifth day of deliberations, the jury signalled to Judge William Sullivan that it had again reached a stalemate. All 12 jurors must agree for a verdict to be returned.

Sullivan responded by issuing what US media describe as a "dynamite charge" — a last-resort instruction designed to encourage deadlocked jurors to continue discussing the case and reach an agreement. If the jury ultimately cannot agree, Sullivan will declare a mistrial, leaving prosecutors to decide whether to retry the case before a new jury.

Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her lawyers say she heard a voice commanding her to kill her children, a symptom they attribute to postpartum psychosis. After the killings, she jumped from a second-storey window in an apparent suicide attempt that left her paralysed from the waist down.

The former nurse faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted of first-degree murder. Jurors may also return verdicts of second-degree murder, manslaughter, or not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility — the last of which would result in Clancy being committed to a psychiatric facility.

Her five-week trial was televised and drew more than 80 witnesses. Dozens of women dressed in pink gathered outside the Massachusetts courthouse during proceedings to express their support for Clancy, while the case has ignited broader debate in the United States about maternal mental health.

Postpartum psychosis affects approximately one to two women in every 1,000 births, according to Sally Wilson, national training coordinator at the UK-based charity Action on Postpartum Psychosis. Wilson told AFP last month that Clancy's case represented "an incredibly distressing and rare outcome of postpartum psychosis."

Source: TheJournal.ie