Eleven Jurors Voted to Acquit Lindsay Clancy. One Did Not, and the Judge Declared a Mistrial.

A Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial Friday in the first-degree murder case against Lindsay Clancy, ending a trial that ran through 85 witnesses and more than 200 pieces of evidence without producing a verdict. The 12-person jury deliberated roughly 36 hours across seven days and told Judge William Sullivan three separate times that it could not agree.

Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse, was charged with strangling her three children at the family's home in Duxbury on January 24, 2023. The children were Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. The jury had five options in front of it, all of which required unanimity: not guilty by reason of insanity, not guilty, first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or manslaughter. It reached none of them.

The final note from the foreperson pointed to a single holdout. By accounts of the panel's deliberations, 11 jurors were prepared to acquit Clancy by reason of insanity and one man would not join them. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington did not hide what he thought of that. "I hope that guy can sleep well at night," he said. Asked whether his client was prepared to go through a second trial, Reddington answered, "She'll be ready."

The defense case rested on postpartum psychosis and on the argument that Clancy had been overmedicated on a stack of prescriptions in the weeks before the killings. Prosecutors argued the opposite — that she planned what she did and understood that it was wrong. "The facts are Lindsay Clancy killed her three children and the evidence suggested to us that she was in control of her actions," Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz said.

Sullivan, who had pushed the jury more than once to keep working, was blunt about the limits of his own role during the standoff. "I'm just giving the instructions," he said. "I'm not an actor." Once the panel reported deadlock for the third time, he ended it.

Cruz now has to decide whether to retry the case, seek a plea, or drop the charges altogether. He was not saying Friday. "I'm going to be meeting with our team, and we will address this case further at the appropriate time in the context of an official court proceeding," he said. Both sides are expected to talk to jurors about where the deliberations broke down, which is standard practice before a retrial decision and often the most useful information a prosecutor gets.

Clancy remains at Tewksbury State Hospital, where she has been held under psychiatric care since 2023, and she stays there while the district attorney decides. Patrick Clancy, the children's father, has divorced her and remarried. He called the prospect of sitting through the whole thing a second time extraordinarily painful.

President Trump was asked about the case Friday and said Clancy "did a horrible, horrible thing."