The shocking triple-murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, which ignited a media circus both in and outside of its Massachusetts courtroom, has been declared a mistrial. The jury remained hopelessly deadlocked as to whether the 36-year-old was guilty of first-degree murder, more than three years after she admitted to strangling her three young children. She previously pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, and Clancy’s legal team argued that the former labor and delivery nurse could not be held criminally responsible for the killings because she suffered from severe undiagnosed postpartum psychosis at the time.
Following a third day of deadlock, in which jurors said they were unable to reach consensus on a verdict, the trial ended without resolution. “I’m going to declare a mistrial at this point,” Judge Kevin Sullivan told the court on Friday morning, as reported by NBC News. Like the high-profile Karen Read case before it, which also took place in a Massachusetts courtroom and initially ended in a mistrial, Clancy’s case could be retried in a court of law. (After Read’s first trial ended with a hung jury in July 2024, she was found not guilty of murder in the second trial last June.)
After Sullivan set his intent to declare a mistrial, Clancy’s lawyer Kevin Reddington requested an immediate appeal to the state supreme court for an emergency stay of the declaration. The judge provided a one-hour window from the time of the request for Reddington to file the stay with the higher court. But Reddington’s request that the case’s holdout juror be further investigated was denied and a mistrial was officially declared shortly after 2 p.m. on Friday.
After seven days of deliberation, a jury pool made up of nine women and three men were unable to reach a verdict in the Clancy case. Judge Sullivan previously told jurors that the burden was on prosecutors to prove that Clancy was not suffering from a “mental disease or defect” so severe that she could not discern the difference between right and wrong. If found not guilty under those terms, Clancy would be sent to a state psychiatric facility until she was cleared as “no longer mentally ill and dangerous” to the wider public, Sullivan told the jury.
The case has shed a national spotlight on negligence in maternal healthcare, dividing amateur online sleuths—many of whom are skeptical of the children’s father, Patrick Clancy—and capturing the attention of celebrities like Khloé Kardashian, Spencer Pratt, and Jeremy O. Harris, who, in a recent interview, told true-crime impresario Nancy Grace, “I have become completely swept up in everything Lindsay Clancy.”
Closing arguments in the five-week trial concluded on Thursday, August 27, with prosecutors arguing that Clancy deliberately killed her three children—Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months—at their home in January 2023. The state says Clancy intentionally waited for her husband to leave their home on an errand, then guided the children into the basement, where she one by one used exercise bands to strangle them dead. But Clancy’s defense attorney Reddington argued that a man’s voice told his client to carry out the killings, as well as an attempted suicide. After jumping from a second-story window at home immediately following the strangulations, Clancy is now paralyzed from the waist down.