US judge says he must declare mistrial in Lindsay Clancy trial over killing her children

An emergency stay would temporarily halt the mistrial declaration while the defence asks a higher court to intervene. A United States judge said on Friday he must declare a mistrial after the jury remained deadlocked in ​the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for killing her three young children, a tragedy her attorney said occurred while she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Judge William Sullivan's ‌decision came after jurors sent a note indicating that they had been unable to reach a verdict, the third such note they sent this week.

The 12 jurors in Plymouth, Massachusetts, have been deliberating for seven days. The nearly six-week-long televised trial revived longstanding debate about how postpartum mental health in women is treated in the US, and how the country's legal system addresses cases when mothers kill their children. No one disputed that Clancy, 36, strangled her three ​children with exercise bands in January 2023 in the basement of their home in the Boston suburb of Duxbury.

She then cut herself with a knife and jumped from ​a second-story window in an attempt to take her own life that left her paralysed. Clancy's lawyer, Kevin Reddington, sought throughout the trial to convince ⁠jurors she should be found not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility, or reason of insanity, arguing she was a loving mother in the midst of a psychotic episode when she killed ​Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan. Sullivan said at 11:30am ET (1530 GMT) he would hold off on formally declaring a mistrial for an hour to give Reddington a chance to file an ​emergency appeal so jurors could keep deliberating.

Prosecutors said they backed the mistrial declaration, which would enable them to decide whether to try the case again. Earlier on Friday, Sullivan rejected a defence request to remove a juror that he said was preventing the jury from returning a not guilty verdict. Sullivan cited a note the jury foreperson sent on behalf of 11 jurors indicating that one of them had acknowledged doubt but refused to apply it to ​the verdict.

Jurors can only find Clancy guilty of first-degree murder if the prosecution proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutions said Clancy planned killings Prosecutors did not dispute that Clancy, a former labour ​and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, had been dealing with mental health issues. But they argued she was able to appreciate the wrongfulness of killing her children and intentionally chose to do so anyway.