CommentaryBy the seventh day of deliberations in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the courtroom dispute had shifted away from her mental state and toward the conduct of a single juror. The jury foreperson had sent Judge William Sullivan notes indicating that one juror had acknowledged doubt but, in the foreperson’s account, was refusing to apply the court’s reasonable-doubt instruction. Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, urged Sullivan to remove the juror, arguing that the problem was no longer disagreement over the evidence but a refusal to follow the law. Sullivan declined. On Friday, after the jury remained unable to reach a unanimous verdict, he declared a mistrial.
After nearly six weeks of testimony and seven days of deliberations, that result will inevitably be dismissed as a failure of justice. But the fight over the holdout juror says otherwise. Criminal procedure exists to produce judgments, but it also sets conditions on how those judgments may be reached. And in a case like this one, with its unthinkable violence, a mandatory life sentence on the table, and relentless public attention, those conditions become all the more consequential.
Clancy’s three children—5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan—died in the family’s Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. She has never disputed that she killed them. In a civil lawsuit filed against several former psychiatric care providers, Clancy’s attorney wrote:
As a direct result of [psychiatric providers’] negligence, Lindsay suffered catastrophic physical injuries, including permanent paralysis, and she lost her three beloved children… Lindsay now faces a lifetime of physical disability, psychological trauma, and the unbearable grief of waking up every day knowing she killed her children — all of which could have been prevented had Defendants provided competent medical care.
The central dispute at trial was whether she was criminally responsible for her behaviors at the time. Her attorneys argued that postpartum psychosis had deprived her of the capacity Massachusetts law requires for criminal responsibility. Prosecutors argued that, despite serious mental-health problems, she understood the wrongfulness of her actions and deliberately carried them out.
That distinction matters because Massachusetts law did not require Clancy to prove that she lacked criminal responsibility. Once the issue was properly before the jury, the burden remained with the Commonwealth to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible. Under the state’s homicide instructions, a person lacks criminal responsibility if, because of a mental disease or defect, she lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of law. The instructions also emphasize that “mental disease or defect” is a legal term rather than a medical diagnosis.
Much of the public discussion surrounding Clancy has understandably focused on postpartum psychosis: whether she had it, whether doctors missed it, and whether it can explain conduct that otherwise seems impossible to comprehend. Those questions matter, but none of them was on the verdict slip. Jurors were not asked to pick the more persuasive psychiatric account and hand that side the win. They had to decide whether the Commonwealth had met its burden of proving criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
No one outside the jury room knows what happened inside it. The judge and the lawyers had the foreperson’s notes and nothing else.
According to Reddington, the foreperson’s notes attributed the deadlock to a lone holdout — a juror who “has made statements acknowledging doubt, but refuses to apply it to the verdict as the law states.” The defense attorney appears to have interpreted the communications as establishing an 11–1 split in favor of a not-guilty verdict and accused the juror of disregarding both Sullivan’s instructions and the oath taken the previous day when Sullivan questioned the jurors individually. He added: “Clearly, Judge, we have a person who under their oath, stood in front of you yesterday…looked you in the eye, and lied.”
Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague disputed that interpretation. From the note, she argued, the court could not know whether the holdout misunderstood reasonable doubt or whether the other jurors did. Sullivan ultimately concluded that the information before him showed a disagreement arising from deliberations, not a basis for removing the juror.
But Reddington’s concern was far from frivolous. Jurors are bound to apply the law as the judge instructs them, and a person who simply refuses to do so presents a different problem from a juror who weighs the evidence differently from everyone else. Telling the two apart, though, means sending the judge into the deliberation room, if not in body then in effect, to settle the argument.
Massachusetts law does not make that easy. General Laws chapter 234A, section 39 permits a judge to discharge a deliberating juror only after a hearing and a finding of an emergency or other compelling reason. Massachusetts courts have interpreted that authority narrowly. Reasons for removing a deliberating juror must be personal to that juror and unrelated to the issues in the case, the juror’s view of the evidence, or the juror’s relationship with fellow jurors.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court explained why more than four decades ago in Commonwealth v. Connor. There, the court reversed convictions after a judge removed a deliberating juror without establishing a proper personal basis for doing so. Reports that a juror cannot follow an oath or participate properly, the court warned, may conceal something much less extraordinary: persistence in a minority position. The court accepted that a particularly obstinate individual may sometimes sit on a jury and described that possibility as an unavoidable risk of the system.
In a case like Clancy’s, the rule at first glance appears counterproductive to the pursuit of justice. Eleven jurors think the twelfth has the law wrong, and the judge can do nothing about it. But the alternative is worse. If a foreperson could trigger removal by reporting that a dissenting juror was applying reasonable doubt incorrectly, it would become impossible to discern where misconduct ends and disagreement begins. A judge called upon to determine which juror had the better understanding of the evidence would necessarily learn something about the substance and direction of deliberations. Removing the dissenter could then do what the unanimity requirement itself prohibits: turn a majority view into a verdict by eliminating the person standing in its way.
None of this is peculiar to Clancy. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt protects defendants, but it also sets the terms on which the state may punish anyone at all. The US Supreme Court has long treated the standard as a requirement of due process, reflecting a foundational judgment about the degree of certainty required before criminal punishment may be imposed. And in Ramos v. Louisiana, the court held that the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous jury to convict a defendant of a serious crime in state as well as federal court.
That requirement deliberately denies the majority the ability to resolve a criminal case by ordinary voting rules. Eleven jurors may represent an overwhelming consensus in everyday life. They do not constitute a criminal verdict.
A jury system that protects genuine dissent also protects stubbornness, confusion, and plain error. The events in the Clancy jury room may have involved one of those things. We cannot know from the public record, and the rules limiting inquiry into deliberations are part of the reason we cannot know. The foreperson may have had it exactly right. Or the holdout misunderstood the instruction, or the other eleven misunderstood the holdout, or the argument was never about the definition of reasonable doubt at all but about whether doubt existed.
The law cannot eliminate those possibilities without giving judges considerably greater power over jury deliberations. Massachusetts has chosen instead to tolerate some uncertainty in order to preserve the independence of the jury. Connor is candid about the cost of that choice: “Although a mistrial may be expensive in both human and monetary costs, it is not to be avoided by intrusion into the jury’s domain. The possibility that an unreasonably stubborn or eccentric juror will be seated is an unavoidable risk of the jury system.”
That is what happened in Plymouth Superior Court. The mistrial did not find that Clancy lacked criminal responsibility, and it did not vindicate the defense’s psychiatric case. It is not an acquittal; the Commonwealth retains the ability to prosecute the case again. It establishes one thing: this jury could not reach the unanimity a lawful verdict requires.
The distinction is hardest to hold onto when nobody disputes the acts. In many criminal trials, reasonable doubt concerns identity, physical evidence, witness credibility, or whether a crime occurred at all. Here, three children are dead and there is no genuine legal dispute about who killed them. What remains unresolved is culpability: what Clancy understood on January 24, 2023, and what the law can hold her responsible for.
Harm on this scale makes people want a clear answer, and they are right to want one. But the gravity of a crime does not prove any element of it. If anything, the extraordinary consequences of a first-degree murder conviction make the discipline imposed by the burden of proof more important.
Procedural rules are easy to defend when they produce results we like anyway. The test is a case like this one. The bar on judicial intrusion protects a legitimate dissenter and an irrational one identically; the unanimity rule prevents a wrongful conviction and, some weeks, any conviction at all. The law accepts those possibilities because the authority to punish carries with it limits on the means by which punishment may be authorized.
There may eventually be a definitive legal judgment in Lindsay Clancy’s case. Prosecutors can retry her, and another jury may reach the unanimous conclusion this one could not. But the first trial did not break down short of its destination. It went as far as the law allows without unanimity, and Massachusetts does not let a judge supply the rest. The facts demanded moral clarity and the law declined to supply it. That is a bad outcome by every ordinary measure, and it is the one the rules were built to allow.
Ingrid Burke Friedman is JURIST’s Editorial Director.
