Prosecutors weigh retrial after jury deadlocks on postpartum psychosis defense

Justice William Sullivan declared a mistrial Friday in the case against Lindsay Clancy, ending a weekslong trial that drew national attention and, throughout its run, hundreds of supporters to the Plymouth courthouse. Sullivan made the ruling after jurors sent a note Friday morning saying they were unable to come to a unanimous decision after seven days of deliberations.

“It is with a heavy heart that we report that we are unable to come to a unanimous decision and will not be able to,” the jury foreperson said in the note.

Before making the mistrial official, Sullivan gave Clancy’s attorney a brief window to petition the state’s highest court to halt the declaration. That effort was rejected.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, was charged with killing her three children in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. She admitted to strangling Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, with exercise bands and to attempting to take her own life by jumping from a second-story window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down.

The central question at trial was whether Clancy was criminally responsible for the killings. Her defense team, led by Reddington, argued she was not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility — Massachusetts’ version of an insanity defense — and that she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis on the day of the killings. Clancy testified that she heard a man’s voice telling her to kill herself and the children.

“This is a young woman that, with her husband, tried very hard to get the help she needed,” Reddington told jurors.

Prosecutors portrayed Clancy as an overwhelmed mother who knew what she was doing was wrong. Buckingham said during trial that Clancy “acted intentionally, rationally and swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal: to kill.”

“This is not a public debate about women’s mental health and how the medical system treats women,” Buckingham told jurors. “This case is about this defendant, Lindsay Clancy.”

Much of the trial traced Clancy’s attempts to manage her mental health in the months before the killings. According to testimony, she began experiencing anxiety about returning to work after the birth of her youngest child in May 2022. She was prescribed a range of medications for depression and insomnia as her condition worsened. She also went to inpatient treatment and called a suicide hotline.

Her ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, returned home on the night of January 24, 2023, to find blood in the couple’s bedroom and his then-wife injured in the backyard. In a statement released days after the killings, he asked the public to forgive his ex-wife and said the woman portrayed in media reports was not the person he knew. “The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone — me, our kids, family, friends, and her patients,” Patrick Clancy said.

In January, Clancy filed a medical malpractice suit against the doctors and health systems that treated her in the months leading up to the killings, alleging they failed to properly diagnose her bipolar disorder and subjected her to a disorganized regiment of medications that worsened her condition. Many of the defendants have denied wrongdoing; the suit is ongoing.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 8 women experience postpartum depression. Postpartum psychosis, characterized by losing touch with reality and experiencing paranoia, delusions or hallucinations, is far rarer.

The jury of nine women and three men had told Sullivan twice before that they were unable to reach a verdict, and were instructed to keep deliberating. Tensions spilled into public view on Thursday afternoon, when Reddington urged the judge to dismiss one holdout juror he said appeared to be blocking the other 11 from reaching a verdict. He said the jury foreperson had indicated the individual “refuses to listen to the law” about reasonable doubt.

Sullivan declined to remove the juror, saying he did not want to favor one side over the other, but agreed to reinstruct the jurors on their obligation to follow the law.

Hundreds of women who sympathized with Clancy’s postpartum struggle gathered outside the Plymouth courthouse during the trial to raise awareness of the severe mood and anxiety disorders some new mothers face.

Prosecutors will now decide whether to bring the case before a new jury.

Help is available: Reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.