Lindsay Clancy's murder trial has exposed a sharp divide over whether the Connecticut native should be held criminally responsible for killing her three young children in January 2023.
But what happens if the 12 jurors now deliberating her fate are similarly split?
The jury of nine women and three men asked to be dismissed for the day late Monday afternoon after not reaching a verdict on the third day of deliberations. They will resume deliberations Tuesday morning in the case against the 36-year-old Massachusetts mother, who is charged with three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan Clancy.
Prosecutors say Clancy strangled the children with exercise bands in the basement of the family's Duxbury, Mass., home on Jan. 24, 2023, and have argued that she bears criminal responsibility for the killings. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, has pursued an insanity defense, arguing that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis and could not appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions.
If convicted of murder, she faces life in prison.
Before deliberations began Thursday, Judge William Sullivan added manslaughter to the list of verdicts jurors could consider. They can also find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity or return a traditional not-guilty verdict.
The jury has plenty to sort through. More than 80 witnesses testified during the five-week trial, which included detailed medical records, digital evidence and opinions from competing mental health experts.
So far, jurors have made only one request of Sullivan. According to Reddington, they asked Friday to examine Clancy's prescription pill bottles and the knife she used to cut her wrists and neck before jumping from a second-story window in a suicide attempt.
In Massachusetts criminal trials, verdicts must be unanimous. The same is true in Connecticut, where all jurors must agree on a guilty or not-guilty verdict for each count.
If jurors in the Clancy case are deadlocked on first-degree murder, it does not necessarily mean they are a hung jury. In that scenario, they would move on to consider second-degree murder and, if they still cannot agree, manslaughter. Sullivan would then accept any unanimous verdict they reach, said David Rossman, director of the Criminal Law Clinical Program at Boston University.
A complete deadlock - meaning jurors cannot agree on any verdict - could prompt Sullivan to give what is known as a "dynamite" instruction, telling them to continue deliberating and "search your conscience to see whether your position is truly reflective of your view," Rossman said.
Holdout jurors, he added, would be asked to consider whether they have "been open to what other people have said."
"If they can't agree, I would expect the judge to deliver that kind of instruction because this has been a very labor intensive trial and it would cost a lot," Rossman said.
If jurors ultimately cannot all agree, Sullivan would declare a mistrial. Clancy would continue to be held at Tewksbury Hospital, a state psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, Rossman said. She has remained there during the trial and has been transported to Plymouth Superior Court for the proceedings.
Prosecutors would then be free to try the case again before a new jury.
"Whether they would charge her again with first-degree murder or not is something I couldn't say," he said.
In deciding whether to retry the case, prosecutors would likely consider how closely divided the original jury was, Rossman said. Narrow splits are more common, he said, while heavily one-sided deadlocks are "very rare."
"Given the notoriety of this case, the seriousness of this crime, all signs point to the prosecutors deciding to retry the defendant if it is a hung jury," Rossman said.
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This article originally published at What happens if Lindsay Clancy jurors deadlock? A 'dynamite' instruction could come next.