Four days of deliberations and no verdict: Is a mistrial next in the Lindsay Clancy case?
After four days of deliberation, the case involving 36-year-old Lindsay Clancy, who prosecutors say intentionally strangled her three children with exercise bands, is at an apparent standstill.
The jury in a murder trial for a Duxbury, Massachusetts, mother accused of killing her three children informed the judge on Tuesday that they cannot come to a unanimous decision.
The judge then instructed the jury, effectively, to keep at it a little longer.
After four days of deliberation, the case involving 36-year-old Lindsay Clancy, who prosecutors say intentionally strangled her three children with exercise bands, is at an apparent impasse.
What happens now?
What is a hung jury?
Following a 2020 Supreme Court decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, all verdicts in state criminal trials must be unanimous. When jurors cannot reach a unanimous verdict after deliberating, they are said to be “hung.”
But Rose Zoltek-Jick, associate teaching professor and associate director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern, says a deadlocked jury does not automatically trigger a mistrial, a proceeding by which a trial ends without a verdict.
After nudging the jurors once, a judge in Massachusetts can formally issue what’s called the “Tuey-Rodriguez” instruction — sometimes called a “dynamite charge” — urging them to make every effort to reach a unanimous verdict.
The Tuey-Rodriguez instruction is still a prod, if a slightly more forceful one, to get the jurors to agree.
After two readings of the Tuey-Rodriguez instructions, the judge cannot send the jury back to deliberate without obtaining their consent, according to Massachusetts law. But Zoltek-Jick said there is no precise point at which a certain number of deadlock notices triggers or results in a mistrial.
The jurors can deliberate for as long as they see fit, but the judge ultimately has discretion over when deliberations should end and whether a mistrial should be declared.
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Clancy’s legal team has raised an insanity defense, arguing that she was not criminally responsible for her children’s deaths because of her mental state at the time of the killings. She was suffering from postpartum psychosis, they say.
Under Massachusetts law, that means the prosecution still bears the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible at the time of the killings.
“The court is very clear with the jury that the Commonwealth bears the burden,” Zoltek-Jick said. “And in Massachusetts, once a criminal defendant raises the insanity issue, or criminal responsibility issue, the burden remains on the prosecution to prove that the defendant was sane. So the holdout or the disagreement [among the jurors] can be about multiple things, but the burden still remains on the prosecution and does not shift.”
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Is the case headed for a mistrial?
The short answer is: nobody knows.
A mistrial would mean the jury would be dismissed, and the state would have to decide whether to try the case again after investing weeks of time and resources in the prosecution, said Aliza Hochman Bloom, an associate professor of law at Northeastern University.
“Obviously, the issue is the resources spent here,” she said.
Over the course of 21 days, the trial included more than 80 witnesses and 300 exhibits, according to Superior Court Judge William Sullivan. A retrial would mean that the state would have to marshal much of that evidence and many of those witnesses again, starting over before a fresh jury.
But the state isn’t required to pursue a second trial, Zoltek-Jick said. It would be at the discretion of prosecutors to do so.
Trials themselves are, in fact, relatively rare in the United States, with the overwhelming majority of cases — over 95%, in most jurisdictions — being resolved through plea agreements, Bloom said. When a case does go to trial — particularly a complicated homicide case involving weeks of testimony, dozens of witnesses and numerous expert witnesses — the costs in time and resources can be enormous.
“The analogy that I would give is that of the birth of a baby, or labor,” Zoltek-Jick said. “Sometimes it’s short, sometimes it’s much longer. And sometimes you need a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, and sometimes you don’t.”
Deliberations are set to resume on Wednesday if the jury cannot agree on a verdict.
“Each jury and each jury verdict and each jury deliberation has its own character, which is very different” case by case, Zoltek-Jick said.
