Massachusetts: A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in the US murder trial of Lindsay Clancy for killing her three young children, a tragedy her attorney said occurred while she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
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.
Judge William Sullivan's mistrial declaration came after jurors sent three notes this week indicating they had reached an impasse.
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 paralyzed.
Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, sought throughout the trial to convince jurors she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing she was a loving mother who had been in the midst of a psychotic episode when she killed Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and 8-month-old Callan.
Earlier on Friday, Sullivan rejected a defense request to remove a juror who Reddington said was preventing the jury from returning a not-guilty verdict.
Reddington cited a note the jury foreperson sent on behalf of 11 jurors indicating that one juror had acknowledged doubt but refused to apply it to the verdict. Jurors could only find Clancy guilty of first-degree murder if the prosecution proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Clancy's defense lawyers then filed an emergency appeal asking Massachusetts' highest court to order Sullivan to inquire further into whether the holdout juror could heed the judge's instructions to follow the law.
The Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts' Suffolk County denied the defense request, paving the way for the mistrial declaration.
