Lindsay Clancy trial: What happens if there’s a hung jury as judge gives ‘dynamite’ instruction
The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial was sent home for the day without a verdict after once again telling the judge that they are unable to reach a decision on whether she is criminally responsible for killing her three children.
Jurors sent a note to Judge William Sullivan at around 2:15 p.m. ET on Wednesday, their fifth day of deliberations, stating for the second day in a row that they have not been able to come to a unanimous decision.
Sullivan ordered them to keep trying, giving them what’s known as a Tuey-Rodriguez charge. The special set of instructions, also called a “dynamite instruction,” ask jurors to rethink their position and “consider that it is desirable that the case be decided.”
“You have been selected in the same manner, and from the same source, as any future jury would be,” Sullivan said in court. “There is no reason to suppose that the case will ever be submitted to twelve persons who are more intelligent, more impartial, or more competent to decide it or that more or clearer evidence will be produced.”
“It really is designed to encourage the jury to take one last look at things and really try,” Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University, told USA Today.
The jury resumed deliberations for a few hours before the judge sent them home for the day and ordered them to resume deliberations for a sixth day on Thursday.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
Jurors heard testimony from relatives and doctors about how her mental health declined in the months before the killings and how her treatment included several medications and a short stay in a psychiatric hospital. Medical experts hired by the prosecution and the defense reached sharply different conclusions about her psychiatric state when she killed the children.
A mistrial will be declared and the case essentially goes back to the same status as before the trial, with the 36-year-old charged with murder and held at a psychiatric hospital awaiting resolution of the criminal case.
Prosecutors will decide whether to try again with a new jury. If they do, the jury selection process will begin again and a new trial will be scheduled. Prosecutors could also offer a plea deal to Clancy, said Brad Bailey, a Boston defense attorney and former prosecutor who is not involved in the case.
“Any time the threat of a retrial with murder one hanging over the client is re-interjected, defense lawyers will, at the very least, explore whether or not there’s any interest in a resolution,” Bailey said.
Clancy doesn’t deny strangling her children at their home south of Boston but says postpartum psychosis led to her actions. After the killings, her husband found her badly injured in the yard, where she landed after jumping from a second-story window. She was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argue she knew what she was doing.
Though less likely, the district attorney’s office could decide to not retry the case.
