Deadlocked Clancy jury faces final push after 30 hours of deliberations

The courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts fell into a peculiar rhythm on Wednesday morning as Judge William F. Sullivan called jurors forward one by one. Each of the twelve deliberating jurors and six alternates approached the bench, were sworn in, and listened to the judge speak in words the reporters in the gallery could not hear. Some nodded. Some shook their heads. When it was finished, the judge declared them all fair and impartial, and sent the twelve back out to do something they had already failed to do twice: reach a unanimous verdict.

Lindsay Clancy sits at the center of this impasse, paralyzed from a suicide attempt, facing three counts of murder for strangling her three children. She has pleaded not guilty. The jury—nine women and three men—has been deliberating for nearly thirty hours across five days, and twice they have sent notes to the court saying they cannot agree. On Tuesday morning, they wrote: "After many hours of deliberation, we are unable to come to a unanimous decision." Judge Sullivan sent them back to work. By midday Wednesday, they sent another message with nearly identical words: "After much deliberation we are still unable to come to a unanimous decision."

What hangs in the balance is not small. The jury must decide whether Clancy is guilty of murder, or whether they should convict her of the lesser charge of manslaughter. They must weigh her mental health issues against the facts of what happened. They must decide whether she bears criminal responsibility at all. The trial itself was long—over eighty witnesses testified—and the legal and moral questions it poses are not simple ones.

When the jury sent its second deadlock message on Wednesday, Judge Sullivan called them back into court and delivered what is known in Massachusetts as a Tuey-Rodriguez charge, commonly called a "dynamite charge." The instruction is designed as a final push: jurors are formally told to consider the reasonableness of their own opinions and the opinions of others, and to continue deliberating toward a verdict. "You should consider that it is desirable that the case be decided," the charge states. It is the last tool a judge has before declaring a mistrial.

Outside the courtroom, the trial has drawn a crowd that has grown restless and sometimes unruly. On Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Dawn Light, fifty-six, a retired nurse, was arrested in the courthouse parking lot. Prosecutors alleged she had filmed jurors leaving the building. When police searched her phone with her permission, they found a deleted video of the jurors. On Wednesday morning, Light appeared in a nearby courtroom and pleaded not guilty to one count of aggravated intimidation of a witness and jurors. Her attorney called it a misunderstanding, saying Light had been trying to photograph Clancy, not the jury. The judge released her without bail but ordered her to stay away from the courthouse and have no contact with jurors. As Light left the courtroom, dozens of people with cameras and microphones surrounded her. She ran.

The jury will return Thursday for a sixth day of deliberations. If they remain deadlocked, Judge Sullivan may declare a mistrial, which would end the trial without a verdict and open the door to a retrial. Legal experts say prosecutors are likely to pursue one. The case has become polarizing and political, and the Plymouth County district attorney would probably retry it regardless of how the current jury votes, according to Mark Eiglarsh, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor. For now, the twelve jurors sit in a room trying to find common ground on a question that has already divided them for thirty hours. What happens next depends on whether they can.