Lindsay Clancy lawyer says one juror blocking verdict

Lindsay Clancy's defense accused a single holdout juror on Thursday of blocking a verdict in the Massachusetts mother's trial over the deaths of her three children.

Kevin Reddington, Clancy's main lawyer, told a Massachusetts court that there was “one juror who refuses to listen to the law” on reasonable doubt. He asked Judge William Sullivan to remove the juror from the 12-member panel.

Sullivan refused and sent the jury back to continue deliberations Friday, the seventh day of deliberations. All 12 jurors must agree to reach a verdict. If they cannot, Sullivan will declare a mistrial, leaving prosecutors to decide whether to try the case again with a new jury.

On Wednesday, Sullivan issued a last-resort “dynamite charge”, which encourages jurors to keep discussing the case in an effort to break an impasse and avoid a mistrial.

Clancy, 36, does not deny strangling Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months, but has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. She says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and heard a voice ordering her to kill her children.

Her five-week trial was televised and featured more than 80 witnesses. The case has sparked debate in the United States over maternal mental health.

After the killings at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023, Clancy jumped from a second-story window in an apparent suicide attempt that left her paralysed from the waist down.

The former nurse faces life in prison without parole if found guilty of first-degree murder. Jurors can also find her guilty of second-degree murder, manslaughter, or not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility, which would send her to a psychiatric facility.