Clancy Verdict Deadlocked at 11-1, Defense Pushes for Holdout to Be Removed in Heated Exchange with Judge
The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial is deadlocked at 11 to 1, reports late Thursday confirmed, and the holdout will be questioned by the judge in the case Friday morning.
While the proceedings in the courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, did not explicitly state which side the lone holdout juror was on, it appeared clear that the panel was leaning toward acquittal, with Clancy attorney Kevin Reddington requesting that the juror be removed from the panel.
“The court has an instruction from the foreperson of that jury that’s been working for a week now, saying that there’s one juror who refuses to listen to the law that you’ve given him or her on reasonable doubt,” Reddington told the court, according to The New York Times.
The judge refused to do so yet, although tension remained high.
The jury is now in its sixth day of deliberations. During the proceedings, the jury sent Judge William Sullivan a note saying they were still hopelessly split, 11 to 1, and that the holdout juror “refuses to listen to the law,” according to CNN.
After a sidebar with the jurors under oath about whether the jurors can follow the law, Sullivan said he was not ready to remove the juror.
BREAKING: The foreperson in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial just delivered a note asking for one juror to be removed for not following the rules regarding the law’s definition of reasonable doubt. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington then asked for that juror to be removed.
The… pic.twitter.com/8jEj6Xhn5J
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 3, 2026
“I don’t feel that it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations,” Sullivan told the court. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to say I agree with one juror or 11.”
The jury will enter a seventh day of deliberations on Friday regarding whether or not Clancy can be held legally liable for killing her three children in January of 2023.
She then allegedly tried to commit suicide herself by throwing herself out of a second-story window onto frozen ground. However, the fall merely left her paralyzed.
The defense maintains that Clancy, who was suffering from a series of mental health conditions including postpartum depression, psychosis, and bipolar disorder — and who had received a revolving door of ineffective pharmaceutical interventions for them — is not guilty by reason of insanity.
The prosecution, meanwhile, maintains that Clancy’s forethought and planning, including internet searches regarding the methods of the killing and sending her husband out on errands that gave her enough time to carry them out, proves that she was mentally sound enough at the time of the killings to support a murder conviction.
Massachusetts has a liberal standard on how insanity pleas are considered, which is why many legal observers feel that this standard would end in either a hung jury or an acquittal. The case has also galvanized social media, often for reasons not related to the legal arguments in the case.
On Wednesday, after the jury announced it was deadlocked yet again, Judge Sullivan issued what’s known as a so-called Tuey-Rodriguez instruction.
Otherwise known as a “dynamite charge,” a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction tells a jury that, given the facts as they were presented, there is no reason to believe a different jury would reach a different conclusion and implores them to keep working.
“It alerts the jury to, among other things, the seriousness of the obligation and unique qualifications to decide this case,” retired Massachusetts Judge Jim Barretto told WCVB-TV.
However, if the jury is still unmoved, it’s more likely the judge will declare a mistrial than remove the juror — even if that isn’t an outcome he appears to want.
“Nobody wants a mistrial. Nobody wants to have this case tried again,” trial attorney Steven Vinick told CNN, adding that the judge “is in a very, very difficult position.”
“The judge is doing whatever he can to allow them to continue with their deliberations.”
And, as for removing a juror, “you really have to make sure that you’re removing them because they are not following the law, not simply because they disagree with the rest of the jurors,” former federal prosecutor Berit Berger told the outlet.
“Being a lone holdout is not only consistent with our law, we tell jurors that, you know, they’re not supposed to compromise their strongly held beliefs.”
For his part, Reddington insisted he didn’t want the Clancy trial to end that way, albeit for different reasons.
“There’s a person who has doubt but will not listen to the judge’s instruction,” Reddington told reporters. “I don’t want a mistrial. Why would I want a mistrial? I kicked the s*** out of their case.”
CNN correspondent Jean Casarez, meanwhile, said she had “never seen anything like” Reddington’s accusation that a juror isn’t following the law, telling Anderson Cooper that if the holdout were to be removed, the deliberations would need to start anew.
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