A Massachusetts Jury Deadlocked 11-1. One Holdout Was Enough to Force a Mistrial.
The Mental-Health Gaps That Preceded Three Children's Deaths Are Still Open.
On September 4, 2026, a Plymouth Superior Court jury told Judge William F. Sullivan it could not reach a verdict in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother charged with strangling her three children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — in January 2023. Eleven of twelve jurors were prepared to find her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, according to the foreperson's note to the court. One was not. After the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied an emergency request to remove that holdout juror, Sullivan declared a mistrial.
Clancy has not been convicted of anything. She is presumed innocent, and after nearly forty hours of deliberation over seven days, a supermajority of the jury that sat through five weeks of testimony from more than seventy witnesses believed prosecutors had not proven she was criminally responsible for what happened. What the trial did establish, largely unchallenged by either side, is a specific, traceable sequence of gaps in the psychiatric care Clancy received in the weeks before the killings.
Those gaps have not closed. A bill written to address them has sat on Beacon Hill for two years without a floor vote.
- 11-1 — the jury's vote in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility when Judge Sullivan declared a mistrial · Source: WBUR
- 3 — children who died — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — on January 24, 2023 · Source: PBS NewsHour
- 5 weeks — of trial testimony from more than 70 witnesses before the case reached the jury · Source: ABC7
- Sept. 29, 2026 — status hearing date by which prosecutors must decide whether to retry, offer a plea, or drop the charges · Source: ABC7
- 2 years — how long a bill mandating a 48-hour mental-health evaluation for postpartum defendants has stalled in the Massachusetts legislature · Source: WBUR
A Plymouth County grand jury indicted Clancy on September 15, 2023, on three counts of murder and three counts of strangulation. The trial that followed, before Judge Sullivan — appointed to the Superior Court bench by then-Gov. Deval Patrick (D) in 2014 — ran five weeks and drew testimony from more than seventy witnesses. The defense built its case largely on the state's own evidence, arguing Clancy was in the grip of a severe postpartum psychosis on January 24, 2023, and lacked the criminal responsibility Massachusetts law requires for a conviction.
The jury of nine women and three men deliberated roughly 38 to 40 hours across seven days. On the seventh day, the foreperson sent Judge Sullivan a note.
“It is with a heavy heart that we report we are unable to come to a unanimous decision, and we will not be able to.”
Jury foreperson's note to Judge William F. Sullivan, Sept. 4, 2026
The defense made an emergency bid to the Supreme Judicial Court to remove the single holdout juror and let the remaining eleven return a verdict. The SJC denied it. Sullivan declared a mistrial and set a status hearing for September 29, 2026, when prosecutors must tell the court whether they intend to retry Clancy, offer a plea, or drop the charges entirely.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz (R) — the only Republican district attorney in Massachusetts, in office since 2001 — framed the mistrial as unfinished business, not a defeat: “This was, and has always been, about getting justice for those three little babies.” Defense attorney Kevin Reddington placed the blame squarely on the single dissenting juror: “They know that they were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.”
NEW: Statement from Patrick Clancy on Lindsay Clancy's mistrial.
Clinicians who treated Clancy testified to a fragmented timeline of psychiatric care in the months before the killings: a private clinician evaluated her in September 2022; she was admitted to McLean Hospital, a leading Massachusetts psychiatric facility, from January 1 to January 5, 2023; and she had a final telehealth visit on January 23, 2023 — one day before her children died. According to testimony, the providers on that final call were unaware of an earlier call Clancy had made to a suicide hotline, and were not coordinating with the outpatient clinicians who had also been treating her.
That fragmentation is not unique to Clancy's case. Massachusetts has no dedicated mother-baby inpatient psychiatric unit — a specialized model used in several countries that keeps a new mother and infant together while she receives intensive treatment. New mothers in Massachusetts typically receive a single postpartum medical check-up, at six weeks, unless they or a provider flag a specific concern sooner. Postpartum psychosis, a rare but severe condition distinct from postpartum depression, can develop rapidly and often within the first two to four weeks after birth — a window a single six-week check-up is not designed to catch.
Advocates, led by the Mind the Gap Coalition's Jessie Colbert, have spent two legislative sessions pushing a bill on Beacon Hill, S1171, written directly in response to gaps like the ones the Clancy trial exposed. The bill would require a 48-hour mental-health evaluation for any new mother charged with a crime within a year of giving birth, and would make perinatal psychosis an explicit mitigating factor at sentencing. It has not gained traction in the legislature.
The state's main legislative response so far came from a different direction. On August 23, 2024, Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) signed H.4999, a maternal-health bill establishing a statewide postpartum home-visiting program and a maternal mental-health grant fund, alongside expanded access to midwifery care, birth centers, and doulas. It is a genuine expansion of maternal-health infrastructure — and it predates the Clancy trial's specific findings by more than a year, and does not address the mental-health-evaluation gap for postpartum defendants that S1171 targets.
Does: funds a statewide postpartum home-visiting program and a maternal mental-health grant fund; expands access to midwifery care, birth centers, and doulas.
Does not: mandate any mental-health evaluation for a postpartum mother charged with a crime, or address perinatal psychosis as a sentencing factor — the specific gap S1171 was written to close.
Status: S1171 remains before the legislature, without a floor vote, two years after it was first filed.
Postpartum Support International issued a statement on September 4, 2026, the day of the mistrial, arguing the outcome reflects a deeper structural problem: the United States, the organization said, “continues to prosecute mothers for the consequences of a severe, poorly understood, temporary, and treatable” condition. The statement noted that England, Canada, and Australia each maintain distinct infanticide-law frameworks that treat postpartum mental illness as a category of its own in criminal law — a framework the United States has no equivalent of, leaving cases like Clancy's to be litigated entirely through the ordinary insanity-defense standard.
None of that resolves the criminal case. Prosecutors still control whether Clancy faces a second trial, and a jury — not a legislature — will still decide any question of criminal responsibility. But the officials with authority over the systems that surrounded this case, before and after January 24, 2023, are identifiable by name.
Judge William F. Sullivan— Appointed to the Superior Court by then-Gov. Deval Patrick (D) in 2014. Presided over the five-week trial, saw the Supreme Judicial Court deny the defense's bid to remove the holdout juror, and declared the mistrial.
DA Timothy J. Cruz (R-Plymouth County)— The only Republican district attorney in Massachusetts. His office brought and has not withdrawn the murder and strangulation charges, and controls the September 29 decision on whether to retry.
Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA)— Signed the state's 2024 maternal-health law expanding postpartum home visits and mental-health grant funding, the administration's principal legislative response to date; has not signed or publicly endorsed the pending S1171 evaluation-mandate bill.
A single juror's dissent, not a verdict, is why Lindsay Clancy's case is unresolved. She remains presumed innocent while prosecutors decide, by September 29, whether to retry her. What the trial surfaced beyond that question — a psychiatric-care system that lost track of a patient the day before a catastrophe, and a two-year-old bill written to fix exactly that gap, still without a vote — does not require a verdict to remain true.
