A Massachusetts jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a mother accused of murdering her three children, and Judge William Sullivan has declared a mistrial.
The 12-person jury, made up of nine women and three men, was split 11 to one, according to notes given to the court.
Clancy's defense and prosecution arguments
Clancy does not deny strangling her children at their home near Boston but says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, which led to her actions. After the killings, her husband found her injured in the yard, where she landed after jumping from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors argued she knew what she was doing in a deliberate act of murder.
What happens after the mistrial
A mistrial means the case essentially returns to the same status as before the trial began, with the 36-year-old former nurse charged with murder and held at a psychiatric hospital awaiting a resolution of the criminal case.
Prosecutors must now decide whether to try again with a new jury. If they do, jury selection would begin again and a new trial would be scheduled, though the exact type of charges could potentially be different.
Possible plea deal or dropping charges
Prosecutors could also offer a plea deal to Clancy, according to Brad Bailey, a Boston defense attorney and legal expert. "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 told the Associated Press.
The district attorney's office could also decide not to retry the case out of a sense that another mistrial is likely in the complex and emotional case. "Sometimes they decide not to, because of the sense that there may be the same result each time they try it, and because of the expenditures involved in trying the case to begin with, particularly when you have expert witnesses," Bailey said. "Those are going to be expensive cases."
Defense's likely push to drop charges
Clancy's defense team will almost certainly want to push to drop the charges against their client. Bailey expected her defense attorney to aggressively lobby against another trial, making a case to the district attorney's office along the lines of: "'Why are you doing this to this poor woman? She's still clearly obviously suffering. She's been punished with her paralysis and, worse than that, the loss of her three children.'"
The court has set a status conference for 9am ET on 29 September. In the US, the national maternal mental health hotline is 1-833-852-6262. In the UK, the Pandas foundation offers support via Whatsapp on 07903 508334. In Australia, the national maternal and perinatal mental health hotline is 1300 726 306.
