Latest: What happens next: retrial, the one-year clock, and c. 123 s. 16
The jury deciding whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children returned to Plymouth County Superior Court at nine o’clock Friday morning. They deliberated about three and a half hours Thursday afternoon without reaching a verdict and without sending a single note.
There are three verdict slips in that room, one for Cora, one for Dawson, and one for Callan. Each carries five options, and the twelve jurors must be unanimous on each slip separately.
The first note, and what it points at
Shortly after resuming Friday morning, the jury sent Judge Sullivan its first question of the deliberations. According to Kevin Reddington, who confirmed it to reporters afterward, they asked to see two bags of Lindsay Clancy’s prescription pill bottles and the knife she used in her suicide attempt after the killings.
Sullivan took it up at a private sidebar without reading the note aloud in open court, and the exhibits were sent in. Neither item had gone into the jury room at the start, which is ordinary practice for weapons and controlled substances; a jury that wants them has to ask.
Yesterday this page said the useful signals would be requests for specific evidence, because they tell you what the room is arguing about. This is one.
Why the pill bottles cut both ways
The bottles are the rare exhibit both sides claimed in closing, which is exactly why the jury asking for them is harder to read than it first appears.
Reddington used the medications as the engine of his whole defense. His line was that it was the medicine and the care, and he walked jurors through a woman cycling through roughly ten psychiatric drugs, a McLean admission a month before, and journals that deteriorated from careful tracking in September to what he called chicken scratch by January.
Sprague used the same bottles for the opposite proposition. Her argument was that leftover pills show Clancy was not taking the medication as prescribed, that as a labor and delivery nurse she knew better, and that she wanted to manage it on her own terms. That is a claim about control, and control is the government’s entire theory.
So twelve people counting pills could be building toward either conclusion. What it does establish is that the medication question is live in that room rather than settled.
Why the knife matters more than it sounds
The knife goes to the suicide attempt, and the suicide attempt is load-bearing for both sides.
The Commonwealth’s own theory, through Dr. Heilbrun, was that Clancy was suicidal and took her children with her because she could not bear to leave them. Prosecutors conceded during the trial that the attempt was serious. The defense needs it to be serious for a different reason: a woman who genuinely tried to die that night is harder to describe as someone executing a plan she expected to survive.
A jury examining the actual knife is testing how real that attempt was. There is no version of that inquiry that helps the first-degree murder count.
What it does not tell you
An exhibit request is not a verdict signal and nobody should treat it as one. It shows engagement with the evidence, and in a case with four contested verdict options it is at least as consistent with a jury working methodically through each one as with a jury close to agreement.
What would be more revealing is a request to have the criminal responsibility instruction reread, or a question about who carries the burden. Neither has come.
As of mid-afternoon Friday there has been one note, no further questions, and no verdict.
A word on sourcing, because this detail is moving fast and being repeated loosely. The note itself was not read aloud in open court, and Judge Sullivan responded to it in writing. What is public comes from Reddington speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, reported by WCVB and CBS News, which described two bags of prescription medication and the knife. No outlet has published the jury’s actual wording. Separately, some accounts Friday suggested the request was denied. No named source has confirmed that, and it should not be repeated as fact.
The five verdict options, and what each one means
Most coverage has been describing four possible outcomes. There are five, and the fifth matters even though almost nobody expects it.
Not guilty. A flat acquittal. This is the verdict for a jury that concludes the Commonwealth failed to prove Clancy caused the deaths at all. Nobody in this trial argued that. The defense conceded the killings from the opening statement forward, which makes this option a formality rather than a live possibility.
Not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. The verdict the defense asked for. It means the jury found the Commonwealth did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was criminally responsible, under the standard from Commonwealth v. McHoul: that mental disease or defect left her without substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the law. It is not a finding that she is innocent of the acts, and it does not send her home. It begins civil commitment under G.L. c. 123, § 16, which can run for decades. We explained that machinery in this piece.
Guilty of first-degree murder. Mandatory life without the possibility of parole, and automatic review by the Supreme Judicial Court under G.L. c. 278, § 33E. Note that first degree appears once on the slip even though the Commonwealth offered two routes to it. Jurors may reach it through deliberate premeditation or through extreme atrocity or cruelty. The second route requires no finding of planning at all; it turns on the manner of the killings. A juror unconvinced Clancy plotted anything can still arrive at first-degree murder that way. What a guilty verdict would mean.
Guilty of second-degree murder. Life with parole eligibility, with the judge setting the minimum between fifteen and twenty-five years. This is the classic compromise verdict, available to jurors who accept an intentional killing but cannot get to premeditation or extreme atrocity, or who simply cannot agree on the top count.
Guilty of manslaughter. The option the defense fought for and won at the charge conference, built on a theory of involuntary intoxication from the psychiatric medications Clancy had been prescribed. Prosecutors opposed including it. Its presence gives a juror who rejects the insanity defense but still believes the medications mattered somewhere to land short of murder.
What the silence means, and what it doesn’t
Through Thursday and into Friday morning this jury asked for nothing. Its first note, described above, came Friday and requested exhibits rather than legal instruction.
That is genuinely ambiguous, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing. A quiet jury may be working comfortably from the written instructions it received, which this jury has. Or it may not yet have reached the point where disagreement surfaces and someone needs a definition settled.
What would be informative are the specific questions this case invites. A request to rehear the criminal responsibility instruction would signal jurors are fighting over the legal test rather than the facts. A request to rehear who carries the burden would signal something more consequential, because the burden here runs opposite to most people’s intuition: Clancy never had to prove she was insane, and the Commonwealth had to prove she was responsible beyond a reasonable doubt. A readback of a particular expert would tell you which of the six is dividing the room.
None of that has happened.
The one inference that holds is modest. Nobody walked into that room and voted immediately. In a case where the defendant admits causing the deaths, a fast verdict would have meant the panel found the mental-state question easy. Twelve people ending a session without resolving it means they don’t.
Why this case takes time
Deliberations that stretch across days are unremarkable given what this jury has to work through: twenty-one days of testimony, roughly seventy witnesses, six psychiatric experts who contradicted one another, three separate counts requiring unanimity on each, an unfamiliar legal standard with two independent prongs, and an allocation of proof that runs backward from what most jurors expect walking in.
Legal analysts watching the case have consistently described the outcome as genuinely uncertain and a hung jury as a realistic possibility. That is not hedging. Andrea Yates, the case this one is compared to constantly, was convicted at her first trial in Texas and found not guilty by reason of insanity at her second on substantially the same evidence. Two juries, two answers.
We laid out the full set of factors in how long the jury is likely to deliberate.
What happens if they cannot agree
If the twelve reach an impasse, Judge William Sullivan will typically instruct them to keep working before doing anything else. If they still cannot agree, he declares a mistrial.
A mistrial dismisses nothing. The indictment survives, and the Plymouth County District Attorney decides whether to try the entire case again to a new jury. Given the resources already spent and the profile of the case, a retrial would be the expected course rather than the exception.
The house, and a story worth handling carefully
A separate thread surfaced this week that is circulating faster than it is being explained.
The family’s home on Summer Street in Duxbury was sold in an off-market transaction in January 2024 for $675,000, roughly $125,000 below what the property was estimated to be worth at the time. The Clancys had bought it in 2018 for $500,000. Patrick Clancy sold it and relocated to New York, which he discussed publicly in a 2024 interview.
The detail generating attention is the buyer: Michael Phippen, who worked as an assistant district attorney in Plymouth County from roughly 2016 to 2018.
The reporting does not support the inference people are drawing from that. Phippen left the district attorney’s office years before Clancy was charged and had no role in the prosecution. He has since objected, through counsel, to a jury view of the property during the trial, citing disruption to his household. A discounted off-market sale of a house where three children were killed is not difficult to explain on ordinary terms.
How a verdict arrives
There is no warning. The jury sends word to the court officer, the parties are notified, and the courtroom reassembles within roughly an hour. Reporters camped outside get perhaps that much notice.
Judge Sullivan has not said publicly whether he will keep the jury into the evening or bring them back on Saturday.
Our running timeline tracks the case, the complete five-week account covers how it got here, and the closing arguments are covered in full.
Where Friday ended
Jurors were excused for the weekend at about 3:55 p.m. Judge William Sullivan told them to be back at nine o’clock Monday morning.
That puts the total at roughly nine hours across two days: about three on Thursday afternoon, a full day Friday. The panel of nine women and three men sent exactly one note in that time, the request for the medication and the knife.
Nine hours is not a long deliberation for this case, and it is worth being clear about why. There are three separate verdict slips, one for each child, and five options on each. The jury has to be unanimous on every slip on its own terms. They also sat through more than three weeks of testimony, including competing psychiatric experts on the only question that really divides the parties, which is whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible when she killed her children.
A jury working carefully through that in nine hours would be moving quickly, not slowly.
What a weekend break does and does not mean
It means very little on its own, and it is worth saying so plainly, because a three-day gap tends to fill with interpretation.
Massachusetts juries are not on a clock. Judge Sullivan has shown no inclination to hurry this one, and nothing about sending jurors home at four on a Friday signals difficulty. The alternative, keeping a jury past the point of usefulness on a Friday evening in a case involving the deaths of three children, is the thing judges actually try to avoid.
What the break does change is practical. Jurors go home to a weekend in which this case is on the news, and they carry Judge Sullivan’s instruction not to read, watch, or discuss it. That instruction is given for a reason and it is generally followed, but it is the reason lawyers on both sides tend to prefer that deliberations not straddle a weekend.
The other thing worth watching Monday is whether the notes start coming. A jury that deliberates two full days on one note and then produces several in quick succession is usually working through something specific. That has not happened yet.
Monday
Deliberations resume at 9 a.m. on Monday, August 31, at Plymouth Superior Court. Television crews have been camped outside the courthouse all week, and after jurors left Friday a protester stood outside chanting and holding a sign.
If the jury reports itself deadlocked, the next step would likely be a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, the Massachusetts charge that asks jurors in the minority to reconsider while making clear no juror must abandon a conscientious conviction. Nothing in the record suggests they are near that point.
Common questions
How many verdict options does the Clancy jury have?
Five on each of the three slips: not guilty; not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility; guilty of first-degree murder; guilty of second-degree murder; and guilty of manslaughter.
Does the verdict have to be unanimous?
Yes, and separately on each of the three counts.
Has the jury asked any questions?
No. Through Thursday afternoon and into Friday morning, no notes, questions, or readback requests have been reported.
What happens if the jury is hung?
The judge declares a mistrial. The charges remain, and the district attorney decides whether to retry the case.
Would a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict free her?
No. It begins civil commitment proceedings under Massachusetts law that can continue for decades, with annual review for as long as she remains mentally ill and dangerous.
When will the verdict come?
There is no way to predict it and no time limit on deliberations.
Updated Friday, August 28, 2026. Deliberations are ongoing and this page will be updated when the jury returns a verdict.