Lindsay Clancy’s case returns to Plymouth Superior Court on Tuesday, September 29 at 9 a.m. Three motions are pending in front of Judge William Sullivan, and one decision that is not a motion at all sits with the district attorney.
The coverage has focused almost entirely on the juror inquiry, which is the loudest of the three. It is also the least likely to end the case. The motion that could end it on Tuesday is the quietest one, and it rests on a rule most people have never read.
What is actually on for Tuesday
- A renewed motion for a required finding of not guilty under Mass. R. Crim. P. 25(b)(2), filed September 10, asking the judge to enter a finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility on each indictment.
- A motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, filed September 21 by Kevin Reddington and Martin Weinberg, arguing that no inquiry was made into a juror before the mistrial was declared and that a retrial is therefore barred.
- A motion for a limited inquiry into the holdout juror, seeking his questionnaire, his phone records and his testimony under oath.
- Whether Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz will retry the case. He has said the decision will not be made hastily, and he is not obliged to announce it Tuesday.
The Rule 25 motion is the one to watch
Most people assume a judge cannot enter a verdict when the jury did not. Rule 25 says otherwise, in terms.
Rule 25(b)(1) provides that where a motion for a required finding is made at the close of all the evidence, “the judge may reserve decision on the motion, submit the case to the jury, and decide the motion before the jury returns a verdict, after the jury returns a verdict of guilty, or after the jury is discharged without having returned a verdict.”
That last clause is the authority for what Reddington filed. Rule 25(b)(2) then sets the deadline: “If the motion is denied and the case is submitted to the jury, the motion may be renewed within five days after the jury is discharged.” Under Rule 46(a), where a period is less than seven days, “intermediate Saturdays, Sundays, and legal holidays shall be excluded in the computation,” which is why a motion filed September 10 after a September 4 mistrial is comfortably inside a five-day window.
The standard, and why criminal responsibility is different
Rule 25(a) sets the test. A judge “shall enter a finding of not guilty” if “the evidence is insufficient as a matter of law to sustain a conviction on the charge.” That is the Latimore inquiry, from Commonwealth v. Latimore, 378 Mass. 671 (1979): whether the evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, would permit a rational trier of fact to find every element beyond a reasonable doubt.
Here is what makes this motion more than a formality. In Massachusetts, criminal responsibility is not an affirmative defense the defendant has to prove. The standard comes from Commonwealth v. McHoul, 352 Mass. 544 (1967), which adopted the Model Penal Code formulation, and under Commonwealth v. Kostka, 370 Mass. 516 (1976), once the issue is properly raised the Commonwealth bears the burden of proving criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt.
So the question for Sullivan is not whether Clancy proved she was not criminally responsible. It is whether, on this record, a rational jury could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that she was.
That is a real question in a case tried on postpartum psychosis. It is also a steep climb, for the obvious reason: eleven jurors apparently were prepared to find exactly that. The legal standard does not ask what the jury did, but a judge is human and the record includes what the jury heard.
The part nobody is discussing: there is no guilty verdict to appeal from
This is the detail that makes Tuesday genuinely consequential, and it is sitting in Rule 25(c).
Rule 25(c)(1) gives the Commonwealth a right of appeal from “a decision of a judge granting relief under the provisions of subdivisions (b)(1) and (2) of this rule on a motion for required finding of not guilty after the jury has returned a verdict of guilty,” or from an order entering a finding of guilt on a lesser included offense.
Read the condition. The express appeal right attaches after a guilty verdict. There was no verdict here. The rule that ordinarily lets the Commonwealth undo a judge’s post-verdict acquittal does not, by its terms, reach an acquittal entered after a hung jury.
Layer double jeopardy on top of that. A required finding of not guilty is an acquittal, and an acquittal ends the matter regardless of how strongly the Commonwealth disagrees with it. If Sullivan grants this motion on Tuesday, the realistic prospect is that the case is over that morning.
We are not predicting that. Required findings after hung juries are rare, and a judge who sat through the trial is well positioned to conclude that the evidence permitted a finding either way, which is all the Commonwealth needs. But the asymmetry in the rule is why this motion, and not the juror motion, is the one with the case on it.
The double jeopardy motion
The second motion argues that a retrial is barred because the judge was required to look into claims raised during deliberations that a juror was not applying the law as instructed, and did not do so before declaring the mistrial.
The obstacle is Arizona v. Washington, 434 U.S. 497 (1977), where the Supreme Court treated a genuinely deadlocked jury as the paradigm case of manifest necessity for a mistrial. A hung jury is the classic justification, and a defendant arguing otherwise is arguing against the strongest version of the doctrine.
The theory has a narrower shape than that framing suggests. It is not that a hung jury never supports a mistrial. It is that where specific claims of juror misconduct reached the judge first, declaring a mistrial without resolving them means the necessity was never established on the record. That is a serious argument, and it is also the argument most likely to end up in an appellate court rather than being resolved Tuesday.
The juror inquiry motion
The third motion seeks the holdout juror’s questionnaire, phone records and sworn testimony. We set out the standard Reddington has to meet and the problem that Commonwealth v. Fidler poses for it.
The juror’s lawyer answered it last week with a written statement to a television station rather than a filing, because a nonparty has no pleading to file. Why that response came as a press release, and why the Sixth Amendment he invoked belongs to Clancy rather than to the juror, is a separate piece.
Order of operations
The sequence matters more than usual, because these motions are not independent.
If the Rule 25 motion is allowed, everything else is moot. There is no retrial to bar and no juror to examine.
If it is denied and the double jeopardy motion is allowed, the case ends on a different theory, and that one the Commonwealth would be strongly motivated to appeal.
If both are denied, the juror inquiry becomes live, and its outcome shapes the record for an appeal after a second trial rather than preventing one.
And underneath all three, the Rule 36 clock on any retrial runs toward late 2027.
What Cruz has to weigh
The retrial decision is his alone and no motion controls it. The reported jury split was eleven to one after roughly 38 hours of deliberation over seven days. A prosecutor reading that has to weigh a near-conviction against the cost of trying a case that has already generated a juror controversy, a sealed record, and a defense that will now have a full transcript of the Commonwealth’s case.
He is not required to say anything on Tuesday, and there is no legal reason he must.
When is the next Lindsay Clancy hearing?
Tuesday, September 29, 2026 at 9 a.m. in Plymouth Superior Court before Judge William Sullivan.
Can a judge enter a not guilty finding when the jury hung?
Yes. Mass. R. Crim. P. 25(b)(1) expressly allows a judge to decide a reserved motion for a required finding “after the jury is discharged without having returned a verdict,” and 25(b)(2) allows the motion to be renewed within five days of discharge.
What standard applies?
Whether the evidence is insufficient as a matter of law to sustain a conviction, under Commonwealth v. Latimore. Because the Commonwealth must prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt once the issue is raised, the question is whether a rational jury could have found her criminally responsible.
Could the Commonwealth appeal a required finding here?
Rule 25(c)(1) grants the Commonwealth an appeal from relief granted “after the jury has returned a verdict of guilty.” There was no verdict in this case, so the rule’s express appeal right does not by its terms reach an acquittal entered after a hung jury.
Will the DA announce a retrial decision?
He is not required to. Timothy Cruz has said the decision will not be made hastily.
What was the jury split?
Reported as eleven to one, after roughly 38 hours of deliberation across seven days. Any verdict must be unanimous.
Hearing date and time, the September 10 filing of the renewed Rule 25(b)(2) motion and the relief it seeks, the deliberation length and the reported jury split as reported in coverage of the mistrial and its aftermath. The September 21 double jeopardy motion and the juror inquiry motion as reported by NBC10 Boston, September 21 and 22, 2026. Text of Mass. R. Crim. P. 25 and Mass. R. Crim. P. 46(a) read at mass.gov. Citations verified: Commonwealth v. Latimore, 378 Mass. 671 (1979); Commonwealth v. McHoul, 352 Mass. 544 (1967); Commonwealth v. Kostka, 370 Mass. 516 (1976); Arizona v. Washington, 434 U.S. 497 (1977). We have not reviewed the motions themselves, which are in part impounded. Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty and the mistrial leaves every charge unresolved. General information about Massachusetts law, not legal advice.