The Verdict Nobody Agrees On
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Eleven jurors wanted to find Lindsay Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. One did not. That single juror, who has not been publicly identified, is now the reason a trial spanning roughly five weeks, more than eighty witnesses, and three hundred exhibits produced no verdict at all — only a mistrial, declared Friday by Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan after repeated jury notes said the panel could not reach unanimity.
The case will get reported, correctly, as a story about postpartum psychosis, about a mother who strangled her three children and does not dispute doing it, about a mental health system that prescribed her thirteen different psychiatric medications across multiple providers who often lacked a shared clinical picture. All of that is real, and all of it matters. But underneath it sits a structural question that has nothing to do with Clancy specifically and everything to do with how the system is built to fail in cases like hers: what does it mean that one juror’s unwavering position can override eleven, and what, if anything, is a court allowed to do about it once that happens?
The math of unanimity
Massachusetts, like every state, requires a unanimous verdict in a felony case. That requirement exists to protect defendants — it means the state has to convince every single person in the room beyond a reasonable doubt, not just a majority. But the same rule that protects a defendant from a bare-majority conviction also means a single juror can block an acquittal just as completely as a conviction. The mechanism doesn’t distinguish between the two outcomes. It just requires twelve to agree, and if they don’t, the case simply doesn’t resolve.
“The same rule that protects a defendant from a bare-majority conviction also means a single juror can block an acquittal just as completely as a conviction.”
In Clancy’s case, that meant eleven jurors prepared to find her not criminally responsible were unable to produce any verdict at all, because Massachusetts law offers no path to a partial or majority finding. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Judge Sullivan to poll the jury about whether it had reached unanimity on any of the lesser offenses — second-degree murder or manslaughter — before declaring a mistrial, an effort that could have affected what charges the Commonwealth would be permitted to pursue at a retrial. Sullivan denied that request.
Massachusetts generally does not permit a court to extract a partial verdict among greater and lesser-included offenses contained within a single charge simply because the jury has deadlocked; the SJC held exactly that in Commonwealth v. Roth (2002), finding that even a carefully phrased judicial inquiry into partial verdicts on lesser-included offenses carries a real risk of coercing a deadlocked jury. On a single charge and its lesser-included alternatives, the jury either returns a unanimous verdict or leaves that charge unresolved — Massachusetts courts have specifically declined to build a middle option.
Why the holdout stayed on the jury
Reddington’s more aggressive move was to ask Sullivan to remove the holdout juror entirely, arguing in a note to the court that the juror had admitted doubt but still refused to join the other eleven. When Sullivan declined, Reddington took the fight to the Supreme Judicial Court on an emergency basis Friday, arguing the juror should be excused or, at minimum, questioned further, and writing in the appeal that the juror’s reasoning “reflects a bias against those who suffer from debilitating mental illness.” The SJC denied the appeal without explanation before the mistrial was declared.
“A juror’s position on the merits — even one the other eleven regard as irrational, inconsistent, or immovable — ordinarily cannot itself justify replacing that juror.”
The legal standard explains why that request was always going to be a long shot. Massachusetts governs the discharge of a deliberating juror under G.L. c. 234A, § 39, and the Supreme Judicial Court set the controlling rule four decades ago in Commonwealth v. Connor (1984): a judge may remove a deliberating juror only for reasons “personal to a juror” and unconnected to the juror’s view of the case or relationship with fellow jurors — not because the juror is being stubborn, contrarian, or simply unpersuaded by the evidence. The SJC reinforced that line as recently as Commonwealth v. Tiscione (2019), vacating a conviction because a trial judge discharged a juror for reasons that turned out not to be purely personal. A juror’s position on the merits — even one the other eleven regard as irrational, inconsistent, or immovable — ordinarily cannot itself supply the personal, case-independent reason Massachusetts law requires before replacing a deliberating juror. It’s the system working exactly as designed — which is precisely the problem for anyone hoping a single dissenting vote could simply be engineered away once it becomes inconvenient.
What the room actually sounded like
Everything above was inference from motions, rulings, and a foreperson’s note — the outside view of a jury room nobody could see into. That changed Tuesday. Three of the eleven jurors, including the foreperson who wrote the note that first surfaced the standoff, sat for an hour-long interview with NBC10 Boston’s Sue O’Connell — the first any juror has spoken publicly since the mistrial.
Their account confirms the shape of what the record had already suggested, and adds texture the record couldn’t: the eleven weren’t simply outvoted, they said, they were worn down by a juror they described as arrogant and dismissive, unwilling to engage with the evidence in front of him. One juror recalled him approaching the exhibit cart once during deliberations, then returning to his seat without examining anything on it. When the panel read him the legal definition of reasonable doubt directly, she said, his response was to suggest the judge read it to them again — as if the definition itself, rather than his application of it, was in question.
The foreperson’s account explains what she meant in the note she sent Sullivan: the holdout, she said, at one point conceded he had reasonable doubt about Clancy’s guilt — the concession that led her to begin filling out the three verdict forms — before adding, in her recollection, that he still wasn’t prepared to sign off on a not-guilty-by-reason-of-lack-of-criminal-responsibility finding. By the jurors’ telling, the arguments grew loud enough that the six alternates, sequestered in an adjacent room, could hear them through the wall.
None of this is neutral testimony. These are three of eleven jurors describing the twelfth in the terms you’d expect from people who spent a week failing to move him — and their account, however consistent internally, is uncorroborated by the juror it’s about. NBC10 Boston said it attempted to reach him and has not gotten a response. The jurors were also warmer toward the defense than the record alone would suggest: they told O’Connell they found Reddington persuasive, with one saying she’d hire him herself, and were more critical of the prosecution’s presentation than of anything in Clancy’s own conduct. That’s useful color for understanding how this particular panel received the case, but it’s their impression of the lawyering, not a fact about what a jury should have concluded — and Father & Co. treats it as the former throughout.
What happens now
A mistrial is not an acquittal. Clancy remains charged, remains in state psychiatric custody, and the charges remain pending — the Commonwealth retains the ability to seek another trial. Double jeopardy does not bar a retrial after a genuinely deadlocked jury — that’s settled since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Richardson v. United States (1984) — so the only thing standing between this case and a second trial is a decision by Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, who told reporters after the mistrial that the case had “always been about getting justice” for the three children but declined to say whether his office would retry it.
Reddington, unsurprisingly, thinks a retrial is a bad bet for the prosecution, telling reporters that an 11-1 split for acquittal should make Cruz reconsider — a position he has continued to press publicly this week. That’s advocacy, not analysis — a retrial starts over with a new jury pool, new voir dire, and no obligation to replicate the same alignment. But it’s also not baseless.
Massachusetts has been here before: Karen Read’s first trial ended in a hung jury after four days of deliberation in 2024, and her second jury, a year later, acquitted her outright on the top charges. A single unanimity requirement, applied to two different juries hearing substantially the same underlying criminal case, ultimately produced two different outcomes. That is not evidence that either jury got it wrong. The Read case is also a reminder of how little a post-mistrial juror account changes, legally, on its own: the SJC ruled in 2025 that reports of what a deadlocked Read jury had privately agreed to acquit her of did not amount to an actual, recorded verdict entitled to legal effect — the jurors’ own account of their deliberations, however detailed, isn’t a substitute for a verdict the court never received.
“The jurors’ own account of their deliberations, however detailed, isn’t a substitute for a verdict the court never received.”
The same limitation applies here. It’s evidence that the unanimity rule, for all the protection it offers a defendant, has no mechanism for converting genuine, good-faith disagreement into a verdict — it simply leaves the case unresolved and gives the Commonwealth the option to try again. This week’s interviews add a new wrinkle to that same problem: the public now has a detailed, sympathetic account of how eleven jurors experienced that disagreement, and no account at all from the one juror it’s about.
“The public now has a detailed, sympathetic account of how eleven jurors experienced that disagreement — and no account at all from the one juror it’s about.”
Sources: Reporting on the Clancy jury’s deliberations, the 11-1 split, and Judge Sullivan’s rulings draws on coverage by NPR, WBUR, CNN, the Associated Press, and the New York Post, as well as the Supreme Judicial Court’s Friday denial of the defense’s emergency appeal as reported by NPR. Trial scale (80-plus witnesses, 300-plus exhibits, nearly five weeks, 38-plus hours of deliberation over seven days) is drawn from Judge Sullivan’s own on-record references and AP’s contemporaneous reporting. The 13-medication figure is drawn from the Boston Globe’s review of Clancy’s prescription history and clinical records. The legal standard for discharging a deliberating juror is drawn from Commonwealth v. Connor, 392 Mass. 838 (1984), and Commonwealth v. Tiscione, 482 Mass. 485 (2019), governed by G.L. c. 234A, § 39. The rule against partial verdicts on lesser-included offenses within a single charge is drawn from Commonwealth v. Roth, 437 Mass. 777 (2002). The double jeopardy standard for retrial after a hung jury is drawn from Richardson v. United States, 468 U.S. 317 (1984), and reaffirmed in the Massachusetts context by Read v. Commonwealth, SJC-13663 (2025), which also establishes that a post-mistrial juror account of an unrecorded agreement to acquit does not itself constitute a verdict. Background on Karen Read’s 2024 mistrial and 2025 acquittal draws on CNN and Vanity Fair’s coverage of the retrial’s changed evidentiary presentation. Juror-interview material is drawn from NBC10 Boston’s September 8 exclusive interview with three jurors, conducted by Sue O’Connell, and corroborating detail from the New York Post and The US Sun’s coverage of that interview; the interview was ongoing/being updated by NBC10 Boston at time of writing, and additional detail aired that evening on “Commonwealth Confidential” has not yet been incorporated. Reddington’s Trump-pardon request and its lack of legal force against a state conviction, referenced only in the editorial note below, is drawn from CBS Boston and Reuters’ September 8 reporting.
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