The Holdout: Inside the Lindsay Clancy Mistrial

2026.09.05 Author: Robert Nogacki

A Massachusetts jury spent seven days deciding whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children. Then the law ran out of ways to make twelve people agree.

At 2:22 on Friday afternoon, in a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, nine women and three men filed back into the jury box for the last time. They had spent seven days, and more than thirty-six hours, deliberating over whether Lindsay Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old former labor-and-delivery nurse who strangled her three children in the basement of the family’s home in January, 2023, was criminally responsible for what she had done. Three times they had told Judge William Sullivan that they could not agree. The third note, sent out shortly before eleven that morning, left no door open: it was “with a heavy heart,” the foreperson wrote, that the jury reported it could not reach a unanimous decision, and would not be able to.

Sullivan said he saw no choice but to declare a mistrial. Then he did something unusual. He gave Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s lawyer, one hour to run to the Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest, and ask a single justice to stop him. Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt heard the parties early that afternoon and declined to intervene. The jurors came back in. Several of the women looked stricken. Clancy, who has been paralyzed from the waist down since she jumped from a second-story window minutes after the killings, sat in her wheelchair between two nurses. By five o’clock she was back at Tewksbury State Hospital, where she has lived since May of 2023. By the defense’s account, the vote had been eleven to one, with eleven jurors prepared to find that she was not criminally responsible and one blocking the acquittal.

Outside the courthouse, Reddington told reporters that the jury had been “robbed by one man,” pursuing an agenda the lawyer could only guess at, who had stolen seven weeks from eleven attentive jurors; he said he hoped the man would sleep well at night, and that Timothy Cruz, the Plymouth County District Attorney, knew he had been crushed. Cruz, for his part, said that the case had always been about justice for three little babies, not about the health-care system or how women are treated in it, and that public opinion would play no part in his decision on a retrial. Reddington added that his client would be ready for a second trial. All of these remarks matter less as emotion than as strategy, and I will come back to them. A status hearing is set for September 29th.

For five weeks, the trial had been about sanity. In its final week, it became about something more elementary: what a doubt is, and who, if anyone, is permitted to check whether a juror is honoring one.

◆

Before the jury retired, the case already had two verdicts. The trial was streamed live, and viewers took the testimony apart in real time on TikTok and Facebook. Under the banners “Justice for Lindsay Clancy,” “Stand With Lindsay,” and “I Am Lindsay Clancy,” a movement grew that in August brought hundreds of women in pink to the courthouse in Plymouth; its members posted videos in which they matched their own exhaustion and dread to what the defendant had been through. On the other side, commentators asked where empathy ends and accountability begins, and saw in the movement a culture of excuses. The two prosecutors, Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham, were called disgusting human beings online; users compiled montages tracking every bow in Buckingham’s hair, because one of the dead girls had loved hair bows, and saw in it a cynical play for the jury. After the mistrial, Cruz spoke of threats against both prosecutors, both of them mothers, and of their home addresses being posted. On the sixteenth day of testimony, Sullivan questioned, outside the jury’s presence, a TikTok creator whom the defense wanted to call as a witness, and kept her off the stand. A few hours after the mistrial, the President of the United States, asked in the Oval Office, said that it was hard not to follow the case, since it was on television so much; that the defendant had done a horrible, horrible thing; and that there would be a price to pay, a mental institution or jail or something. In a single sentence he made interchangeable the two outcomes the trial existed to tell apart.

Patrick Clancy has spent three years running a quieter campaign of his own. Days after the children died, he wrote publicly of forgiveness; in 2024 he told The New Yorker that he had not been married to a monster but to someone who got sick; and on Friday, an hour after the mistrial, his lawyer said that the prospect of reliving the tragedy in a second trial was extraordinarily painful for him and his family. The prosecution read the New Yorker piece as a text framed to portray the defendant as a woman in a mental-health crisis, and demanded the writer’s notes and recordings, including interviews conducted off the record. I will return to that episode, because it belongs to the court record and not to the commentary.

Both camps had their narratives ready before the first witness was sworn. For one, the case is the story of a system that overmedicated and abandoned a sick woman; for the other, the story of a culture that can explain away any crime. Both are indifferent to the question the twelve people in Plymouth actually had to answer, which was not whether the system failed, nor whether mothers are entitled to be exhausted, but whether on January 24, 2023, the defendant retained a substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of what she was doing and to conform her conduct to the law. Neither camp reads search-warrant returns. Writing about Lucy Letby, the English nurse convicted of murdering seven infants, I described the moment at which public discussion parts ways with the judicial record; there it parted in one direction, here in two at once. And both camps obey the reflex I described in that piece, the oldest human reflex there is: to find a culprit in every catastrophe. One side found her in Lindsay Clancy. The other found them in her doctors. The jury had a different job.

In an essay on the verdict as a psychological act, I cited research in which the intensity of media coverage of crime travels with harsher sentences. This case adds a footnote. The noise was enormous, and eleven of the twelve jurors, if the defense is to be believed, went the other way. The jury room proved better sealed than the theory assumes. So this account leaves the battlefield for the paper: the unsealed search-warrant affidavits, the judge’s written order refusing to split the trial in two, the defense motions, the jury’s notes as they were read or described in open court, the instructions. Where the record is not public, I have leaned on the reporters who sat through eighty-five witnesses. The facts of the case are a click away. What the summaries leave out is the sequence of moves, and what each one cost.

◆

In October of 2023, two days before Clancy was arraigned in Superior Court, the Plymouth District Court unsealed two hundred and ninety-nine pages: eleven search warrants, the affidavits that justified them, and the returns recording what was seized. It is the rawest material we have. The return for the house on Summer Street, in Duxbury, a coastal town south of Boston, lists, among other things, a Google camera and a Ring camera, a baby monitor, a pink iPhone, four bottles of medication, paperwork from McLean Hospital, a brown journal, and a CVS bag containing Pedia-Lax. The whole case is in that line of the inventory: the diary of an illness, the discharge papers, and the errand a husband ran because his wife asked him to.

The affidavits state that Clancy used her phone and her journal to document her mental state and her feelings about her children, to keep track of her medications, and, in the investigators’ phrase, for “researching ways to kill.” The Boston Globe noted at the time that none of the unsealed pages explained how the investigators knew this, or quoted a single search. Two notebooks, a brown one from the basement and a multicolored one from a kitchen cabinet, contained lists of medications and what the affidavit calls suicidal expressions and thoughts.

Prosecutors laid out the timeline of January 24, 2023, at Clancy’s first court appearance, and the phone data has anchored it ever since. In the morning, a pediatrician’s visit for five-year-old Cora, who had a stomachache. In the afternoon, a snowman, art projects. At 4:02 P.M., a search for “kids Miralax.” At 4:13, a search for a restaurant in Plymouth, and a query to Apple Maps for the driving time. At 4:47, a call to a pharmacy, whose manager said they were out of Miralax but had alternatives. At 5:10, the takeout order. At 5:15, Patrick Clancy left the house. At 5:32, he was at a CVS in Kingston, calling his wife to ask which product to buy; she didn’t pick up, then called back a minute later. At 5:54, he collected the food. At about 6:09, he was home. At 6:11, the police logged his 911 call. The three children were in the basement, exercise bands around their necks. Cora and three-year-old Dawson were pronounced dead at the hospital in Plymouth; Callan, eight months old, died three days later at Boston Children’s. The cause of death was asphyxia.

The same sequence supports two coherent readings. To the prosecution, the Apple Maps query was a calculation of the window in which she would be alone. To the defense, it was the afternoon of a mother preoccupied with her daughter’s constipation, still arranging medicine for her children an hour before they died. The same CVS bag is an alibi and a proof of care. This is what juries are for.

The whole chronology rests on those warrants: the phone data, the map and search queries, the footage from the cameras were all seized on affidavits, some of which quote not a single search. In the United States, had any of those warrants fallen for want of probable cause, its fruits would have been in jeopardy with it; that is how the doctrine of the fruit of the poisonous tree works, and I have written about it in connection with illegally obtained evidence. In Poland, Article 168a of the Code of Criminal Procedure forbids excluding evidence merely because it was obtained unlawfully, so the same material would most likely have entered the record. Whether the defense tried that route, the public record does not say.

The months leading up to that day are in the civil complaints and in the testimony of her clinicians. In September, 2022, a psychiatrist diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed sertraline. Then, in turn, among others: lorazepam, trazodone, fluoxetine, zolpidem, mirtazapine, clonazepam, quetiapine, lamotrigine, amitriptyline. The Globe counted thirteen different drugs in under five months. In December, a day program at Women & Infants Hospital, in Rhode Island, sent her home with a note suggesting that her trouble was more likely overmedication and misdiagnosis than postpartum depression. From January 1st to January 5th, 2023, she was an inpatient at McLean, the storied psychiatric hospital outside Boston, which discharged her with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, severe, without psychotic features. On January 23rd, in a video appointment, she denied thoughts of suicide and denied thoughts of harming anyone. In her final month, according to phone data shown to the jury, she searched for information about her medications, about bipolar disorder, hallucinations, and insomnia, and also for the location of the carotid artery, for how to slit one’s throat, for whether the airbags in a Kia Sorento can be switched off, and for whether a sociopath can be treated. The treatment chronology reconstructed at trial includes a December mention of reported hallucinations and of two calls to crisis hotlines; no one intervened, because the caller had no plan. None of the clinicians who treated her diagnosed psychosis. In the case of Kajetan P., a Warsaw librarian who in 2016 murdered a woman he had never met, there was one signal, and no one acted on it, because there were no grounds to; here there were dozens, every one of them acted on, and no clinician saw psychosis. The lesson is the one I drew from that case: humility about the predictive limits of psychiatry.

◆

Massachusetts does not say “insanity” to its juries. It speaks of a lack of criminal responsibility. The test dates to a 1967 case, Commonwealth v. McHoul, and tracks the Model Penal Code: a defendant is not responsible if, as a result of mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. The two prongs are independent, and the Commonwealth must negate both. Polish law is built the same way: Article 31 of the Penal Code joins a psychiatric premise to a psychological one with the words “as a result of,” and in the Kajetan P. case the Warsaw appellate court separated the capacity to recognize the meaning of the act from the capacity to control conduct, exactly the two prongs of the Massachusetts test. More important, once the defense raises the issue and offers some evidence, the burden of proving sanity rests on the state, beyond a reasonable doubt. The so-called presumption of sanity is, in Massachusetts, merely an inference, and the Supreme Judicial Court held in 2016 that it cannot, by itself, carry the burden. Writing about Letby, I argued that the presumption of innocence is a principle of epistemic humility rather than of leniency. Massachusetts extends the humility to sanity itself: it is not for the defendant to prove that she was ill but for the state to prove that she was well.

This places the Clancy case on some of the most defendant-friendly ground in the country. After a federal jury found John Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity, in 1982, Congress shifted the burden to the defendant, raised it to clear and convincing evidence, and abolished the volitional prong; many states narrowed their own tests or shifted the burden to the defendant. Texas, where Andrea Yates was tried, requires a defendant to prove insanity by a preponderance of the evidence and asks only whether she knew that her conduct was wrong. Massachusetts kept both prongs and kept the burden where it was.

The Plymouth jurors also knew what a verdict of not criminally responsible would mean. Since a 1975 case, Commonwealth v. Mutina, Massachusetts judges instruct juries on the consequences: commitment to a psychiatric facility under the state’s mental-health statute, periodic review, and, since a 2018 revision of the model instructions, an explicit statement that there is no limit to the number of renewed commitments so long as the person remains mentally ill and dangerous. The fear that she would simply walk free, which ordinarily works for the prosecution, was largely disarmed.

For each of the three counts, the jury had five options: murder in the first degree, on a theory of deliberate premeditation or of extreme atrocity or cruelty, which carries life without the possibility of parole; murder in the second degree, life with parole eligibility after fifteen to twenty-five years; involuntary manslaughter; not guilty; and not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Under a 1980 decision, Commonwealth v. Gould, mental impairment that falls short of insanity may also negate premeditation or extreme atrocity, opening the way to the lesser degrees.

So the puzzle is not the one the vote count suggests. It is not why eleven people had doubts. It is how, given where the burden sat, one person had none.

◆

Postpartum psychosis strikes one or two women in every thousand who give birth, usually within the first two weeks. It is an emergency: delusions, hallucinations, disorganization, violent swings of mood, often on a bipolar substrate. The literature puts the risk of infanticide, and of suicide, in the low single digits, as percentages. It is a different thing from the unwanted, intrusive thoughts of harming the baby that roughly half of new mothers report, with or without depression, and that they experience as alien and terrifying and almost never act on. The whole diagnostic art lies in telling the two apart.

The prosecution built part of its case on that distinction. Its experts, the psychiatrist Gregory Saathoff and the psychologist Kirk Heilbrun, adopted the definition of the postpartum period in the D.S.M.-5, whose “peripartum onset” specifier covers the four weeks after delivery. Callan was eight months old. The defense answered that clinicians count the period as a year, and Reddington, in his closing, added that these men could not tell psychosis from schizophrenia. The definitional fight is, at bottom, a fight about a label rather than about a patient; the nomenclature of the manual does not determine whether a woman heard a voice. The prosecution’s first rebuttal witness, the psychiatrist Avram Mack, confirmed, for that matter, that Clancy is being treated for bipolar disorder at Tewksbury.

The defense’s crucial witness was Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University who, in 1969, published the classification of filicide that still organizes the field: altruistic, acutely psychotic, unwanted child, fatal maltreatment, spouse revenge. Resnick has examined Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, and Susan Smith, and he testified for the defense at both of Andrea Yates’s trials. In Plymouth, he said that on January 24th Clancy was frankly psychotic, that it was as though she were a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings, and that the killings belonged in the altruistic category: murder out of love, by a woman convinced that her children could not survive without her. He added that, in his interviews, she tended to minimize her symptoms rather than exaggerate them. The remark was not incidental. In the Kajetan P. case, the mask slipped when the defendant performed his illness in court and paused to ask the clerk whether he had managed to write it all down; the demonstration of illness became evidence against it. Resnick said of Clancy the reverse. His professional specialty is the detection of malingered mental illness; his testimony about minimizing was aimed squarely at the prosecution’s strongest argument.

That argument was: the voice came once. None of her treating clinicians had recorded psychosis. The day before, she had denied any thought of harming anyone. The voice she described to the experts after the fact arrived on January 24th and never returned. Jennifer Sprague, the assistant district attorney who delivered the closing, put it vividly: she had to choose where, the basement; how, strangulation; with what, an exercise band. The voice was vague; the decisions were specific.

I weigh these points separately, because they do not weigh the same. A single episode of command hallucinations, with no psychotic symptoms before or after, is clinically atypical; it is a real weakness in the defense’s account, and the prosecution was right to stand on it. The denial to her psychiatrist the day before is weak evidence: patients hide thoughts of harming their children out of shame, and out of fear that the children will be taken away, and Yates, too, concealed her delusions from the people around her. The argument from planning is the weakest on the merits and the strongest as rhetoric. Planning is not the opposite of psychosis. Yates waited for her husband to leave for work and then filled the bathtub. A person who hears a command receives a goal, not a script; the execution she must organize herself, and she does it the more efficiently the more completely she believes in the necessity. The law does not ask whether the defendant could plan. It asks whether she retained a substantial capacity to appreciate that what she was doing was wrong, and to govern herself accordingly. The equation of planning with sanity is, in my view, the single most consequential cognitive distortion in insanity trials. It is a cousin of the hindsight bias I described in the essay on judging: whoever knows the outcome sees intent in every earlier step, and a jury knows the outcome from the first minute. Writing about Kajetan P., I argued that his two months of preparation showed cold, planning control rather than its loss. Both statements are true, because planning tells you about the capacity to conform conduct only once you know what the plan served. In his case it served a fantasy about himself, in a personality disorder without psychosis. In Yates’s case, and in Clancy’s according to the defense, it served a command from outside the mind. It is the first thing a defense must dismantle, during jury selection rather than in the closing.

The most interesting thing, though, is the prosecution’s own theory of motive. Sprague argued that the children were Clancy’s “protective factors” against suicide, so that she had to kill them in order to end her own misery; she expected no consequences, because she expected to die with them. The prosecution conceded outright that the defendant was mentally ill and that the suicide attempt was real. My hypothesis is that in doing so it gave up half the field. Not by conceding illness alone: in the structure I described in the Kajetan P. case, illness satisfies only the first premise, and the second, the psychological one, remains. It gave up the field by describing a motive that is itself a description of disordered reasoning. A mind that treats its own children as an obstacle on the road to death, and removes the obstacle in order to die, is what the textbooks call extended suicide, which is to say Resnick’s category, exactly. The Commonwealth then had to persuade twelve people, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this same mind retained a substantial capacity to govern itself. That is a narrow ledge. Narrower still because, at other moments in the trial, the prosecution implied that the suicide attempt had been staged: the cuts superficial, the drug levels in her blood inconsistent with a swallowed handful of pills. The two narratives could not both be true. When, on August 28th, the jury asked to see the only exhibits it had not yet handled, the pill bottles and the knife, the jurors were, I suspect, probing exactly that seam.

◆

The most instructive moves in the case were made before a jury was picked. In early March, Reddington moved to split the trial in two: a first phase, in which the Commonwealth would have to prove that his client had killed her children, and in what degree; and a second, in which it would have to prove that she was criminally responsible. He invoked Article 12 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which forbids compelling a defendant to “furnish evidence” against herself, a broader phrase than the Fifth Amendment’s bar on being made a “witness” against oneself, one of the guarantees on which the American exclusionary rule rests. There was almost no precedent. Sullivan denied the motion in a written order: dividing the evidence cleanly between phases would be nearly impossible, the same witnesses would testify twice for marginally different purposes, and the lengthy expert testimony both sides had promised made the plan an offense against judicial economy. He did add a safeguard. Clancy’s statements to the Commonwealth’s experts, in the examination the state is entitled to under a 1977 case called Blaisdell, would be admissible only in rebuttal, after the defense had put her sanity in issue. It is the same problem seen from the other side: what the state may do with words a defendant spoke because she had to.

Days later, the defense made the move that followed from losing: it offered to stipulate, in writing, that Clancy had caused her children’s deaths, so that the only live issue at trial would be her state of mind. The prosecution refused. Its reasons deserve to be stated at their strongest. First, murder in the first degree by extreme atrocity or cruelty requires the jury to evaluate the manner of killing under factors set out in Commonwealth v. Cunneen, in 1983: the victims’ consciousness and degree of suffering, the extent of the injuries, the instrument used, the disproportion between means and result. A dry stipulation cannot do that work. Second, accepting the stipulation would have handed the defense control of the frame from the first minute. Third, the 911 recording and the testimony of the first responders were a counterweight to the sympathy that a paralyzed woman in a wheelchair inevitably draws.

The cost of the refusal was concrete. Over five weeks, the prosecution called more than seventy of the trial’s eighty-five witnesses to reconstruct the mechanics of three children’s deaths, while the only contested question, the question of capacity, occupied a fraction of the time. My hypothesis is that the surplus of proof on an uncontested point turned against the state: the more meticulously the jury was shown what this mother had done, the less it resembled anything a well mother could do. I am aware that this runs against a finding I have cited myself, in the essay on judging: disgust provoked by graphic descriptions of violence makes judges measurably harsher. I think the rule has a boundary condition. It operates when responsibility is settled and what remains is punishment. When sanity itself is in dispute, the same disgust feeds the representativeness heuristic in the opposite direction: a nurse with no criminal history who strangles her three children while telling them to go to God does not fit the prototype of a murderer; she fits the prototype of a madwoman, and the fuller the picture of the act, the better the fit. If the defense’s reading of the split is right, the Commonwealth won every factual point and lost the only one in dispute.

The rest of the pretrial game fits the pattern. Prosecutors obtained an order compelling the New Yorker writer Eren Orbey to turn over his notes from an interview with Patrick Clancy; Massachusetts has no shield law, and the magazine’s publisher moved to quash; the subpoena was dropped in May of 2025, before the trial. In July of this year, the prosecution itself dropped three counts of strangulation as redundant, tidying the verdict slip. During the trial, Heilbrun mentioned Clancy’s Catholic faith; Reddington moved for a mistrial, and Sullivan denied it and told the jury to disregard the remark. Her former husband, who testified for the Commonwealth, was a double-edged witness: he described deepening fears for the children’s safety, and said that his wife had spoken of harming them and herself, which helps the defense; he also said that on the morning of January 24th she had seemed better, which helps the prosecution. His 911 call was, in the judge’s estimation, so harrowing that he barred its release to the public.

The war of experts is best read through the lesson of Houston. In 2002, the jury in the Yates case needed less than four hours to reject insanity. The conviction fell in 2005, because the prosecution’s expert, Park Dietz, had testified that Yates might have taken the idea from an episode of “Law & Order” in which a mother drowns her children and is found insane. No such episode existed. In 2006, a second jury, after more than two days, found Yates not guilty by reason of insanity. An expert is a single point of failure for an entire case, on either side. In Plymouth, the prosecution’s principal experts were Saathoff and Heilbrun, the defense’s Resnick and the psychologist Paul Zeizel; one rebuttal witness went so far as to suggest that Zeizel had planted the idea of the voice in Clancy’s mind, a theory Reddington called manipulative in his closing. The fight over four weeks versus twelve months showed how a medical question gets converted into a question of credibility. Nor is a dispute over the very existence of psychosis an American peculiarity: in the Kajetan P. case, the first team of experts diagnosed schizophrenia and complete insanity, the second a personality disorder; the same happened with Anders Breivik.

◆

Deliberations began on August 27th. The jury sent its first note reporting an impasse on Tuesday, September 1st, and its second on Wednesday. After the second, Sullivan delivered what Massachusetts calls the Tuey-Rodriquez charge, and what lawyers everywhere call the dynamite charge. It descends from Commonwealth v. Tuey, decided in 1851; in 1973, in Commonwealth v. Rodriquez, the Supreme Judicial Court softened its language so as not to lean on jurors in the minority. The modern version tells jurors to keep weighing one another’s views but forbids them to surrender an honest conviction merely to reach unanimity. A state statute provides that a jury which has twice returned without a verdict may not be sent out again without its own consent, unless it asks for further explanation of the law.

On Thursday, the jury asked about reasonable doubt. Sullivan reread the definition: a charge is proved if, after considering all the evidence, the jurors have an abiding conviction, to a moral certainty, that it is true. The formula is a hundred and seventy-six years old. It comes from Commonwealth v. Webster, in 1850, in which Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw instructed the jury at the trial of a Harvard chemistry professor accused of murdering a Boston physician named George Parkman, and for a century it was the most quoted definition of reasonable doubt in the English-speaking world. That afternoon, the foreperson sent a note reporting that one juror had made statements acknowledging doubt but was refusing to apply it to the verdict as the law requires. Everyone in the room understood the same thing: the man doubted the defendant’s sanity and still would not vote for the acquittal to which doubt must lead when the burden rests on the prosecution. The judge questioned each juror individually, then repeated to the group his instruction on the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof. Reddington moved to remove the juror and seat one of the six alternates, which would have meant starting deliberations over. Sullivan refused; it was not, he said, his place to side with one juror or with eleven.

On Friday morning, the defense filed a one-page motion asking that there be no more sidebars, that everything be done in open court. At a short, tense hearing, Reddington went so far as to say that the juror had lied under oath; Sullivan replied that he would make no further inquiry, and that it was the jurors’ duty to take the law as he had given it to them. The jury resumed at 9:25. At about eleven, it sent the third note. In his petition to the Supreme Judicial Court, Reddington argued that the juror’s reasoning reflected a bias against people with debilitating mental illness. Justice Wendlandt declined.

The motion had to lose, and I believe Reddington knew it. Since Commonwealth v. Connor, in 1984, a deliberating juror may be discharged only for reasons personal to that juror, having nothing to do with the issues in the case or with the juror’s relations with the others. The model instruction puts it more bluntly: unreasonable stubbornness or eccentricity is not good cause. The rule exists to protect precisely what the defense wanted to breach, the secrecy and autonomy of deliberation. “Twelve Angry Men,” Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film, is a hymn to that rule; Juror No. 8 could defend his doubt against eleven because no one had the power to remove him for it. In Plymouth, the same shield covered a man who rejected doubt. The story of the one just man against the crowd has a mirror image, and the law cannot tell the two apart, because it is not allowed to look inside the room.

The case of Karen Read, in neighboring Norfolk County, had demonstrated this two years earlier. After her first trial ended in a mistrial, in July, 2024, several jurors came forward to say that the panel had unanimously acquitted Read of murder and had hung only on a lesser count, but hadn’t known how to tell the judge. The trial judge, the Supreme Judicial Court, and the Supreme Court of the United States all declined to act on those accounts; the S.J.C. held that post-trial disclosures cannot retroactively alter a trial’s outcome. At her second trial, in June, 2025, Read was acquitted of murder. Reddington drew two lessons from Read, and both were visible in his conduct: object to the mistrial (Read had consented to hers, which sank her double-jeopardy claim), and act before the declaration, not after. Hence the hour for the petition. Whether the federal route his team has floated has any prospects is a hypothesis with a low probability attached. A hung jury has been the paradigm of “manifest necessity” for a mistrial since United States v. Perez, in 1824, so the defense would have to show that the court’s refusal to question the juror further had undermined that necessity.

The psychology of the deadlock matters as much as the law. In the classic study by Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel, published in 1966 as “The American Jury,” the majority on the first ballot almost always prevailed, and the juries that hung had begun with a substantial minority; a lone dissenter almost never held out. An eleven-to-one deadlock is therefore a statistical rarity, and it is worth seeing the sequence that produced it. The foreperson’s note pointed at one person. The judge then questioned each juror individually, which meant questioning that person. Then the group received an instruction whose addressee was obvious to everyone. From that juror’s chair, a disagreement about evidence had become a test of personal integrity. Reactance, one of the best-documented phenomena in social psychology, holds that pressure generates counterforce. In the essay on judging I wrote that collegial deliberation rescues judgment only under conditions of psychological safety, and that without it a cohesive group slides into groupthink and suppresses dissent. The foreperson’s note is a textbook instance of the second; what is unusual about Plymouth is that the suppression failed. Then there was the matter of face: once he had been singled out, no one could offer him a way of changing his mind that would not look like capitulation. There was no golden bridge. And the Rodriquez charge handed him a sentence he could hear as permission: do not abandon your honest convictions.

The Webster formula supplied the last ingredient. When, in a case about the deaths of three children, a judge speaks of “moral certainty,” a literal-minded juror is given a place to stand: I have a doubt, but I have no moral certainty of innocence. That is a misreading of the standard, but a human one. In “A Time to Kill,” the 1996 film, a jury nullifies the law in the name of moral intuition, acquitting a father who killed his daughter’s rapists. My hypothesis is that Plymouth saw nullification in reverse: one juror nullified the standard of proof rather than the substantive law, and in the opposite moral direction. The same mechanism, in different clothes. A caveat I attached to the Letby piece applies here as well: the existence of a mechanism does not prove that it operated in a particular case.

Poland, where I practice, has its own memory of juries, though few Americans know it. In the part of the country that had belonged to Austria before 1918, jury trials survived until 1938. In Lwów (now Lviv, in Ukraine), on May 14, 1932, a jury found Rita Gorgonowa, a governess, guilty of murdering her employer’s teen-age daughter, by a vote of nine to three, which under the inherited Austrian procedure was enough for a death sentence. The Supreme Court overturned it that July, and a Kraków jury, in April, 1933, sentenced her to eight years, having found that she acted under the influence of overwhelming emotion. It was the most famous trial of interwar Poland; the feminist essayist Irena Krzywicka wrote against jury courts in its wake, and the 1977 film about it, by Janusz Majewski, has preserved more of the case than the textbooks have. In the United States, since Ramos v. Louisiana, in 2020, the Constitution has required a unanimous jury to convict of a serious crime in state court. Under the rules of Lwów, Lindsay Clancy would have a verdict today, one way or the other. Under the rules of Plymouth, she has none. Which rules are more just is not something the outcome of a single case can tell you.

◆

Timothy Cruz is an elected prosecutor. Walking away after three years, five weeks of trial, and eighty-five witnesses is expensive for his office, and on Friday he insisted that public opinion would play no part in the decision. Two voices will weigh on it anyway. The father of the children, the prosecution’s own first witness, said through his lawyer an hour after the mistrial that a second trial would be extraordinarily painful for him and his family. And Reddington announced a motion under Rule 25(b), due within five days of the jury’s discharge, asking Sullivan to enter a required finding of not guilty on the ground that the Commonwealth’s evidence of criminal responsibility was insufficient as a matter of law. The standard is demanding: the court does not weigh the evidence but asks whether, viewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, it could have allowed a rational jury to find criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. Even a denial, though, tells the parties how the judge sees the sufficiency of the record, and that is a card in any negotiation.

Reddington’s remarks outside the courthouse were aimed at precisely that decision. To call the holdout a thief with an agenda, and to tell the District Attorney that he had been crushed, is to recast an eleven-to-one deadlock as a public acquittal, which in law it is not, and to raise the price of trying the case again in the same county. It also lays a foundation: a juror with an “agenda” is the premise of the federal petition Reddington’s team has floated. The gamble is that the same words will be heard by the next jury pool. A defense that will need only one dissenting juror in any retrial has just shown Plymouth County what a dissenting juror can expect from it. My hypothesis is that Reddington weighed that risk and judged the pressure on Cruz worth it. A second hypothesis is that Cruz’s answer, that the case is about three children and not about the health-care system, previews the Commonwealth’s strategy for a retrial: to strip the defense of the frame that Sprague, in her closing, called a distraction.

The Commonwealth has three options: retry first-degree murder on the same evidence, before a new Plymouth jury that knows the count was eleven to one; reduce the charge; or negotiate. There is also a lever that almost no one is discussing. A Massachusetts statute forbids a defendant to waive a jury in a “capital case,” which in this state means first-degree murder; the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the bar in 2007. As long as the prosecution maintains that charge, the defense cannot elect a trial before a judge alone. Were the charge reduced to second-degree murder, a bench trial would become available, and the structure of risk would change on both sides. The defense would lose the shield of a single juror’s sufficing to hang the jury but gain a decision-maker trained to apply the burden of proof; the prosecution would lose its chance at a jury moved by the victims but gain a decision. For both sides, the rational path is a negotiated one. Whether emotion and the electoral calendar permit it is another matter. Sullivan has signalled that if the Commonwealth wants a second trial he would like to hold it this fall.

Two civil suits are proceeding in parallel, in Norfolk Superior Court, both filed in January of this year. Patrick Clancy has sued the psychiatrist Jennifer Tufts, the psychiatric nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta, and their employers for wrongful death and medical negligence. Lindsay Clancy has sued eleven defendants, including McLean and Women & Infants, for malpractice; among the damages she claims is the knowledge that she killed her children. A hearing is scheduled for October 28th. The entanglement is not trivial. The former husband’s complaint adopts the causal theory of the criminal defense, that negligent care led to the children’s deaths, even though he testified for the prosecution at the criminal trial. The outcome of the criminal case will in turn condition the civil ones: a finding of lack of criminal responsibility supports the theory of both complaints, while a conviction would hand the hospitals a formidable defense. The institutions being sued therefore have, paradoxically, an interest aligned with the prosecution’s. That is a hypothesis, but it is worth keeping in mind when reading who says what about a second trial.

◆

The case did not founder on any obscurity in the law or any helplessness in psychiatry. The law of Massachusetts was clear and favorable to the defense; the psychiatry was contested in the way psychiatry always is. It foundered at the point where the system hands the last word to twelve laypeople and forbids anyone to check how they used it.

For a practitioner, a few conclusions follow. In an insanity case, the real battle is over the frame: the bifurcation motion, the stipulation, what the jury sees in the first two weeks. Whoever loses that battle swims against the current afterward. Overproving the uncontested is not free, because the emotion it generates does not always flow in the intended direction. The heuristic “she planned it, so she was sane” is the first distortion to dismantle, and the Yates case is the best teaching material available. Procedures for a deadlock must be ready before the jury leaves the room: the objection to the mistrial, the preserved record, the route to the higher court. And one last thing: never give a lone juror a reason to defend his face instead of his opinion.

I do not claim that Lindsay Clancy heard a voice, and I do not claim that she did not. I claim, as I did about Letby, that the questions this case raises matter more than the answer, because they belong to every trial in which twelve people are asked to measure another person’s mind.

There is no verdict. There is only knowledge of how the machine works, and of where it breaks.