A defense motion to remove one juror has thrown the closely watched Massachusetts trial into new turmoil

In a Plymouth courtroom, the trial of Lindsay Clancy has reached a tense standstill. After six full days of deliberation, the 12-person jury remains unable to reach a verdict, and the reason, according to a note sent to the judge, comes down to one person: a single juror allegedly unwilling to apply the court’s legal standard for reasonable doubt.

The case itself is almost unbearably painful. Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, does not dispute that she strangled her three young children — Cora, Dawson, and Callan — in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home in January 2023, before attempting to take her own life by jumping from a second-story window. What the jury has been asked to decide isn’t whether she caused her children’s deaths, but whether she can be held criminally responsible for them, or whether severe postpartum psychosis left her incapable of understanding what she was doing.

Defense Pushes to Remove the Holdout

The impasse became public when the jury foreperson alerted Judge William Sullivan that one juror appeared to be departing from the court’s instructions on reasonable doubt — the legal threshold prosecutors must clear to secure a conviction. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington seized on the note, asking the judge to remove that juror from the panel entirely and replace them with an alternate.

“It is a shame — it is a real shame,” Reddington told the court. “My motion is to remove the juror that refuses to listen to your instruction of reasonable doubt.” His concern was straightforward: if one juror won’t apply the law as instructed, the remaining eleven could be locked in an unresolvable stalemate, and months of trial preparation could end without a verdict at all.

The Judge Chooses Caution Over a Rare Move

Removing a sitting juror mid-deliberation is one of the more legally fraught steps a judge can take in a criminal trial, and Judge Sullivan didn’t take it lightly. Rather than granting the defense’s motion outright, he brought each of the twelve jurors into his chambers individually to hear directly from them about what was happening in the deliberation room.

Afterward, he called the full panel back into open court and re-read the legal definition of reasonable doubt in full, underscoring just how high the bar is for a conviction: “It is not enough for the Commonwealth to establish a probability… that the defendant is more likely to be guilty than not guilty. Instead, the evidence must convince you of the defendant’s guilt to a reasonable and moral certainty.”

Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague backed the judge’s approach, arguing that reinforcing the instruction — rather than swapping out a juror — was the appropriate path. Judge Sullivan agreed, pointing out that every member of the panel had sworn an oath at the outset of the trial to follow the law as given to them, and that oath doesn’t get set aside just because deliberations turn difficult.

What Happens If the Jury Can’t Agree

The stakes of the next few days are significant. If the panel remains unable to reach a unanimous decision, Judge Sullivan will have no choice but to declare a mistrial due to a hung jury. From there, Massachusetts prosecutors would face a difficult set of options: retry the entire case before a new jury, attempt to negotiate a plea agreement, or drop the original charges altogether.

Over four weeks of testimony, the two sides painted starkly different pictures of what happened inside that Duxbury home. Defense experts described a rapid and severe psychiatric collapse, arguing Clancy was in the grip of postpartum psychosis so profound that she could not comprehend the wrongfulness of her actions. Prosecutors countered that the timeline told a different story — pointing to the fact that Clancy sent her husband out on an errand before the killings as evidence of premeditation and awareness, not a total break from reality.

A Case the Country Is Still Watching

As court adjourned for the night, Judge Sullivan sent the visibly worn jury home with instructions to return for a seventh day of deliberation. The case has drawn national attention not just for its tragedy, but for the difficult questions it raises about postpartum mental illness, criminal responsibility, and how the justice system should weigh the two against each other. For now, twelve jurors in Plymouth are left to decide whether they can find agreement — or whether this case will have to start over from the beginning.