Who is William Sullivan? Lindsay Clancy Trial Judge in the Spotlight
Newsweek · C · trust 54/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. As the Lindsay Clancy jury remains deadlocked after days of deliberations, attention has increasingly turned to the judge overseeing one of Massachusetts' most closely watched murder trials.
Judge William F. Sullivan has presided over the case from the Plymouth County Superior Court bench, ruling on evidence, objections and legal arguments while overseeing a trial centered on one of the most difficult questions in criminal law: whether a mother who killed her three children should be held criminally responsible when she says she was experiencing severe psychosis.
Now, with jurors having twice told Sullivan they cannot reach a unanimous verdict, the judge is at the center of the next critical stage of the case.
On Wednesday, Sullivan issued a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction—sometimes called a “dynamite charge”—urging jurors to continue discussing their differences and reconsider their positions while not abandoning their honest convictions. The jury was sent back to deliberate again and is due to return Thursday.
If jurors remain deadlocked, Sullivan could ultimately declare a mistrial.
But Sullivan's connection to the issues in Clancy's case goes back well before he took the bench.
Sullivan is a Massachusetts native who began his legal career as an assistant district attorney in Norfolk County from 1982 to 1984 before moving into private practice. He later became known as a prominent criminal defense attorney, handling hundreds of Superior Court cases.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick appointed Sullivan to the Massachusetts Superior Court in 2014. At the time of his appointment, Sullivan was a partner at Sullivan & Sweeney LLP in Quincy and had built a reputation as a leading criminal defense lawyer.
His education included an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and a law degree from Boston College Law School.
Before becoming a judge, however, Sullivan personally handled a case involving a mental-health defense that bears striking similarities to the arguments now being presented in the Clancy trial.
In 2013, Sullivan represented Nathaniel Fujita, a 20-year-old Massachusetts man accused of killing his former high school girlfriend, Lauren Astley.
Fujita did not dispute that he killed Astley. Instead, Sullivan argued that his client had experienced a psychotic episode and should not be held responsible for the killing.
In his closing argument, Sullivan told jurors that the case involved a question of mental illness and criminal responsibility. The jury ultimately rejected the defense and convicted Fujita of first-degree murder.
Sullivan later acknowledged the difficulty of asking jurors to understand a mental-illness defense.
“We knew that this was a possibility,” Sullivan said after the verdict, according to contemporary reporting. He described the mental-illness defense as “a difficult concept for jurors to understand, especially if you haven't dealt with mental illness in your family .”
More than a decade later, Sullivan is sitting on the other side of the courtroom in another case where the defendant's mental state is central. This time, he is the judge.
The Clancy trial has also put renewed attention on another case Sullivan presided over as a judge.
In 2018, Latarsha Sanders killed her two young sons in Brockton, Massachusetts. Like Clancy, Sanders argued that she was not criminally responsible because of mental illness.
Sullivan presided over Sanders' 2022 trial, where a jury convicted her of two counts of first-degree murder. But in August 2026, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned those convictions and ordered a new trial, finding that Sullivan had improperly excluded medical records documenting Sanders' post-arrest mental-health diagnoses and treatment.
The Supreme Judicial Court concluded that excluding the records constituted prejudicial error and had impaired Sanders' ability to present her criminal-responsibility defense.
The court noted that the sole issue before the jury in Sanders' case was whether she lacked criminal responsibility. Her defense expert had relied on thousands of pages of mental-health records in forming an opinion that she was “grossly psychotic” when she killed her children.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the exclusion of the records improperly stripped the defense of medical evidence supporting its argument and ordered a new trial.
That ruling came just weeks before Sullivan began presiding over Clancy's trial.
The cases are not identical, and the Supreme Judicial Court's decision did not determine anything about Clancy's guilt or mental state. But the parallels have made Sullivan's handling of the Clancy trial particularly noteworthy.
Both cases involve Massachusetts mothers accused of killing their children while presenting mental-health defenses. Both also turn heavily on psychiatric evidence and the question of criminal responsibility.
Throughout the five-week Clancy trial, Sullivan has been responsible for deciding what evidence the jury can hear, resolving disputes between prosecutors and defense attorneys and instructing jurors on the law.
The case itself has centered on competing accounts of Clancy's mental state.
Clancy has acknowledged killing her children—5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan—but her defense has argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and other severe mental-health problems and therefore lacked criminal responsibility.
Prosecutors have argued that Clancy understood what she was doing and deliberately carried out the killings. They have pointed to evidence they say demonstrates planning, including her actions before her husband left the home.
More than 80 witnesses testified during the trial, with hundreds of exhibits presented to the jury. The…
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