Lindsay Clancy Likely 'Heading To A Mistrial', Attorney Says
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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. The Lindsay Clancy trial appears to be heading toward a mistrial, a former Manhattan prosecutor told Newsweek , after the jury told the judge for a second time that it remains deadlocked and unable to reach a unanimous verdict.
Gary Galperin, an adjunct professor at Cardozo School of Law and a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who spent four decades as a prosecutor, told Newsweek that the repeated deadlock is a sign the case may be approaching an impasse—but cautioned that a unanimous verdict remains possible.
“It sounds to me that it's heading to a mistrial,” Galperin said.
Rither Alabre, a former prosecutor and partner in Blank Rome's White Collar Defense & Investigations Group, said the judge has already given the jury Tuey-Rodriguez instructions, which are intended to encourage continued deliberations without coercing jurors into reaching a verdict.
“If the jurors are still deadlocked, the judge can declare a mistrial, or re-issue the Tuey-Rodriguez instructions, but I don’t expect the court to issue the instructions more than twice,” Alabre told Newsweek .
The jury has been deliberating since August 27 following a trial that lasted weeks and included dozens of witnesses and hundreds of exhibits. Jurors first told Judge William Sullivan they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on Tuesday. The judge instructed them to continue deliberating.
On Wednesday, the jury again reported that it could not agree. Sullivan again sent the jurors back to deliberate.
At the heart of the trial is a difficult question of criminal responsibility: whether Clancy, who has admitted strangling her children, understood the wrongfulness of her actions or was so severely impaired by mental illness that she should not be held criminally responsible.
Clancy is charged with killing her children—5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan—in January 2023. Her defense does not dispute that she killed them. Instead, her attorneys have argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and other severe psychiatric problems and had lost touch with reality.
Clancy subsequently attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window and was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Prosecutors have presented a dramatically different interpretation.
They have argued that Clancy was depressed and mentally unwell but nevertheless understood what she was doing. Prosecutors have pointed to evidence they say demonstrates planning and awareness, including her actions before the killings and her decision to send her husband, Patrick Clancy, out of the house.
The prosecution also challenged the defense's account of Clancy's medications and mental state, while cellphone evidence, the 911 call and testimony about her behavior in the period leading up to the killings became important parts of the state's case.
The defense, meanwhile, presented evidence of Clancy's deteriorating mental health, psychiatric treatment and increasingly disturbing thoughts in the months before the killings.
For Galperin, that competing evidence explains why this may be an unusually difficult case for jurors.
“This is not one of those cases,” he said, referring to psychiatric defenses he has encountered as a prosecutor that he considered weak or lacking a viable basis.
“Lindsay Clancy clearly has had a documented history of post-partum depression,” he said. “It's not enough to be mentally ill in order for someone to be found not responsible. There has to be a forensic consequence.”
That consequence, Galperin said, is the crucial question of whether Clancy's mental illness meant she could not appreciate that what she was doing was wrong or could not conform her conduct to the law.
“So the question really here is, in addition to postpartum depression, did she have postpartum psychosis, the inability to perceive reality completely and fully so that she knew what she was doing or knew that it was wrong and was able to conform her behavior or not?” he said.
The fact that the jury has twice reported being deadlocked does not reveal how many jurors favor each outcome.
Galperin emphasized that a hung jury can result from a single holdout.
“It only takes one juror to deadlock and hang the jury,” he said. The jury could theoretically be divided 6-6, but it could also be 11-1 or 10-2, with one or two jurors unwilling to join the majority.
That distinction could help explain why the judge has continued asking the jurors to deliberate.
“I think that there's no recourse but to declare a mistrial if the judge has exhausted his remedies under state law,” Galperin said. “And they say, Your Honor, we're at an impasse, we're hopelessly deadlocked... the case will have to come to an end, and it will be a mistrial.”
But he stressed that a deadlock does not necessarily mean the jury is finished.
“In my own experience with psych defenses and otherwise, I can tell you, I had juries deliberate over a period of days where it was looking bleak, and then something clicked in the jury room, and they come in with a unanimous verdict,” he said.
“It's certainly isn't a foregone conclusion that it's a hung jury or a deadlocked jury.”
If the jury ultimately cannot reach a unanimous verdict, the case would not simply disappear. A mistrial caused by a deadlocked jury would generally allow prosecutors to retry the case before a new jury.
Alabre said he would expect prosecutors to do exactly that.
“If there is a mistrial because of a deadlocked jury, I would expect prosecutors to retry the case,” he said.
A second trial could give prosecutors an opportunity to review what happened during the first trial and adjust their presentation, Alabre said.
“The consensus is that a retrial favors prosecutors because they get to review the first trial and address any…
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