“During World War II, Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister for England when England pretty much stood against Nazi Germany alone, and so Churchill oftentimes had to talk to the citizens and say, ‘Let us brace for our duties,’” Sullivan told the jurors.

“I thought of that phrase when all of you were agreeing to be on this jury,” the judge continued. “I understood that you all gave everything you could, and probably more than you thought you could. And so, on behalf of myself, I just want to thank you so much that you should be proud of what you did.”

Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt, on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, had agreed to hear Reddington’s appeal to stop Sullivan’s declaration of a mistrial, but ended up denying his request to direct Sullivan, by way of superintendence or mandamus, to conduct a voir dire of the holdout juror to determine whether there was cause to remove that juror.

The defense claimed the person unlawfully refused to “not apply reasonable doubt to the evidence to return a not guilty verdict.” The prosecution argued the juror’s stance simply “indicates a disagreement about how to weigh the evidence, and that’s deliberation.”

What did the prosecuting team say?

The verdict caps off roughly five weeks of testimony since the trial started in July, with 85 total witnesses called before the jury.

The mistrial declaration came after prosecutors, led by Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague, said Clancy carefully calculated the timing of the murders, sending her then-husband, Patrick Clancy, on various errands so she could strangle her children during his absence. Clancy looked up suicide methods, bipolar disorder, and insomnia at the end of December 2022, and she searched about postpartum depression in January 2023, according to court testimony. Massachusetts State Police Sgt. Timothy Chiappin testified about a search on Clancy’s phone about “hallucinations” days before the killings. A Google search asking “can you treat a sociopath” was also made from her phone days before the murders, he testified.

Patrick Clancy testified that on Jan. 24, 2023, the day of the killings, his then-wife “was having one of her best days,” building a snowman in the yard and playing with the children.

That evening, Lindsay Clancy said that after having a brief phone call with Patrick Clancy, she was hit with a hallucinatory spell of psychosis, and voices told her to kill her children. She allegedly murdered the three children in the basement of the house before throwing herself out the window.

Patrick called his then-wife at 5:33 p.m., but she did not answer. He called a minute later, at 5:34 p.m., and she picked up the phone, with the pair having a roughly 14-second conversation.

Digital forensics expert Ian Whiffin, who testified for the prosecution, said the former nurse’s phone was last unlocked at 5:13 p.m. He said Clancy’s last recorded heart rate on her iPhone Apple Health app and her Apple Watch was 57 beats per minute, which is considered low, while app data showed that she climbed two flights of stairs at 5:03 and 5:33 p.m.

Sprague said the timeline of the evidence proved Clancy killed her children before the call, arguing that if the murders occurred after the conversation, the mother would have had only 20 minutes to go downstairs, strangle her children in the basement, and carry out her own suicide attempt.

“Because if she’s already killed the kids because of a voice … and she’s like a puppet, then she can’t get a call and miss it and then call the person back and have a conversation and then hang up,” Sprague said during closing arguments.

“A puppet can’t do those things,” she said. “Those are decisions and choices and actions that she’s controlling. So she has to explain away the phone call because her behavior and her ability to have the phone call don’t make sense if she’s being compelled by a voice.”

The prosecution also pointed to Clancy’s behavior in the months leading up to the murders, saying it painted the picture of a woman who functioned fairly normally, demonstrated rational thought, and wilfully withheld the hallucinations and psychosis she said she struggled with from multiple health professionals she saw during that time period.

“Who she didn’t tell is important and very telling,” Sprague said. “That’s a rational thought. That telling mandated reporters that you’re having a thought of harming your kids, that they might be taken away for their safety … she knew the difference between right and wrong.”

What did the defense say?

The defense team, led by Reddington, argued that the prosecution could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy was not in a state of psychosis. It pointed to over a dozen medications she was prescribed over a short time span to argue that she was the victim of a broken health system that contributed to her severe mental deterioration and state of psychosis.

Reddington also pointed to Clancy’s journal, saying it proved her deteriorating mental state in the months leading up to the murders. By December 2022, her journal was “chicken scratches because her mind is gone,” he said.

Searches she made prior to the killings about how long it would take for her husband to pick up takeout and medicine were not evidence of guilt or premeditation, but a signal of distress, Reddington said.

“She didn’t want him out of the house long,” he argued. “She wanted him home to help with the bathing, to help with the kids, to help putting them to bed. How long is he going to be gone? She googles it. Is that something that is so nefarious?”

Did Clancy suffer from psychosis?

The overarching question of the trial was whether Clancy suffered from psychosis. She was never diagnosed with the condition before killing her three young children. She was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, postpartum depression and anxiety, a major depressive episode, and insomnia.

Experts brought in by the defense testified that Clancy did suffer from psychosis. Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist, testified that Clancy was “clearly psychotic” on the day she killed the children and not in control of her actions.

Experts brought in by the prosecution disagreed. Dr. Gregory Saathoff, a senior psychiatrist for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, said Clancy told him during two video interviews earlier this year that she began hearing a voice on Jan. 24, 2023, after getting a call from Patrick. Saathoff expressed skepticism of Clancy’s account that the voice did not stop until she had strangled Callan, Dawson, and Cora Clancy in the basement of their Massachusetts home. She also gave a different timeline to other evaluators about when she first heard the voice that day, he said.

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“Committing the act is not curative of the voice,” Saathoff said of the voice stopping abruptly. “I’ve not ever seen that.”

Forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun also expressed skepticism about Clancy’s claim that she had a command hallucination. Heilbrun said he ruled out acute psychosis with command hallucinations because “she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children.” He said that “to put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about.”