Holdout juror preventing verdict in Lindsay Clancy’s US child murder trial, lawyer says

A single juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is preventing the jury from reaching a unanimous verdict, her lawyer said in court on Thursday, after deliberations stretched into a sixth day over whether to convict the Massachusetts woman of killing her three young children.

Defence lawyer Kevin ‌Reddington made that statement shortly after the jury sent Judge William Sullivan in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a note that prompted him to reinstruct jurors on what would constitute “reasonable doubt”.

After the jury was sent back to continue deliberating, Reddington moved to have a holdout juror removed, saying a note from the jury’s foreman indicated “there’s one juror who refuses to listen to the law that you’ve given him or her on reasonable doubt”.

“If we come back here in half an hour with a mistrial because of a juror that has just spurned the instructions of this court, it’s a shame,” Reddington ⁠told the judge, who declined to remove the juror.

The jury sent Sullivan a note a day earlier that said: “After much deliberation, we are still unable ‌to come to a unanimous decision.” They sent a similar note on Tuesday. But on both days, the judge instructed them to continue deliberating.

If the jury does not reach a verdict and Sullivan declares a mistrial, prosecutors would need to ‌decide whether to retry the case, which has included more than 80 witnesses and more than 300 exhibits.