Marian Braccia, director of Temple Law’s LLM in trial advocacy program, discusses jury deadlock, the relationship between insanity and criminal responsibility in the Clancy case, and the legal questions that remain following the mistrial.

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy drew national attention as jurors wrestled with questions about mental illness and criminal responsibility. Clancy was charged with three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of her children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. The trial came to an end without a verdict on Sept. 4, when Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. 

There was no dispute at trial that Clancy killed the children. The central question was instead one of criminal responsibility: Was Clancy legally responsible for her actions, or was she so profoundly mentally ill that Massachusetts law did not permit the jury to hold her criminally accountable? The 12 jurors could not unanimously answer that question.  

Marian Braccia, director of the Beasley School of Law’s LLM in trial advocacy program, recently discussed some of the legal issues surrounding the mistrial, including jury deadlock, the relationship between insanity and criminal responsibility, the legal questions left unanswered, and more.

Read her full commentary on Voices @ Temple Law. Excerpts from that commentary can be found below. 

When a jury cannot agree 

Criminal jury verdicts must be unanimous. But disagreement does not automatically produce a mistrial.  When jurors report that they have reached an impasse, judges generally have some discretion to send them back to continue deliberating. The challenge is encouraging meaningful deliberation without coercing a juror into abandoning a sincerely held view merely to produce a verdict. 

Pennsylvania lawyers know the supplemental instruction commonly called a Spencer charge, after Commonwealth v. Spencer. Jurors may be reminded to consult with one another, reconsider their views and attempt to reach agreement. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has also been explicit about the other half of that instruction: No juror should surrender an honestly held conviction merely because other jurors disagree or simply for the purpose of returning a verdict. 

Massachusetts follows the same basic principle through what is known as the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction. Its history is particularly instructive. 

Older supplemental instructions to deadlocked juries were sometimes called “dynamite charges” because of their potential to blast a verdict out of a divided jury. Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court recognized the danger inherent in telling minority jurors, in effect, that if most of their fellow jurors saw the case differently, they should question whether their own judgment was correct. In Commonwealth v. Rodriguez, the court modified the traditional instruction to emphasize that both majority and minority jurors should reconsider their positions. 

The distinction is critical: Deliberation is supposed to produce reflection, not capitulation. 

Judge Sullivan delivered the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction after the Clancy jury reported that it was deadlocked. But after approximately 38 hours of deliberation, the jurors still could not agree. 

Ordinarily, that would make this a relatively straightforward hung-jury mistrial. The final hours of the Clancy trial made it considerably more complicated. 

What did “insanity” mean in this case? 

The most difficult question in Clancy’s trial was not whether she suffered from mental illness. It was whether that illness relieved her of criminal responsibility. 

The doctrine has deep historical roots. The famous M’Naghten rule, developed in 19th-century England, focused principally on cognition: Because of a “disease of the mind,” did the defendant understand the nature and quality of the act or know that it was wrong? 

Massachusetts uses a broader test, known as the McHoul standard, after the Supreme Judicial Court’s 1967 decision in Commonwealth v. McHoul. The test incorporates M’Naghten’s traditional focus on whether a defendant could appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct, but adds a volitional component: whether she had the capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of law. Thus, a defendant is not criminally responsible if, because of a mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of law. 

In other words, Massachusetts law asks not only whether mental illness prevented a defendant from understanding that what she was doing was wrong, but also whether it left her unable to control her conduct even if she understood it was wrong. 

In a majority of states (and in federal prosecutions), the burden shifts to the defense to show by clear and convincing evidence or by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant was insane. Not so in Massachusetts. Once criminal responsibility is properly placed at issue in the Bay State, the defendant does not bear the ultimate burden of proving insanity. The Commonwealth must prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. 

That was the heart of the Clancy trial. Her defense attorney argued that postpartum psychosis rendered her legally incapable of criminal responsibility. Prosecutors maintained that although Clancy suffered from serious mental illness, she nevertheless understood what she was doing and retained the capacity necessary for criminal responsibility. 

For now, Clancy will return to Tewksbury Hospital, the state-run psychiatric facility where she has received court-ordered inpatient care for more than three years. The lawyers will return to court on Sept. 29 for a hearing on Reddington’s Rule 25(b)(2) motion, the status of the case and (if the prosecution elects to proceed) a potential trial assignment. 

More than one unanswered question 

The mistrial leaves the ultimate question of Clancy’s criminal responsibility unanswered. But the circumstances that produced it illuminate an important tension built into the jury system itself. 

A lone juror is not required to yield simply because eleven others disagree. Indeed, protecting a conscientious holdout from pressure is one reason courts carefully regulate what judges may say to deadlocked juries. At the same time, juror independence is not a license to disregard the law. Every juror takes on the obligation to consider the evidence, deliberate in good faith and apply the legal rules given by the judge. 

The difficult question in Clancy’s final hours was not whether one juror should be permitted to disagree with the other eleven. Of course, that one juror should. 

The harder question was whether this juror was disagreeing within the rules of the system or refusing to follow them. 

The mistrial may have resolved this proceeding for now. It did not, however, resolve that question.