At 9:13 this morning, twelve jurors in Plymouth Superior Court filed back into a room to start a fourth day of deliberations in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial. About an hour later they came back out with a note.
Judge William Sullivan read it aloud. After many hours of deliberation, they wrote, they were unable to come to a unanimous decision.
He sent them back in.
Not out of cruelty, and not because he ignored them. That is simply how this works in Massachusetts, and it is worth understanding, because most people assume a deadlocked jury means the trial is over. It does not. It means the trial has entered a procedure with stages, like a boss fight.
Stage one, which happened this morning.
The judge acknowledges the note and asks them to keep going. Sullivan reminded jurors this was a long trial, more than eighty witnesses and over three hundred exhibits, and asked them to return to the room with his instructions in mind. Clancy sat in a beige sweater with a matching headband and showed no visible reaction. Her parents and sister were in the courtroom.
Stage two, if they come back deadlocked again.
The judge confers with both sides and then reads what Massachusetts calls the Tuey-Rodriguez instructions.
Everyone else calls it the dynamite charge.
That is its actual nickname, and it has others. Over the years lawyers have also called it the shotgun charge, the third-degree charge, and the nitroglycerin charge. The original version dates to 1851. The idea, as the names suggest, is to blow up the impasse. The instruction tells jurors there is no reason to believe a future jury will be smarter, fairer, or better positioned than they are, and that it is desirable the case be decided.
Many states have outlawed it entirely on the grounds that it is coercive. Massachusetts kept it but softened the wording in 1973 in an attempt to encourage a verdict without pressuring anyone into abandoning a genuinely held position, which is a needle roughly the width of a hair.
Sullivan has not read it yet.
Stage three.
If they deadlock a third time, he declares a mistrial. Under Massachusetts law he can send them back, but not more than twice without their consent.
Kevin Reddington, Clancy's attorney, said this morning that if it ends in a hung jury he would absolutely try the case again. He also said he has strong faith in this jury, and that maybe today is the day, and that he does not know.
Nobody knows. That is the honest status.
What the length actually tells you.
Roughly eighteen hours of deliberation across four days. For comparison, jurors in the Brian Walshe case took five and a half hours to convict him of first-degree murder in December. The second Karen Read jury went about twenty-two hours before acquitting.
So this is long, but it is not unheard of, and it is not by itself a signal about which way anyone is leaning.
What it does tell you is that this is exactly as hard as it looked from the outside. There are three verdict slips, one for each child, with five options on every slip. The jury has not indicated whether it is stuck on one charge or all of them, which means a partial verdict remains possible. Nine women and three men are somewhere in that room trying to agree on whether a woman who admits she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan was capable of understanding that it was wrong.
Three years of national argument, and the twelve people who actually sat through all of it cannot get there either.
That should probably tell the rest of us something.
One thing worth saying plainly.
There is a real temptation, watching a jury struggle, to decide they are weak or confused or that somebody in there is being difficult on purpose.
Consider the alternative. Twelve strangers were handed the hardest question the legal system produces, told to be unanimous about it, and have now spent four days refusing to fake an agreement they do not have. That is not dysfunction. That is the system working precisely as designed, and it is a great deal more than most of the people posting about this case have done.
Whatever comes back, and whenever it comes, they will have earned it.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
- Article Source:
Based Apparell
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