Deliberations resumed on Wednesday in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother charged with murder after strangling her three children, after the judge questioned each juror individually shortly after 9 a.m.
The judge, William Sullivan, called a sidebar and questioned jurors briefly under oath, one by one, for about 10 minutes in total. Lawyers from both sides witnessed the interactions but others present in the courtroom, including journalists and public spectators, were unable to hear what transpired.
It was unclear even afterward what the questioning had concerned, but several jurors shook their heads and clearly answered “no” in response to the judge.
At the start of the hearing, before he called in the jury, Judge Sullivan made an opaque reference to an order and statute that he said would be enforced. He did not elaborate.
On Tuesday, a woman was charged with intimidating a participant in the trial. Sergeant Gregory Jones, a spokesman for the Massachusetts State Police, said in a statement that Dawn Light, 56, of Sutton, Mass., was arrested outside of the courthouse on a charge of “intimidation of a witness, jurors, or person furnishing information in connection with criminal proceedings.”
Ms. Light was arraigned on Wednesday morning at the same courthouse, and a not-guilty plea was entered on her behalf. The prosecutor in the case said that she had been videotaping jurors in a restricted area, in violation of Judge Sullivan’s orders.
“The sanctity of the judicial system is at risk” because of Ms. Light’s actions, said the prosecutor, Nicole Piacentini.
Ms. Light’s lawyer, Jennifer White, said she was trying to get a picture of Ms. Clancy and did not intend to film jurors. Ms. Light is a retired nurse with no criminal record, Ms. White said.
Prosecutors asked for $50,000 bail. The judge, Shelby Smith, set no cash bail but ordered Ms. Light to stay away from the courthouse, apart from her own appearances.
The jurors — nine women and three men — had been set to begin deliberating for a fifth day in the trial of Ms. Clancy. They have spent almost 24 hours over four days privately discussing the high-profile case, after more than four weeks of often-wrenching testimony at the courthouse in Plymouth.
On Tuesday, they told the judge that they could not come to a unanimous decision.
But Judge Sullivan ordered them to keep trying. So far, he has gaveled the court into session each day around 9 a.m. and sent jurors home at about 4 p.m. After jurors requested a slightly earlier dismissal on Tuesday, the judge let them go with the words, “You’ve come this far.”
Failure to reach a verdict would result in a hung jury, with neither a conviction nor an acquittal. The judge could then declare a mistrial, and prosecutors would decide whether to try Ms. Clancy all over again, in front of a different jury.
Ms. Clancy, 36, doesn’t deny killing her children with exercise bands in 2023 at their home in Duxbury, Mass., an affluent suburb of Boston. But she has pleaded not guilty, and her lawyers have argued that she should not be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Kevin Reddington, Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, has said that she tried repeatedly to get help when she began to experience intrusive thoughts after the birth of her third child. But she was overmedicated, he said, and hallucinated a male voice commanding her to kill her children and herself.
Jennifer Sprague, a prosecutor, told jurors that Ms. Clancy had made a series of premeditated choices before killing the children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months. Those included asking her husband to leave the house and deciding where and how to kill the children, as well as whom to strangle first.
Ms. Clancy’s husband at the time, Patrick Clancy, said he had found her lying injured in the backyard after the killings. Ms. Clancy had cut her wrists and neck and jumped from a second-story window of their home, leaving her partially paralyzed.
The trial has drawn crowds of demonstrators, including many women who see Ms. Clancy’s struggles to get help as an indictment of the health care system’s approach to maternal mental health care.
For a guilty verdict, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Clancy both committed the crime and was criminally responsible for it. Judge Sullivan has instructed jurors that Ms. Clancy would not be criminally responsible if she had a mental disease or defect that prevented her from controlling her actions or from understanding that they were legally or morally wrong.
If jurors find Ms. Clancy guilty, they must choose among first-degree murder, second-degree murder and manslaughter. The option of a manslaughter verdict could potentially help jurors reach consensus sooner and make the prospect of a hung jury less likely.
Jenna Russell and Remy Tumin contributed reporting.
