Bless these jurors. They worked their hearts out, deliberating for some 38 hours since Aug. 27. They sorted through dueling depictions of the mental illness Clancy’s attorney said was entirely the reason she killed her children. They grappled with the conflicting testimony and the graphic evidence that was presented to them over 22 days. They saw and heard things in that courtroom that would test anyone, and will surely leave at least some of them with lasting trauma.
All for nothing.
A mistrial means that the whole heartbreaking, costly circus this case became could start over.
Plymouth District Attorney Tim Cruz effectively lost this case. His office threw all they had into this prosecution, and yet — if not for the one holdout — Clancy would have been found not guilty by reason of insanity.
If Cruz digs in his heels and decides to try Clancy for first-degree murder again, there will be a whole new trial, with a new jury of 12 people trying to absorb weeks of painful and complex testimony. The jury, not to mention the people who loved those poor kids — their father, Patrick, their grandparents and aunts, their caregivers, and Lindsay Clancy herself, paralyzed from trying to take her own life after killing them — will be dragged through all of this again.
Prosecutors will again play the wrenching 911 call and show the autopsy photographs. They know that will make it harder for the jury to set aside their emotions as they decide, beyond a reasonable doubt, the central issue of the trial: Whether Clancy knew what she was doing was wrong, and could control her actions, on that awful January night in 2023.
If there’s another jury trial, the ghoulish carnival that surrounds this case will be back — the breathless coverage, the armchair pundits demonizing Clancy and her family, the conspiracy theorists spinning absurd theories for clicks.
Poor Patrick Clancy, who lived through horrors no one should endure, and barely held it together on the witness stand. And who apparently committed the unforgivable offense of trying to salvage something of his life by remarrying, thereby making himself the subject of unhinged speculation that he bore responsibility for the deaths of his beloved children.
Day after day, an utterly broken woman appeared at the defense table, a woman who lost her marriage, her future, and her ability to walk. A woman who, Reddington said, wants to die because she killed the children she loved.
Enough is enough.
“This is not a righteous prosecution,” Reddington said at the start of the trial. And today, it’s hard to argue with that.
Cruz could have reduced the charges to second-degree murder, which would have allowed Clancy to waive her right to a jury trial and have her case decided by a judge alone. Past cases show a judge would almost certainly have found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and confined her to a locked psychiatric institution until the court determined it is safe to release her, a day that could come in years, or never.
Why did Cruz throw the book at Clancy? He may have backed himself into a corner by bringing first-degree murder charges against Latarsha Sanders — a mentally ill, poor Black woman who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2022 for killing two of her children. It would not have looked good if, weeks later, he had given the mentally ill, middle-class white woman a break with lesser charges.
But Cruz, like other prosecutors, has brought first-degree murder charges against other defendants who were plainly mentally ill and belonged in a hospital instead of prison. An analysis I did last year as part of a series on Sanders showed Cruz is more inclined than other district attorneys to bring harsher charges against mentally ill defendants.
On Friday afternoon, Cruz told reporters he was merely following the evidence in the Clancy case and was focused on getting justice for the three victims.
Clancy “killed her three children, and the evidence suggested to us that she was in control of her actions when she committed those homicides,” he told reporters outside the courthouse, right after the mistrial was declared. “Based upon that assessment, it was determined that the charges of first-degree murder were warranted and appropriate in these circumstances.”
He also lamented the fact that, too often, “criminals” — like Clancy, presumably — are “being treated like victims, and all too often, the victims are invisible.”
It would be easier to credit Cruz’s contention that his hands were tied here if the Sanders trial had never happened. But in that case, Cruz had extensive evidence that Sanders was profoundly mentally ill around the time she killed her children. Thousands of pages of medical records begun immediately after the killings showed Sanders was in the grips of severe psychosis, her symptoms including hallucinations and bizarre behaviors. She was so ill that health workers at MCI- Framingham, where she was held before trial, needed to commit her to a psychiatric institution in Worcester. An expert, one retained by the prosecutor no less, found that Sanders was likely psychotic at the time of the killings.
And yet Cruz still brought first-degree murder charges against her.
Latarsha Sanders with her son La’Son, around his first birthday.Courtesy Shalea Sanders
Hardly anybody was watching that trial, and the district attorney handled it accordingly, putting few resources into his case against the Black woman from Brockton, compared to the massive production he mounted in an effort to convict Clancy, from Duxbury.
In the courtroom, a prosecutor argued that Sanders was faking her illness to get away with premeditated murder. She made the absurd claim that Sanders was “evil,” and that she killed the children she loved so that she could write a book about it and become famous. Cruz did not even bother to put an expert on the stand to rebut a neuropsychologist who testified for the defense that Sanders was psychotic when she killed her boys.
Prosecutors got a lucky break when Judge William Sullivan, the same judge who later heard the Clancy case, excluded the medical records that would have shown the jurors just how sick Sanders was. The jury took less than four hours to convict her of first degree murder. The state’s highest court recently ruled that Sullivan had erred in excluding the records, and vacated the conviction.
Now Cruz — whose voters appear to appreciate his willingness to throw the book at every defendant — must decide whether to retry both women, and what charges to bring against them if he does.
As Cruz himself said on Friday afternoon, his job is to do justice. According to the rules of professional conduct, “a prosecutor has the responsibility of a minister of justice and not simply that of an advocate.”
Sometimes, justice and conviction are not one and the same. It’s time for Cruz to absorb that distinction and learn the lessons of these two big defeats.
It’s time for him to do what is right.
Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.