NORTHAMPTON — After the murder trial heard around the country ended in a mistrial last Friday, Northampton attorney Dana Goldblatt has taken a lead role in the Lindsay Clancy appeals process. She intends to file a motion to dismiss on the grounds of double jeopardy, should the case be retried.
Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, was charged with fatally strangling her three young children in 2023 before leaping from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed. Her more than five-week trial attracted national attention and prompted debate over postpartum psychosis and mental health treatment.
Clancy never disputed that she killed the children. Her attorney said she had lost control of her mind due to a rare condition called postpartum psychosis, a mental illness linked to the stress, sleep deprivation and hormonal changes that follow childbirth.
Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s lead defense lawyer, previously said he believed she would have been acquitted if not for the stubbornness of a single juror. In an interview with Boston NBC10, three jurors described the seven days of deliberations that failed to produce a verdict. Foreperson Ronni Carlson said she thought at one point that the group had finally persuaded the juror arguing for a conviction to vote for an acquittal.
The names of the jurors have been temporarily sealed by the judge, and the holdout juror has not yet come forward to give a public account of what happened inside the jury room.
Goldblatt, a local criminal defense and appellate attorney who said she has a long professional history with Reddington, said that the jury’s foreperson twice notified Superior Court Judge William Sullivan that the juror had expressed reasonable doubt in the case but refused to apply the judge’s instructions in his decision-making.
Goldblatt filed a petition in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest appellate court, aiming to compel the judge to dismiss the allegedly defiant juror. That petition was denied, and Sullivan declared a mistrial.
“If a judge has evidence that there’s a juror who is refusing to follow instructions, that juror should be removed, that’s one of the reasons we have alternates,” Goldblatt said in an interview Wednesday. “There were six alternates standing by, waiting for just such an emergency, and the court did not use them. The court instead declared a mistrial — that mistrial was not necessary.”
The case’s lead prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Timothy Cruz, is expected to decide whether to retry the case prior to its next status conference hearing on Sept. 29.
Goldblatt said she intends to file a motion to dismiss a retrial, claiming double jeopardy — a constitutional defense that prohibits the government from prosecuting or punishing a person twice for the same crime. Central to that argument is the legal standard of “manifest necessity,” which requires a genuine emergency, not an available alternative like an alternate juror, to justify ending a trial without a verdict.
“The prohibition on double jeopardy is unique among criminal defense protections in that it recognizes that trials themselves are painful, and no one should have to go through a trial twice unless it is absolutely necessary,” Goldblatt said. “In this case, we will argue that there was no manifest necessity [for a retrial]. There is a well-established remedy when you learn that there is a juror who is not following instructions — that juror is removed.”
Goldblatt clarified that if the holdout juror dissented from the rest of the jury as a matter of conscience and had a different belief about the evidence, that would trigger a mistrial and would likely justify a retrial. She said that is not the case with this particular juror.
“Watching this trial and the fact that it’s so high-profile has really brought the public into the degree of pain that goes into litigating something like this, and why we should take the prohibition on double jeopardy really seriously,” Goldblatt said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this story.
