Lindsay Clancy's defense has filed a double jeopardy motion seeking to have the three first-degree murder charges she faces for the strangling deaths of her young children dismissed.
Attorney Martin Weinberg, who also represented Karen Read in her double jeopardy claim, filed a motion for Clancy Monday raising claims under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. Read's claim failed, but she was later acquitted of all homicide-related charges in her second trial.
Weinberg argued that there was no "manifest necessity" to declare a mistrial on Sept. 4 "given the absence of judicial inquiry regarding repeated reports that one juror was refusing to apply the Court's instructions regarding reasonable doubt."
The jury split 11-1, with only the holdout wanting to find her guilty. The others were in favor of finding her not criminally responsible for the children's deaths after Clancy's defense claimed she suffered from postpartum psychosis.
Judge William Sullivan previously overruled a defense motion to have the holdout juror dismissed and replaced with an alternate, saying he felt it was not appropriate for him to get involved in the deliberations.
"The jury twice informed the Court that one of its members was refusing to apply the Court's instructions regarding the fundamental concept of reasonable doubt," Weinberg wrote. "After the first such report, the Court asked each juror individually whether he or she was able to apply the law. Upon receiving the second report, the Court tempered its response even further, simply reminding all jurors as a group of their obligation to follow its instructions generally. The Court denied Ms. Clancy's explicit requests to go further."
Weinberg's motion argued that Sullivan's decision to declare a mistrial before investigating the holdout is improper, alleging that the jury foreperson accused the holdout of making "statements acknowledging doubt but refus[ing] to apply it to the verdict as the law states."
"Ms. Clancy, like all criminal defendants, had a Constitutional right to have her fate decided by an impartial jury of her peers, faithfully applying the law as instructed rather than superimposing the juror's own view of legal right and wrong, including the foundational principle that, absent proof beyond a reasonable doubt of her guilt, she must be acquitted," he wrote. "The multiple reports of a juror violating this bedrock principle, therefore, required a judicial inquiry sufficient to ascertain whether her right to an impartial jury was being violated."
Read the double jeopardy mistrial on Sept. 4 after jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of finding her not criminally responsible for the slayings due to mental illness or defect. Her defense had claimed she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and repeatedly sought help to no avail.
Prosecutors argued that she acted deliberately and understood that strangling her children one by one with exercise bands was wrong.
The lone holdout juror is referred to only as "Juror Doe" in the motion due to the court's impoundment order protecting the jurors' identities.
Prosecutors have not yet officially announced whether they'll seek a new trial for Clancy, who faces three counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
Clancy's attorney has separately asked the court to overrule the holdout and declare her not guilty, a routine motion that experts nonetheless have said rarely succeeds.