The jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has told the judge that it cannot reach a unanimous verdict.
That sounds like a hung jury. Legally, it isn't quite that simple.
On Tuesday morning, after roughly seventeen and a half hours of deliberation spread over four days, the twelve jurors told Plymouth Superior Court Judge William Sullivan they had been unable to agree. He did not declare a mistrial. He did not give them the famous "dynamite" instruction. He sent them back to keep working, and they deliberated about six more hours before going home for the night.
That decision is entirely consistent with Massachusetts law. It also illustrates a part of criminal procedure that gets misunderstood every single time a high-profile jury looks stuck.
"We can't agree" is not the end of a trial
A criminal verdict in Massachusetts must be unanimous. Rule 27(a) of the Massachusetts Rules of Criminal Procedure says so in seven words: "The verdict shall be unanimous." If a jury ultimately cannot agree, the judge may declare a mistrial on the charges it could not resolve.
But there is a great deal of room between "we are having trouble" and "this jury is hopelessly deadlocked and the trial must end." Filling that room is the trial judge's job, and he has considerable discretion in doing it.
The governing phrase is "due and thorough deliberation." That language is not something a judge invented — it comes straight out of the statute, G.L. c. 234A, § 68C. The question is not how long the jury has been out. It is whether the jury has genuinely done the work.
There is no stopwatch that turns a struggling jury into a hung one.
The Supreme Judicial Court has been explicit that there is no mechanical formula for deciding when a jury is truly deadlocked. Ray v. Commonwealth, 463 Mass. 1 (2012), borrowing the phrase from the Supreme Court's decision in Illinois v. Somerville, 410 U.S. 458 (1973). A jury that has deliberated three hours after a six-week trial is in a very different position from one that has deliberated three hours after a two-day trial.
That matters here. The Clancy trial ran roughly six weeks, with more than eighty witnesses. By Tuesday morning the jury had been deliberating about seventeen and a half hours — a small fraction of the time it spent listening. Judge Sullivan had every reason to conclude that more deliberation was appropriate.
The Tuey-Rodriquez charge
If a jury remains deadlocked after sufficient deliberation, Massachusetts has a particular instruction for the situation. Lawyers here call it the Tuey-Rodriquez charge. Elsewhere you will hear it called the Allen charge, the deadlock instruction, or — most commonly in the press — the dynamite charge.
The name comes from two cases: Commonwealth v. Tuey, 8 Cush. 1 (1851), and Commonwealth v. Rodriquez, 364 Mass. 87 (1973), which set out the modern Massachusetts language in an appendix. It is spelled Rodriquez, with a q, in the official reports, though you will see it with a g nearly everywhere else, including in one of the model instructions.
The purpose of the charge is narrow and frequently misdescribed. It does not tell jurors to reach a verdict. It tells them to give serious consideration to the views of the others, reminds them that they are the ones who heard the evidence, and points out that another jury would not be in a better position to decide the case.
What it may not do is ask a juror to abandon an honest belief.
That line is the whole ballgame. A judge cannot say "you have to reach a verdict," because a juror's obligation runs to the law and to his own conscience, not to the court's calendar. Massachusetts judges are cautioned to stay close to the model language for exactly this reason, and they may not mention the cost or inconvenience of trying the case again.
The judge is not required to give it
This is the most common misconception about deadlocked juries in Massachusetts. The Tuey-Rodriquez charge is not an automatic response to a jury note.
The model instruction — Instruction 2.460, "When Jurors Cannot Agree" — contemplates a progression. A jury reports difficulty. The judge may conclude it simply needs more time and send it back. If the jury later reports a genuine deadlock after due and thorough deliberation, the judge may give the Tuey-Rodriquez charge. If the jury remains deadlocked after that, a mistrial may follow.
There is also an intermediate step that fewer people know about. When a jury signals an impasse but the judge decides the full deadlock charge would be premature, the Appeals Court has recommended using the opening language of the alternate instruction drawn from the American Bar Association standards. Commonwealth v. O'Brien, 65 Mass. App. Ct. 291 (2005). It acknowledges the difficulty without applying the pressure of the full charge.
So there is no single moment when a judge flips from "carry on" to "here is the dynamite." There is a ladder, and Tuesday was the bottom rung.
The rule that limits how many times a judge can send them back
The statute does eventually run out of patience, and this is the part most coverage gets wrong.
Under G.L. c. 234A, § 68C, if a jury returns without a verdict, the judge may restate the evidence or the law and send it out again. But if the jury returns a second time without having agreed, it cannot be sent out again without its own consent — unless the jurors themselves ask for further explanation of the law.
Note what triggers that bar. It is the second report of disagreement, not the giving of the Tuey-Rodriquez charge. The two often happen close together, which is why they get conflated.
The SJC worked through exactly this sequence last year in Read v. Commonwealth, 495 Mass. 312 (2025), the Karen Read case. There the jury sent three increasingly emphatic deadlock notes across about twenty-eight hours, the Tuey-Rodriquez charge was given after the second, and after the third the judge was statutorily barred from ordering further deliberation. The SJC held she acted within her discretion in declaring a mistrial.
A hung jury is not an acquittal
This is the point most worth understanding for anyone following the Clancy case.
If the jury cannot agree, there is no verdict of not guilty. There is simply no verdict.
When a mistrial is declared because a jury is genuinely deadlocked, the Commonwealth is generally free to try the case again. A hung jury is the textbook example of the "manifest necessity" that permits a retrial without offending double jeopardy — Commonwealth v. Troila, 410 Mass. 203 (1991), and on the federal side Richardson v. United States, 468 U.S. 317 (1984), which holds that jeopardy does not end when a jury is discharged for failing to agree.
Hung jury leads to mistrial leads to a possible new trial. It does not lead to the courthouse door.
Whether the Commonwealth would actually retry a case like this one is a separate question, and a hard one. The parties could also reach a negotiated resolution. But nothing about a deadlock ends the prosecution by itself.
Why this jury is especially hard to read
There is another reason the Clancy deliberations resist interpretation from outside the building.
The verdict form is not a yes-or-no proposition. For each child, the jury is weighing several possibilities: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, and not guilty. The defense case rests on postpartum psychosis.
That means jurors could be stuck for completely different reasons. Some could agree she caused the deaths but divide over criminal responsibility. Others could divide over whether the Commonwealth proved deliberate premeditation or extreme atrocity or cruelty. Others could think the evidence supports manslaughter rather than murder.
From outside the jury room, nobody knows which. And Massachusetts sharply restricts inquiry into what happens inside it — Read reaffirmed that courts may not probe the content of deliberations, and that jurors' later accounts of what they had privately agreed on do not amount to a verdict. A verdict exists only when it is returned, received, and recorded in open court.
So speculation about whether this jury is split ten to two or nine to three is exactly that. Speculation.
The most important thing the judge did
The significant development on Tuesday was not that the jury reported difficulty. It was what Judge Sullivan did next.
He did not declare a mistrial. He did not tell the jury it had to reach a verdict. He did not give the formal Tuey-Rodriquez charge. He told them to keep working.
That is the Massachusetts procedure operating exactly as designed.
What to watch
Three things.
Does the jury simply return a verdict? Juries that report early difficulty often do.
Does it report a second, more definitive impasse? That is the report with statutory consequences, and it changes what the judge is permitted to do next.
Does the judge give the Tuey-Rodriquez charge? If he does, that is a real procedural milestone — but it still is not the end. The jury goes back out. Only if it still cannot agree does the mistrial question actually arrive.
Watching a trial from outside makes the process look binary: verdict or hung jury. It isn't. A jury can struggle, get more time, report an impasse, be told the deliberations have not yet been sufficient, receive a supplemental instruction, and deliberate again — all before anyone reaches for the word mistrial.
The Clancy jury has told the judge it is having difficulty agreeing. For now, it is still deliberating.
In Massachusetts, that distinction matters.