The judge who presided over Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has ordered the jurors’ names to be sealed for two weeks after declaring a mistrial in the high-profile case, records show.
Judge William Sullivan said in an order filed Friday in Plymouth Superior Court that the names of the jurors would remain impounded until Sept. 18, “unless otherwise ordered by the Court” for good cause.
He cited posts on “various social media platforms that have raised issues regarding various reactions to a verdict in this case,” and the fact that a woman was recently charged with recording jurors as they left court.
“This case has garnered significant and divisive attention in Massachusetts, nationally and internationally,” Sullivan wrote. “The trial was livestreamed on local and national broadcasting channels. The proceedings have been and continue to be the daily subject of commentary on various social media platforms.”
Sullivan added, however, that individual jurors are free to speak publicly about the case and deliberations if they wish.
“This order shall not preclude any juror from identifying himself or herself and/or from speaking to the public about his or her jury service,” Sullivan wrote.
Clancy, 36, admitted that she strangled her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan, in the basement of her Duxbury home on Jan. 24, 2023, after sending her husband to get takeout.
She argued through counsel that she was not criminally responsible for the slayings, a strategy commonly known as the insanity defense, asserting she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis and heard a voice telling her to kill her children and herself.
Prosecutors said Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse who cut herself and jumped from a second-story window after killing the children, methodically planned the act and understood the wrongfulness of her behavior, noting that she never claimed to hear the voice before or after the murders.
Clancy is paralyzed from the waist down and remains at a state hospital where she continues to receive treatment.
On Friday, Sullivan declared a mistrial after the jury deliberated for 37 hours over seven days without reaching a unanimous verdict. The jury reported that one panelist was a holdout, whom Reddington identified as one of the three men on the panel. The margin was 11-1 in favor of acquittal, according to Reddington.
Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz’s office hasn’t said whether prosecutors will retry Clancy. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 29.
Should Clancy ultimately be found not guilty for lack of criminal responsibility at a retrial, she would not go free but be sent to a state psychiatric hospital, where she’d come up for periodic reviews to determine if she could live safely in the community.
Separately Friday, a lawyer for the Boston Globe filed a motion seeking “public access to inquiries of the jurors in this case by the Court, the Commonwealth, and Defendant.”
The jurors were questioned at sidebar during both the empanelment process and later during deliberations, after the foreperson sent a note indicating a lone juror was refusing to follow the law despite expressing some doubt about Clancy’s criminal responsibility. The holdout’s stance led to an 11-1 margin in favor of acquittal, according to the defense.
“The public’s presumptive right of access to judicial proceedings extends to jury voir dire, the trial itself, and post-verdict hearings concerning extraneous influences on jurors,” the Globe’s motion stated.
Material from prior Globe coverage was included in this report.
Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.