Commonwealth v. Clancy

Commonwealth v. Clancy, August 27, 2026

Closing arguments from both sides, Judge Sullivan's charge on the law, and the case handed to the jury just before one o'clock. The twelve deliberated a little over three hours and were sent home for the day without a verdict.

Procedural

• 09:30Court was called to order for the day. NBC News reports the sitting opening at half past nine, with the closings from both sides to follow, and says it is still not known whether the judge will send the jurors out to deliberate today or hold them over to Friday. NBC News, August 27, 9:30 a.m.
• 09:32The judge told the jurors they would not have to hold the instructions in their heads: they will be given written copies, in the two parts he was about to describe, with the second part following the closing arguments. He warned them that reading them would take a while and would be dry going. East Idaho News, August 27, 9:32 a.m.; CNN, August 27, 9:40 a.m.
• 09:33Judge William Sullivan took the bench at about half past nine and put his usual morning question to the jurors, asking whether they had kept away from coverage of the case. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:33 a.m.
• 09:34The judge told the jurors how the rest of the trial would run. He will read them the first part of his instructions, covering the charges the defendant faces, before either side gives its closing argument; the closings follow, an hour apiece; and he will come back with the remainder of the instructions before the jurors begin to deliberate. Of the instructions he said, “They take a while.” Boston Globe, August 27, 9:34 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 9:38 a.m.
• 09:37The judge began the first part of his charge, telling the jurors that the closing arguments they are about to hear are not themselves evidence, and that the defendant is presumed innocent unless the Commonwealth proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:37 a.m.
• 09:40Coming to the charges themselves, the judge told the jurors that the defendant faces three counts of murder and that it is for the Commonwealth to prove she was criminally responsible for what she did. “The defendant has no burden to prove a lack of criminal responsibility,” Sullivan said. He gave them the test in two halves: a person is not criminally responsible if a mental disease or defect left them unable to appreciate that their conduct was wrong, or unable to keep it within the law. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:40 a.m.
• 09:45The judge restated the Commonwealth's burden, adding that it must also prove no mental disease or defect kept the defendant from understanding the significance of what she was doing. On the expert testimony he told the jurors the opinions they heard are theirs to weigh and may be given “whatever weight you think they deserve.” He then told them what a verdict of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility would mean for her: she would likely be committed to a state hospital and come up for periodic review of whether she can be released, and “there's no limit” on how long she could be held there. East Idaho News, describing the same passage, names Bridgewater State Hospital and puts her release there in the hands of a judge deciding she is no longer a danger to herself or to others. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:45 a.m.; East Idaho News, August 27, 9:43 a.m.
• 09:47The judge put the Commonwealth's burden on that question in plain terms for the jurors: “The commonwealth must prove that the defendant knew and understood that her conduct was illegal or wrong.” On CBS Boston's account of the same passage he told them that in Massachusetts it falls to the prosecution to prove the absence of a mental disease or defect. CBS Boston, August 27, 9:47 a.m.
• 09:48The judge turned to the murder charges themselves. There are three counts, one for each child, and the jury may return murder in the first degree or murder in the second degree. The Commonwealth is proceeding on two theories of first-degree murder, deliberate premeditation and extreme atrocity or cruelty. On premeditation, he told the jurors, it must prove that the defendant caused the deaths of Cora, Dawson and Callan, that she intended to kill them, and that she “decided to kill after a period of reflection.” Boston Globe, August 27, 9:47 a.m.; East Idaho News, August 27, 9:45 and 9:48 a.m.
• 09:49On NBC News's account of the charge, the judge told the jurors a mental disease or defect “need not fit into a formal medical diagnosis” — a point that goes to weeks of dispute over whether postpartum psychosis is a diagnosis at all. He put the questions in order: if the Commonwealth has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she had no mental disease or defect when she killed her children, it has carried its burden on criminal responsibility; if it has not, the jurors go on to ask whether, as a result of that disease or defect, she “lacked the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.” NBC News, August 27, 9:49 a.m.; CNN, August 27, 9:48 a.m.
• 09:54On the second theory of first-degree murder, extreme atrocity or cruelty, the judge told the jurors the Commonwealth must prove the defendant caused the deaths and either intended to cause grievous bodily harm or acted in a way a reasonable person would have known was likely to cause death. He told them they may weigh any credible evidence that she was mentally impaired or affected by the prescription drugs she had taken. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:54 a.m.; East Idaho News, August 27, 9:48 a.m.
• 09:55As the judge went through the charges and what the Commonwealth has to prove on each of them, Lindsay Clancy wiped the corners of her eyes and her shoulders began to shake. CNN reports the jurors not looking across at her, their attention on the instructions. CBS Boston, describing the same stretch of the morning, has her using a tissue and taking deep breaths as the judge worked through what a conviction of murder in the first degree would require. CNN, August 27, 9:55 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:02 a.m.
• 09:56The judge moved on to murder in the second degree. East Idaho News, August 27, 9:56 a.m.
• 09:57Staying with extreme atrocity or cruelty, the judge gave the jurors the terms. Extreme atrocity, he said, “means an act that is extremely wicked or brutal, appalling, horrifying, or utterly revolting,” and extreme cruelty means the defendant “caused the person’s death by a method that surpassed the cruelty inherent in the taking of a human life.” What the jurors have to settle, he told them, is whether the method or means of the killing was so shocking as to amount to it. Among the things they must weigh, he said, is whether the defendant was indifferent to her children’s suffering or took pleasure in it. He repeated that they may consider evidence of mental impairment or of the prescription drugs. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:57 a.m.; NBC News, August 27, 10:02 a.m.
• 09:59On murder in the second degree, the judge told the jurors the Commonwealth must prove the defendant intended to kill her children. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:59 a.m.
• 10:01The judge came to manslaughter, the lesser offense open to the jury. The Commonwealth must prove the defendant caused the deaths and that her conduct went past negligence into what he called wanton or reckless. East Idaho News has him putting it as her having intended the conduct that caused the death. He told the jurors once more that they may weigh whether she was mentally impaired or affected by the prescription drugs she had taken. Boston Globe, August 27, 9:59 and 10:01 a.m.; East Idaho News, August 27, 9:59 a.m.
• 10:02The first part of the charge ended and the closing arguments began, an hour or thereabouts for each side. The defense went first, taking up the argument as soon as the judge had finished. CNN, August 27, 10:02 a.m.; NBC News, August 27, 10:04 a.m.
• 10:03Kevin Reddington opened the closing argument for the defense by thanking the jurors for the weeks they had given to what he called a gut-wrenching case, and by remarking on how closely they had followed it. “The service that you have performed I have never seen before,” he told them. He reminded them of the “very, very solemn oath” they had taken, and that it is for the prosecution to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:03 and 10:17 a.m.; NBC News, August 27, 10:04 a.m.
• 10:06Reddington told the jurors what the prosecution had done to his client. “This is a prosecution that has ripped the soul out of this girl,” he said, gesturing toward her at the defense table — paralyzed by the fall from the window, on the Boston Globe's description of her, and reaching for a box of tissues. She sat through parts of the argument with her head in her hands. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:06 and 10:17 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:09 a.m.
• 10:07Reddington named the three children — Cora, Dawson and Callan — and told the jurors that they are the ones who were wronged, holding up photographs of the family as he spoke. “They are the victims of the horrible, horrific act that has been laid at your feet as jurors to decide whether or not Lindsay is guilty,” he said. NBC News, August 27, 10:07 a.m.
• 10:08He set two photographs in front of the jury, one of the Clancys as a family and one of the aftermath of the killings, and asked how the first had become the second. His answer was “because of the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got.” On the Boston Globe's account the first showed her smiling with her children — “This is what they had,” he said. “This is their family” — and the second showed her in a hospital bed afterwards: “How does this turn into this?” How, he asked the jurors, could the prosecution argue “that this woman was acting in her right mind when these children were killed”? CNN gives the second photograph differently, as one of a child after the killings rather than of the defendant in a hospital bed; the accounts of what was held up disagree. NBC News, August 27, 10:08 a.m.; Boston Globe, August 27, 10:17 a.m.; CNN, August 27, 10:22 a.m.
• 10:09Reddington put the Commonwealth's burden to the jurors as having to satisfy them that no mental disease had left his client unable to appreciate how grave her conduct was, and told them the objective evidence in the case runs the other way. She had done “nothing wrong in her life” before that morning, he said, and was “a nurse, a daughter, a wife, and a darn good mother.” He showed the jury photographs of her with her children, one of them a Facebook post of her smiling beside her son. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:09 a.m.; NBC News, August 27, 10:12 a.m.; CNN, August 27, 10:18 a.m.
• 10:11In the overflow courtroom several members of the public leaned forward in their seats and spoke to one another as the defense closing got under way. There were gasps and nods at the line about the soul being ripped out of the defendant, and when Reddington held up photographs of her injuries at least two people wiped their eyes. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:11 a.m.
• 10:12Reddington took up the order in which the children died. The prosecution, he told the jurors, would have them believe she killed Dawson first out of dislike for him: “They would have you think she killed him first, cruelly because she didn't like him.” Then: “That is repulsive.” NBC News, August 27, 10:12 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:09 a.m.
• 10:13The case against his client, Reddington told the jury, was built on “manipulation” of the evidence — the 911 call the jurors “had to suffer through,” and the treatment of the injuries she gave herself afterwards, when she cut herself and went out of a second-floor bedroom window. He asked them why the defense had spent close to a week on the extent and severity of that attempt, and answered that it was because the prosecution had called it a fake suicide and “dinky little cuts.” She was in psychosis, he said, when the children died. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:12 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:17 a.m.
• 10:14Reddington was speaking quietly and away from the microphone, addressing the jurors directly, and every one of them was following him; CBS Boston describes them watching him closely as he came to the injuries. Clancy was crying and wiping her eyes. One juror was doing the same, and two others looked close to it. NBC News, August 27, 10:14 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:17 a.m.
• 10:15Reddington turned on the way the Commonwealth had gone about its case, telling the jurors it had tried to “assassinate” his client's character in whatever way it could, down to drawing out evidence that she drank socially. He took them back to her searches — throat slitting, drug information, suicide — and told them she plainly had not been taking all of those drugs at once: she took what she had been prescribed and was trying to do the right thing to get well. Her suicide attempt, he said, was real, and it was “horrific.” Boston Globe, August 27, 10:15 a.m.
• 10:17The judge broke into the closing argument. Reddington had turned away from the jury box toward the prosecutor Jennifer Sprague, challenging her to tell the jurors why the suicide attempt was not a serious one, and Sullivan stopped him there. “Counsel, address the jury,” he said. NBC News has him putting a quarter down on the table as he made the challenge — “That’s a quarter — I don’t know if you play pool” — and CNN has the judge cutting across him mid-sentence: “Counsel, counsel — address the jury, please.” CBS Boston, August 27, 10:17 a.m.; NBC News, August 27, 10:18 a.m.; CNN, August 27, 10:25 a.m.
• 10:20The severity of that attempt is the spine of the argument. “We spent all that time showing through ... testimony that this was a legitimate, dreadful, horrific suicide attempt,” Reddington told the jurors, and asked them to hold on to it: “You think about this beautiful young girl throwing herself out a window.” NBC News, August 27, 10:20 a.m.
• 10:23Reddington took the jurors back to the exercise bands. Patrick Clancy had told the jury they were knotted and that he could not get the knots undone — “Horrific stuff,” Reddington said — and the defense lawyer told the jurors the Commonwealth had drawn testimony out of that about how the bands were wound around the children’s necks and about how long the acts would have taken. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:23 a.m.
• 10:23He turned to what was done to his client in the days afterwards. She was handcuffed to her hospital bed, he told the jurors, although the fall from the window had left her paralyzed from the waist down. He singled out one nurse who looked after her at the start and who, in his account, spoke up for her: “That’s an example of what nursing is all about.” She came out of a coma intubated, after a transfusion he called massive, and was, in his word, “delusional.” Boston Globe, August 27, 10:23 a.m.
• 10:25The nurse had a name, and the overflow courtroom went from tears to laughter as Reddington gave it. Meg Collins, he told the jurors, had worked an emergency room through the pandemic “when half of us were hiding at home behind our computers, hoping we’re not going to die in a week, drinking Chardonnay at 11 in the morning.” The Boston Globe reports the line drawing laughter in the overflow room. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:25 a.m.
• 10:29What she said when she came out of surgery, Reddington told the jurors, was a question about whether she needed a lawyer, asked in what he called a delirious state. He set that against what the hospital was doing around her at the time: on CNN's account of the argument, a meeting held to decide whether her health care proxy should pass from her husband to her parents, with lawyers there and documents for her to sign, because Patrick Clancy was not going to be responsible for her care. Dr. Sejal Shah, who examined her at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in January and February 2023 as part of that assessment, had testified that she was able to explain her reasoning for the change. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:29 a.m.; CNN, 11:06 a.m.
• 10:29Reddington told the jurors that he and Patrick Clancy had found pill bottles in the house that law enforcement had somehow left behind. CNN has him holding a bag of them up in front of the jury and mocking the thoroughness of the search — “Why wouldn’t police have grabbed this?” — before turning to the Commonwealth’s account that pills had been crushed for the suicide attempt, for which he told the jurors there was nothing at all to point to: “Where’s the residue? Where’s the crusher? Where’s anything? Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Great investigation, guys.” Boston Globe, August 27, 10:29 a.m.; CNN, 10:35 a.m.
• 10:29He carried two more things from the house up in front of the jury. One was a book, “Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts,” which the Boston Globe reports one of her treatment providers had given her. The other was a jar of folded slips of paper — a wish jar, Reddington said, in which his client had left wishes that her children would be healthy and would do well. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:29 a.m.
• 10:29The turn in her life, on the defense argument, was the psychiatrist she was sent to. “This woman lived for her kids until she had the pleasure of running into Dr. Tufts with two months of experience,” Reddington said — CBS Boston names her as Dr. Jennifer Tufts, the first psychiatrist to treat her — “after Dr. Tufts, it was not a wonderful life anymore.” CNN has him putting it as overprescribing, and telling the jurors the evidence showed a patient who had raised her own fears about what she was being given: “Does this seem like a young lady that didn’t care and wanted to score more drugs off somebody? That’s another repulsive allegation.” Boston Globe, August 27, 10:29 a.m.; CBS Boston, 10:34 a.m.; CNN, 10:39 a.m.
• 10:33Reddington took up an allegation he said the Commonwealth had made falsely: that one of his medical experts had coached his client into saying she heard voices. A member of the hospital staff, he told the jurors, had testified that she said it before that expert ever spoke to her, and he called the suggestion “disgusting.” The Commonwealth’s own experts, he said, did not interview her until three years after the children died, and when they did she answered them — “she was cooperative ... and she owned what she did,” and, on CBS Boston’s account, never ran from anything. On the Boston Globe’s later account of the same passage the expert has a name: Paul Zeizel, the forensic psychologist Reddington had brought in, whom prosecutors suggested had told her what to say. “Think about how ugly that is,” he said, adding that the allegation would ruin Zeizel’s professional standing. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:33 and 10:45 a.m.; CBS Boston, 10:34 a.m.
• 10:36The overflow courtroom laughed out loud when Reddington called the Commonwealth’s rebuttal experts “very, very impressive.” The Boston Globe describes a few dozen people there, most of them women, following the broadcast of the closing closely — nodding along with him, and several of them writing notes by hand. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:36 a.m.
• 10:37“Watch the manipulation,” Reddington told the jurors, and kept telling them. His example was the Kingsbury Club: the prosecution, he said, had made the place his client took her children to sound snooty, when it is a swimming pool and somewhere to exercise. He came back from there to the claim that she said she heard a voice only because she had been told to say it, and denied it again. NBC News has him slapping a third quarter down on the table as he called the manipulation disgusting. On CBS Boston’s later account the coins stood for evidence Reddington said was harmless in itself and had been turned against his client, and the example it gives is her drinking: “She wasn’t drinking while she had her kids, she wasn’t drinking while she’s breastfeeding. She would have a couple of beers with her friends,” he told the jurors. “That’s bad, put that over in the bad pile.” NBC News, August 27, 10:37 a.m.; CBS Boston, 2:51 p.m.
• 10:37On the injuries, Reddington reminded the jurors that the exhibits themselves will go into the jury room with them — the cuts to her throat and her wrists, the blood on the bedroom floor, the open window, the slashed screen. Then he corrected the last of it in front of them: the screen was not slashed, and that was only what she believed. “It’s called a delusion. She was in psychosis when she thought it.” He took them back to the searches she ran before that night, on slitting a throat, on suicide, on drugs and their side effects, and told them the experts on both sides had accepted that the attempt on her own life was a serious one. CNN, August 27, 10:37 a.m.
• 10:38The jurors were giving the argument nothing back. CNN, which has watched some of them smile or laugh at Reddington’s asides over the weeks of trial, reports them stoic through Thursday morning, barely moving, their eyes on him even when he turned to point at other people in the room. CNN, August 27, 10:38 a.m.
• 10:39Reddington told the jurors that when he was retained he asked a forensic psychologist, Dr. Paul Zeizel, to go and see his client in the hospital, and that Zeizel has been “by her side” in the three years since. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:39 a.m.
• 10:39He turned to what the Commonwealth had made of the record of her care since. Prosecutors had gone through her medical file at Tewksbury Hospital — where the Boston Globe reports she is being held and treated — to pick out the days her parents visited and the days she had dinner with them. And she had passed a test given her by one of the government’s own experts, Reddington told the jurors, which showed she “didn’t lie” about what she was going through when the children died. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:39 a.m.
• 10:43Reddington brought the jurors back to Dr. Phillip Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist who examined his client for the defense. One of the Commonwealth’s own experts, he said, had agreed on the stand that Resnick is a leading authority on malingering — on telling whether someone being evaluated for mental impairment is faking it. Resnick’s opinion, and that of other specialists, was that she had a “horrific mental disease or defect” when she killed “her beautiful children,” and that she was psychotic: “He indicates clearly, in his opinion, that she was in a state of psychosis at the time of this death, times three.” Boston Globe, August 27, 10:43 a.m.; NBC News, August 27, 10:47 a.m.
• 10:45Reddington gathered up what he said the Commonwealth had put to the jurors about his client — that she faked the attempt on her own life, that she was doctor shopping when she went from one psychiatric provider to another in the months before the children died, and that she lied about hearing a voice telling her what to do. He called the prosecution a mess and told the jurors to be careful with all of it. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:45 a.m.
• 10:46“What kind of demons? What kind of horror was in her mind as she lay there paralyzed,” Reddington asked the jurors of the days after the suicide attempt. He set those days against the Commonwealth’s forensic psychologists, who first met his client in the weeks before the trial and told the jury they had wanted to build a rapport with her. There is none to build, he said, when a woman three weeks from her own murder trial sits down with a third doctor hired by the government to testify against her: “There is no rapport.” She had been cooperative with them all the same, and friendly. NBC News, August 27, 10:46 a.m.
• 10:46At the defense table, on CNN’s description of her through the closing, Clancy sat with her hands in front of her, turning a tissue over and dabbing at her eyes with it, her shoulders lifting now and then as she took a breath. CNN, August 27, 10:46 a.m.
• 10:47Reddington asked the jurors to hold the children in mind — Cora, five years old, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months. He pointed across at his client: “She knows loss.” The three of them, he said, are the victims of this case, and of an act it has fallen to the jury to weigh. CNN, August 27, 10:47 a.m.
• 10:47The Commonwealth’s experts had not answered Resnick, Reddington told the jurors, and he took them to one of them by name. Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, the forensic psychologist called by the prosecution, had allowed that it was possible either way. “That’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Reddington said. NBC News, August 27, 10:47 a.m.
• 10:49The journals came back into the argument. Prosecutors had held her out as manipulating and controlling, Reddington told the jurors, pointing to the notes she left a nanny about how to prepare the children’s food; what she actually wrote, he said, was about what the prescribed drugs were doing to her. Through December of 2022 she put down over and over that she had “horrible thoughts” and was “deeply depressed,” and by January, he said, “her mind was gone.” The Commonwealth’s experts had tried to hold that postpartum symptoms can only start within weeks of a birth, he told them; the Boston Globe notes for its own part that some medical guidelines put the window at a year. Her children “were her life,” he said, and she did not want to go back to work and leave them. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:49 a.m.
• 10:49Reddington went at the qualifications of the three psychiatrists the Commonwealth called, all of whom told the jury she should be held criminally responsible. “You have these men coming in here that don’t even know psychosis from schizophrenia,” he said. The definition of the postpartum period they worked from allowed symptoms to begin only in the four weeks after a birth, and miss that window and, as he put it, “that’s it. Lights out.” He then took the jurors through what each of them does: Dr. Gregory Saathoff, the last of the Commonwealth’s rebuttal witnesses, he called an expert in terrorism, and said another had built much of his research on juvenile delinquency and substance abuse. The Boston Globe notes for its own part that other experts reject the four-week limit and put the onset window at a year or longer. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:01 a.m.
• 10:50Reddington put the question to the jurors the way the law puts it to them. Resnick had found his client frankly psychotic and not in control of what she was doing, he said, and he asked whether any of the government’s doctors had rebutted it. “She’s not criminally responsible,” he told them. “The burden is on them.” CNN, August 27, 10:50 a.m.
• 10:52Near the end of his argument Reddington put it to the jurors that his client had gone looking for help and had not been given it. She called a suicide hotline twice, he said, and took herself into McLean Hospital in the first days of January 2023, and the doctors the jury heard from found a disease or defect in her when the children died. “My God, what does she have to do? She was reaching out for help and she was not getting it,” he said. On the Boston Globe's account he described her as in distress and wanting her husband at home — his explanation for her looking up, on the day of the killings, how long it would take him to reach a pharmacy and collect a takeout order from a Plymouth restaurant — and as a woman who believed she would never get better, against a prosecution case that she wanted out of her life. “There’s no evidence that she’s malingering,” he told the jurors. CBS Boston, August 27, 10:52 a.m.; Boston Globe, August 27, 10:54 a.m.
• 10:53Reddington put a film to the jurors. He likened the journals his client kept of her medicines and her state of mind to the writing done by the character Jack Nicholson plays in “The Shining” — a man, on NBC News’s description of the comparison, in a state of complete psychosis, whose manuscript turns out to be one sentence over and over. NBC News, August 27, 10:53 a.m.
• 10:53Going page by page through the journals, Reddington read the jurors what his client had set down as the fall of 2022 turned into winter: the date, the dose — ten milligrams of Prozac — and how she felt that day, kept up through November and into December. By the ninth, tenth and eleventh of December the entries had narrowed to “horrible, intrusive thoughts” and “no motivation. Deeply depressed.” Into January, he told them, there is nothing left on the pages but scratches, because by then her mind was gone. CNN, August 27, 11:01 a.m.
• 10:54Reddington took the jurors to a study by Dr. Phillip Resnick, the forensic psychiatrist called by the defense, in which 38 percent of a thousand subjects reported hearing voices in their heads that then stopped abruptly — which is what his client described. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:54 a.m.
• 10:56After close to an hour Reddington finished. His client is not guilty of killing her children, he told the jurors, because she was suffering from the disease or defect the judge had described to them an hour earlier, and the Commonwealth will not be able to prove otherwise. “And it’s their burden, not us.” NBC News, August 27, 10:56 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:52 a.m.
• 10:57About half the people watching from the overflow courtroom clapped as Reddington sat down. The clapping stopped when the prosecutor got up, and the Boston Globe reports one of them saying to another that they could not wait to hear what she had to say. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:57 a.m.
• 10:58Jennifer Sprague opened the closing argument for the Commonwealth by granting the illness and setting it apart from the killings. Nobody disputes that the defendant was mentally ill, she told the jurors, or that she tried to take her own life. What is on trial, she said, is what the defendant did on the night of January 24, 2023 and what her state of mind was then — whether, when she killed Cora, Dawson and Callan, she knew right from wrong — and, as CNN has the formulation, whether she could conform her behavior to the requirements of the law. NBC News, August 27, 10:58 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:57 a.m.; CNN, 11:08 a.m.
• 10:58What is not on trial, Sprague told the jurors, is the country’s mental health system or the way mental illness is diagnosed. “That’s a distraction to get you angry and passionate about an important issue, but an issue that’s not on trial here,” she said. CNN, August 27, 11:08 a.m.
• 11:01Sprague told the jurors the defendant had more of what helps than most people get: insurance that covered a run of doctors, places in specialist programs, eighteen weeks of maternity leave, a nanny who took on work around the house, and support at home. “This wasn’t a woman suffering from a lack of care, a lack of resources,” she said. “She had an abundance of help, an abundance of care.” NBC News, August 27, 11:01 a.m.; CBS Boston, August 27, 10:57 a.m.; CNN, 11:13 a.m.
• 11:02The mental health system did not cause the defendant to strangle her children, Sprague told the jurors, and her providers were not to blame for how she was. They “did the best they could with the information she provided them,” she said, and on CBS Boston’s account she told the jurors the defendant had not been truthful with her family or with her doctors. Whatever name is put on it, Sprague said on CNN’s account — bipolar illness, a depressive disorder, postpartum depression — what it came to was that she was depressed and trying to get help for it, and her providers were working with what she gave them and with how far she went along with the plan they made. The records and the pill bottles show what she was prescribed and what she actually took, Sprague told the jurors, and those did not always match what she told her providers, her then-husband or her mother. Boston Globe, August 27, 10:58 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:02 a.m.; CNN, 11:15 a.m.
• 11:02Sprague put the December thoughts of harming the children to the jurors as something the defendant chose who to tell. She told her husband and her mother, Sprague said, and did not tell the providers who asked her. “Why? Because the police might take away her kids,” she said. “That’s a rational thought.” On CNN’s account she put a name to the reason the clinic was different: the people treating her were mandated reporters, and a thought of harming her children told to them could mean the children being taken away for their own safety. “But who she didn’t tell is important and very telling,” Sprague said. CBS Boston, August 27, 11:02 a.m.; CNN, 11:24 a.m.
• 11:03Sprague turned to the medicine. The defendant did not take all of it as prescribed and lied to her husband about one of the drugs, she told the jurors; some of the bottles among the thirteen prescriptions she had been given were down only a couple of pills, and some were untouched. “There’s a lack of compliance there,” Sprague said, and as a nurse the defendant knew what following the instructions on a medicine meant. What she wanted, on the prosecution’s account, was to get better on her own terms and to be herself again quickly — which is what Sprague said the searches for how fast particular medicines work were about. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:03 a.m.; NBC News, 11:06 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:02 a.m.
• 11:07On the prosecution’s account the defendant knew the medicine needed time and would not wait for it. She knew that going from one doctor to the next was not the way to deal with what she had, Sprague told the jurors, and the records from Women and Infants Hospital have Patrick Clancy saying his wife was overmedicated while the staff there ruled out any adverse effect of her medication. “She wants the help in a certain way, in a certain time frame,” Sprague said. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:07 a.m.
• 11:11Sprague told the jurors the defendant was never turned away from mental health care but refused what was offered. The Boston Globe names the hospital as Women and Infants, in Rhode Island, where she went in late December 2022 and was not taken into the postpartum program; she was given three other ways in — inpatient care, partial hospitalization, or outpatient care that would have let her decide how long she was away from her children — and declined them. “It was very well planned out to give her these three options,” Sprague said, and the answer was that she would take them to her provider for guidance. “You look at the records, she never discussed those options with them.” NBC News, August 27, 11:11 a.m.; Boston Globe, 11:07 a.m.
• 11:12The defendant was never on more than two or three medications at any one time, Sprague told the jurors, and a prosecution expert who has treated patients in psychosis had called the prescriptions she was given reasonable. Providers have to work from what a patient tells them and build a plan on it, she said, and that is what the defendant’s providers did for her. What the defendant was doing, on the prosecution’s account, was managing what they were allowed to see: “She’s controlling the presentation she presents to her providers.” Boston Globe, August 27, 11:12 a.m.
• 11:13In the months before the killings the defendant was “a functioning mom,” Sprague told the jurors, seeing friends and looking after her children. In those same months she told her husband and her mother that she was having thoughts of harming herself and the children, and told none of the providers she was seeing. “You know that she knew the difference between right and wrong during that time,” Sprague said, and later, of the reason she kept it from them, “that’s a rational thought … she knew it was wrong.” Of the providers she said: “She lied to them.” NBC News, August 27, 11:13 a.m.
• 11:14Sprague did not dispute that the defendant was mentally ill in the months before the children died. Her argument was that the defendant should have done more about it and been a better patient — that she turned treatment down, went from one provider to the next, and made her symptoms smaller than they were. “She wants help. No one’s saying she doesn’t want help,” Sprague said. “But she … wants the help in a certain way, in a certain timeframe.” The Boston Globe describes her choosing her words carefully through the passage, allowing the jurors some sympathy for what the defendant went through while asking them for a conviction of murder in the first degree. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:14 a.m.
• 11:15The stay at McLean Hospital was put to the jury as a choice. On the prosecution’s account the defendant left the psychiatric hospital in the first days of January 2023, knowing she was not well, so that she could be at her daughter Cora’s birthday party. Sprague told the jurors it was “completely understandable” that she wanted to be there — “She wants to be that mom again, who can throw her daughter a party and enjoy it” — and that she should have stayed where she was. “She knew how she was feeling. She knew she was depressed. She knew she needed help.” Boston Globe, August 27, 11:14 and 11:15 a.m.
• 11:15Going out of McLean the defendant denied being suicidal and denied any thought of harming her children, Sprague told the jurors, and none of the people treating her ever saw a sign of psychosis in her. Through the rest of January 2023, on the prosecution’s account, she did a great many things that showed she knew right from wrong, and the people around her came away thinking she seemed a little tired but all right. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:15 a.m.
• 11:20Sprague took the jurors through the weeks before the killings. Earlier in January 2023 the defendant was able to look after her children on her own without trouble, she said, and between January 7 and January 21 her mother and her sister, who were in touch with her all along, had no cause to come to the house. She was texting through that stretch that she was doing better and sleeping better. She told Dr. Jennifer Tufts in the same period that she felt depressed, Sprague said, and Tufts started her on what the Boston Globe reports as “a very low dose” of a medication to help — but there was no sign of psychosis in her. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:20 a.m.
• 11:23Her family believed she was getting better right up to January 23, 2023, Sprague told the jurors, because that is what the defendant wanted them to believe; she described her then-husband and her mother watching what they took for a recovery. The one person given any sight of the depression, on the prosecution’s account, was the psychiatrist treating her, and even there the defendant held things back: “She still denied having a suicide plan, denied wanting to hurt anyone else, denied voices … showed no signs of psychosis, all the way up to January 23,” Sprague said of Dr. Jennifer Tufts. NBC News, August 27, 11:23 a.m.
• 11:23CNN’s account from the courtroom has the jurors hearing the Commonwealth’s closing much as they heard the defense’s, with little on their faces, though a few of them seem less held by it — one juror shifting in her seat and looking about the room, another stroking his beard and picking at his fingers. CNN, August 27, 11:23 a.m.
• 11:23Sprague turned the jurors to January 24, 2023. “Everything that happened that day, every person she interacted with, every situation she was in, shows you she knew the difference between right and wrong, and she could conform her behavior to the law,” she said. The journal entries the defendant had been keeping on how the drugs were affecting her stopped a few days before, Sprague told the jurors, as though she had decided she was done trying. That morning she took her daughter Cora to a check-up and the doctor there noticed nothing wrong; later in the day she was out in the snow with two of the children, building a snowman, and sent photographs of them to her husband and her mother. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:23 a.m.; CNN, 11:32 a.m.
• 11:27The planning began at four in the afternoon, on the Commonwealth’s account. Sprague took the jurors to the searches the defendant made then — a children’s medicine, the menu of the Plymouth restaurant her husband was sent to for takeout, and how far that restaurant was from the house in Duxbury. The defense has told the jurors those searches are the work of a woman in distress. “If you’re in distress, don’t send him anywhere. Make food at home. Have him cook. Get delivery,” Sprague answered. What the defendant wanted was not a rough idea but a figure: “She needed to know not generally, but exactly ‘How much time will I have?’” On CNN’s account Sprague told the jurors she knew her time was limited “to do what she wanted to do, and what she had decided to do was to kill the children and then kill herself.” Boston Globe, August 27, 11:23 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:27 a.m.; NBC News, 11:29 a.m.; CNN, 11:33 a.m.
• 11:28The errand to CVS was where Sprague put the clearest sign of planning. Needing more time than the restaurant alone would give her, she told the jurors, the defendant added the pharmacy as her husband was going out the door — “oh, by the way, can you” — in the manner of something just thought of. She had already called the store to be sure the medicine for Cora was in stock, Sprague said, so that nothing would send him home early, and she had no difficulty calling in the takeout order. “It’s a level of planning there and thinking and decision making,” Sprague said. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:28 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:27 a.m.; NBC News, 11:29 a.m.
• 11:31Sprague told the jurors the defendant must have begun strangling the children “immediately” after her husband left the house, and that the evidence before them shows how each child was killed and in what order. She was intelligible to Patrick Clancy when he found her on the ground, Sprague said, whatever the jurors made of the groaning heard behind him on the 911 call. Some of the cuts the defendant made on herself carried what Sprague called hesitation marks, and by the time her husband reached her she had stopped bleeding: “Whether she dove out [of the second-floor window], or climbed out and slid down …” Boston Globe, August 27, 11:31 a.m.
• 11:32CNN’s reporter in the courtroom describes the defendant sitting through most of the Commonwealth’s closing facing straight ahead, without turning toward the lawyer speaking beside the jury box. When Sprague reached the events of January 24, 2023, she turned her head to look at her. CNN, August 27, 11:32 a.m.
• 11:33Sprague brought the jurors to Patrick Clancy coming back to the house. He set down what he was carrying, she said, and the house was silent — “it’s quiet in a way that a house with three kids under five should not be during waking hours.” He called out and nobody answered. Upstairs he found blood and an open window, and ran down and out to where his wife was. “And he says to her, ‘What did you do?’” Sprague told the jurors. “And her response is, ‘I tried to kill myself.’” She told him the children were in the basement, and on the Boston Globe’s account said nothing to him about any voices. NBC News, August 27, 11:33 a.m.; Boston Globe, 11:28 a.m.
• 11:36The Commonwealth answered the defense picture of a woman compelled by a voice and left powerless. Sprague reminded the jurors that a call came in from Patrick Clancy while the children were being killed, that his wife did not pick it up and then rang him back, and that the two of them spoke. “A puppet doesn’t do those things,” she said; on her account they were decisions and choices and actions the defendant was in charge of. That, Sprague told the jurors, is why the defense has to place the onset of the psychosis after the call rather than before it. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:36 a.m.; NBC News, 11:40 a.m.
• 11:41Sprague picked up one of the three quarters Reddington had laid on the table in front of the jury during his closing as challenges to the Commonwealth, taking the one on the exercise bands. The bands had to be pulled, she told the jurors, and Patrick Clancy never said in his evidence that they were knotted — on the Boston Globe’s account he described them as possibly looped, and it was not knots he was working at during the 911 call. The Commonwealth’s account is that the defendant stood over each child and strangled them for one to two minutes rather than tying anything. NBC News, August 27, 11:41 a.m.; Boston Globe, 11:36 a.m.
• 11:41Sprague took the jurors to the first words between husband and wife in the yard. Patrick Clancy asked what she had done, she said, and the answer was that she had tried to kill herself, followed by the children being in the basement — not that a voice had made her do it, not that they were hurt and needed help. The 911 recording may not carry it clearly, Sprague told the jurors, but Patrick Clancy gave them his account of what she said. CNN reports the defendant's shoulders rising and falling as though she were breathing deeply while that passage was delivered. CNN, August 27, 11:41 a.m.
• 11:41Sprague put the wrongfulness question to the jurors in terms of what the defendant did on either side of the killings. She sent her husband out of the house to make the time for them, Sprague said, and when she came round in the hospital afterwards she was horrified and asked whether she had a lawyer. “Because she knows what she did was wrong,” Sprague said. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:41 a.m.
• 11:43Sprague put the Commonwealth’s answer to why the children died. The defendant was worn out and wanted her misery to end, she told the jurors, and the children were what had been keeping her alive — her protective factor, in Sprague’s word — so they had to be taken out of the way. “It was what she had to do to end her misery, but it was a choice,” Sprague said, and she made the choice to take them with her. She allowed that it is a choice nobody wants to believe a mother could make, because believing it makes the world feel less safe. NBC News, August 27, 11:43 a.m.
• 11:43The Commonwealth told the jurors the voice itself does not hold together. The defendant has never reported hearing it before the evening the children died or at any time since, Sprague said, which she put to them as a sign it was invented; and the account of when it began, on her argument, is placed after the call from her husband because the call has to be explained away. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:43 a.m.
• 11:45Reddington objected when Sprague brought the jury the case of Andrea Yates, who killed her five children in 2001 and who, on the point the Commonwealth was drawing, had put herself in hospital more than once and made two attempts on her own life to keep her children safe. On CBS Boston's account of the objection, the defense told the court that Yates had heard voices telling her to kill her children over a period of months, where the defendant acted on a voice heard once. “Let’s move on from that,” Judge Sullivan told Sprague, and no ruling on the objection is reported. NBC News, August 27, 11:45 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:45 a.m.
• 11:47Sprague took a second of the quarters Reddington had left on the table, this one on the suicide attempt, and turned its failure into an argument against the voice. The pills were not taken in a quantity that would kill, she told the jurors, the cuts were superficial and the window was not high enough. “We’re not saying she didn’t want to kill herself,” she said. “She wanted to kill herself, but her natural instinct to live was fighting against that.” A woman genuinely compelled, on her argument, would have had no such fight in her and would have succeeded. NBC News, August 27, 11:47 a.m.; CNN, 11:55 a.m.
• 11:50The last of the three quarters went to the suggestion that the defense psychologist had told the defendant what to say about hearing a voice. The Commonwealth had never said it, Sprague told the jurors — not through a witness and not through an exhibit — and the only person who had put those words into the case was defense counsel. NBC News, August 27, 11:50 a.m.
• 11:51Sprague put deliberate premeditation to the jurors through the order in which the children died. The defendant knew Dawson was the one who might struggle, she told them, so he went first and out of the sight of the other two, taken to a separate room while Cora stayed with Callan — “that's rational. That makes sense. That's ordered thinking.” The force of the exercise bands was on each child for as long as thirty seconds, Sprague said, and she carried on with each one until she could be certain of it. Through all of it, on the Commonwealth's account, their mother was “completely indifferent” to what they were suffering. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:51 a.m.; CNN, 12:05 p.m.
• 11:52Sprague set out for the jurors how each child died and what the Commonwealth says they went through while it was happening: the pain and the confusion of being strangled, and by their mother. That, she told them, is extreme atrocity and cruelty, one of the two theories the Commonwealth has to prove for murder in the first degree. She put the order of the killings to them as a mark of rationality, the two older children before the infant, and asked how much of a child's pain would have been acceptable — “How about it wasn't OK for one second for any of them?” The defendant was crying again as it was delivered. NBC News, August 27, 11:52 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:53 a.m.
• 11:53The Commonwealth's closing ended shortly before noon, after fifty-six minutes on CBS Boston's count. Sprague left the jurors with the children on the basement floor, where the defendant “left them discarded ... like broken toys, because she was done playing the game,” and told them they know to a moral certainty that she is guilty. NBC News, August 27, 11:53 a.m.; CBS Boston, 11:53 a.m.
• 11:53With both arguments finished the judge took up the rest of his charge. He told the jurors that the indictments against the defendant are not evidence of anything, and that if the Commonwealth has not carried its burden of proof she is to be acquitted. Boston Globe, August 27, 11:53 a.m.
• 11:55On CNN's account of the closing's last minutes, Sprague went at the timing the defense has offered for the killings: there would not have been time to take the three children down to the basement and strangle each of them in three minutes. First responders described Patrick Clancy unwinding the exercise bands from his children's necks, she reminded the jurors, and the bands were neither knotted nor tied, so they would not have stayed in place by themselves — which is why the jury had to hear the 911 call. CNN, August 27, 11:55 a.m.
• 11:55The judge came to the standard of proof and to what the jurors have to agree on. Any verdict must be unanimous, he told them. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not proof beyond every doubt that could be imagined, but a juror has to be satisfied to a moral certainty before convicting, and showing that guilt is likely will not do: “It is not enough for the Commonwealth to establish a probability, even a strong probability.” On the facts of the case, he told them, they are “the sole and exclusive judges.” Boston Globe, August 27, 11:55 a.m.
• 11:56The closing arguments were over and the judge went on with the rest of his charge without a break. CNN reports Judge Sullivan asking the jurors whether they wanted one and several of them shaking their heads, and describes the courtroom emptying as the argument ended — prosecution witnesses, reporters and members of the public going out, and people who had been waiting in line outside being let in to take the seats. CNN, August 27, 11:56 a.m.
• 11:58CNN, filing on the passage of the closing about the telephone call, has Sprague testing the defendant's own account of the moment against the physical evidence. She had told Dr. Gregory Saathoff that when her husband rang she was at the refrigerator getting chicken nuggets out for the children's dinner, Sprague told the jurors, while Patrick Clancy's evidence was that Dawson was already on the couch eating chicken nuggets and green beans when he left, and photographs of the scene show two bowls there. Why say it, Sprague asked, if the children were already dead — and answered that the call has to be explained away, because a woman being worked like a puppet does not miss a call, return it, hold a conversation and hang up. CNN, August 27, 11:58 a.m.
• 12:00The two outlets in the room differ on how the jury took the closing. The Boston Globe describes the defendant in tears through the passage on how her children died, still wiping her eyes as Sprague called her indifferent to their suffering, and says the jurors listened to both closings without showing emotion. CNN's account of the same stretch has a woman on the panel bowing her head as Sprague spoke, and wiping her eyes as the children's last minutes were described. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:00 p.m.; CNN, 12:05 p.m.
• 12:00By noon the second part of the charge was in the jurors' hands on paper, as the judge had promised them in the morning, and they were reading along while he delivered it from the bench. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:00 p.m.
• 12:03The judge told the jurors what they are not to be swayed by. They are to decide the case on the facts and the law alone, and not on anything said about it outside the courtroom. Nothing he has decided from the bench carries any view of his own about the facts, he told them, because he has none, and they are to draw no inference from either side having objected during the trial. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:03 p.m.
• 12:03Coming to what counts as evidence, the judge told the jurors it is the testimony of the witnesses and the exhibits, and that what matters is the weight they choose to give it. A question put to a witness is not evidence, he said — only the answer is — and any answer he ordered struck is not to be considered at all. Where a report in evidence has passages blacked out, they are to draw no inference from the redaction. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:03 p.m.
• 12:04CNN, filing later on the passage about the errand, sets out the clock the Commonwealth put on the afternoon. The defendant checked the pharmacy's stock online and then telephoned the store, Sprague told the jurors; she called in the takeout order at ten past five, with no difficulty reciting it or giving her husband's number for the pickup; and she waited until he was nearly out of the door before adding the pharmacy, “acting like it's this last-minute thought.” She texted him the details at a quarter past five. He rang her from the store at 5:33 and she let it go, then called him back a minute later. The purpose of the second stop, on the Commonwealth's argument, was to be sure of not being interrupted — “so she has time to do what she needs to do.” CNN, August 27, 12:04 p.m.
• 12:07Fox News, filing on the Commonwealth’s closing, sets out an argument Sprague built from the treating records. From September through late January, she told the jurors, not one of the doctors who saw the defendant ever found her psychotic, and for the defense account to be right every one of those clinicians, across several practices, would have to be “collectively together, wrong.” Fox News, August 27, 12:07 p.m.
• 12:10The judge drew the line between direct and circumstantial evidence. Direct evidence is a witness's account of what they themselves saw, heard or did; circumstantial evidence asks the jurors to reason from a fact proved to a further fact, and any inference they draw that way has to be a reasonable one. Whichever kind it is, he told them, the burden does not move: the proof has to reach beyond a reasonable doubt. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:10 p.m.
• 12:10Whether a witness is to be believed is for the jurors, the judge told them, and in deciding it they are to take in the whole of the evidence — how the witness carried themselves, any motive, any bias. They may weigh whether a witness said something different before trial, and whether a witness had said the same thing before. He then set a limit on the medical accounts: what the defendant told the people treating her is before them as evidence of her mental condition, not as proof that what she described was true. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:10 p.m.
• 12:11CNN, reporting the charge as it ran on past noon, has the judge going through reasonable doubt, the jurors' own role and the rules of evidence, and describes the instructions as largely the standard ones given in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Sullivan told them; the facts are theirs to find and the law is his to give; opening statements and closing arguments are not evidence; and they may weigh direct and circumstantial evidence alike and are the sole judges of whether a witness is to be believed. CNN, August 27, 12:11 p.m.
• 12:14Consciousness of guilt is not on its own enough to establish that a defendant is guilty, the judge told the jurors, though they may weigh it with everything else. The experts, he said, stand no higher than any other witness: how much of an expert's testimony to accept is for the jurors to decide, and they may reject it in whole or in part. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:14 p.m.
• 12:14The judge reminded the jurors that the defendant did not testify, that she had a “perfect right” not to, and that nothing may be held against her for it. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:14 p.m.
• 12:18The judge turned to the exhibits. Whether an exhibit shows what it is offered as showing is for the jurors to decide, he told them, and the view they took of the house is itself part of the case. The photographs from the scene are unpleasant and graphic, and are before them for their evidentiary value and nothing else. Their own notes are not a transcript, official or unofficial, and are not to be treated as one, and nobody is to look anything up on a phone. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:18 p.m.
• 12:19CNN, filing later on the Commonwealth's closing, sets out the argument Sprague built from the choices the killings required. The voice, on the account the defendant gave of it, told her to kill the children so that she could kill herself and no more than that — so where was hers to settle, Sprague told the jurors, and so was how, and so was what to use, three times over, and so was the way she meant to end her own life. She did not shut herself in the bathroom, on that argument, or call her husband, or call 911, or leave the house: “She just obeys.” A woman with no will of her own, Sprague put to the jurors, could not have made that many decisions. CNN, August 27, 12:19 p.m.
• 12:21The judge named the foreperson, Juror No. 257, and set out how a question from the deliberation room is to reach him: written down, handed to a court officer, taken up with the lawyers in the courtroom, answered and sent back. The jurors are to discuss the case only when all of them are present. What they do, he told them, they do as a group. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:21 p.m.
• 12:23The autopsy images are not pleasant, the judge told the jurors, and their verdict must not be influenced in any way by that. The defendant is entitled to a verdict resting on the evidence rather than on pity or sympathy for the children the images show, and the jurors may consider them only for what they say about the children's clinical condition and the nature of their injuries. CNN, August 27, 12:23 p.m.
• 12:25The clerk drew the alternates by lottery, pulling the names, on the Boston Globe's description, from something that looked like a bingo tumbler. Twelve of the eighteen jurors will deliberate and six will stand by in case one of them has to be replaced. The Globe names the six drawn as jurors 157, 162, 385, 122, 124 and 245. East Idaho News, timing the draw two minutes earlier, gives the same six numbers and adds the seats they had sat in: 122 in seat 6, 124 in seat 7, 157 in seat 11, 162 in seat 12, 385 in seat 14 and 245 in seat 15. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:25 and 12:58 p.m.; East Idaho News, 12:23 p.m.
• 12:27The panel that will decide the case is nine women and three men, CBS Boston reports, the six alternates having been drawn at random from a box. CBS Boston describes the foreperson the judge picked as an older woman in the eighteenth seat, and East Idaho News, timing the appointment at 12:18, likewise has the judge naming a woman and calls her juror 18. The outlets identify her differently — the Boston Globe by a juror number, 257, and CBS Boston and East Idaho News by the eighteenth seat — and none of them says how the two go together. CBS Boston, August 27, 12:27 p.m.; East Idaho News, 12:18 p.m.
• 12:30The judge held up the verdict slip the jurors will fill in. There is one for each child, he told them, and on each of them five choices: not guilty; not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility; guilty of murder in the first degree; guilty of murder in the second degree; guilty of manslaughter. Reaching a verdict in the case, he added, is not necessarily going to be an easy task. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:30 p.m.; CNN, 12:33 p.m.
• 12:33Judge Sullivan closed the charge by putting the case to the jurors as their own. Each of them has to decide it for themselves, he told them, and the responsibility is an awesome one; they are to hold off from conclusions their own biases might carry them to and judge the matter on the evidence alone. The system of justice is counting on them, he said on ABC News’s account, to reach a fair decision on the evidence rather than on any bias. He said he was completely confident they would arrive at a just verdict, whatever that verdict turned out to be, and asked them to carry the same confidence into the room: “Please have confidence in what you’re about to do.” He had no doubt, he said, that they would bring their wisdom and their conscience to the verdict, and he told them he had never been involved in a trial with a more dedicated group of jurors. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:30 p.m.; NBC News, 12:35 p.m.; CBS Boston, 12:42 p.m.; ABC News, 12:37 p.m.
• 12:35The jury retired at about twenty-five minutes to one to begin deliberating. The Boston Globe has the judge sending the jurors out after a sidebar at the bench; CNN and NBC News time the start of deliberations to the same minute. CNN counts more than eighty witnesses heard over the weeks of evidence behind them. CBS Boston puts the jurors' departure a minute earlier, at 12:34. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:35 p.m.; CNN, 12:35 p.m.; NBC News, 12:35 p.m.; CBS Boston, 12:42 p.m.
• 12:37With the jurors out of the room, Judge Sullivan commended the lawyers on both sides. Unless you have tried a murder case as hard as this one, he told them, you may not know what it asks of you: it is emotionally taxing, and intellectually and physically exhausting. He said he knew how challenging the trial had been for all three counsel. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:37 p.m.; CNN, 12:42 p.m.
• 12:37The judge called the lawyers back to a sidebar after commending them, and then left the bench. NBC Boston, which puts the commendation and the sidebar a couple of minutes later, says the exhibits in the case were what he called them over to take up. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:37 p.m.; NBC Boston, 12:39 p.m.
• 12:54NBC Boston, describing the panel after the draw, puts it at three men and nine women once the clerk had taken the six alternates out of it. Its courtroom insider, Sue O'Connell, speaking on the station's live coverage, described the foreperson as a woman who looks to be in her seventies, a steady note-taker who watched and listened closely to the witnesses. NBC Boston, August 27, 12:54 p.m.
• 12:58The six alternates have not been sent home. They are being kept apart from the twelve who are deliberating but are staying close by, and Judge Sullivan told them not to talk about the case, because if a deliberating juror cannot carry on — through illness or anything else — one of them will have to take that seat. The eighteen who heard the evidence were empaneled in July. Boston Globe, August 27, 12:58 p.m.
• 13:09NBC News, describing the courtroom through the two closing arguments, reports the room packed and the morning intense from the moment the reporters came in. Through the defense argument Clancy’s parents were fixed on Reddington, and the jurors were following every word of it. During the Commonwealth’s argument a woman in the back row of the jury box wiped her eyes several times, and Clancy’s mother sat at times with her arm along the back of the seat. NBC News, August 27, 1:09 p.m.
• 13:18CNN describes the twelve now deliberating: nine women and three men, with a woman with gray hair and glasses as the foreperson. The six alternates released before the panel went out were three men and three women. Among the twelve, on CNN's account, are the woman who wiped her eyes during the closing arguments, a man who yawned through the Commonwealth's argument, and a woman who nodded when a psychiatrist testified that the defendant's decision not to take one of the medications was reasonable “in her mind.” Many of them have taken notes steadily through the evidence. CNN, August 27, 1:18 p.m.
• 13:21CBS Boston, writing up the panel as it went out, records a remark from the bench about the jurors themselves. The judge said he did not think he had ever seen a more dedicated group of jurors in any trial he had been involved in. CBS Boston, August 27, 1:21 p.m.
• 14:05CNN describes the courthouse with the jury out. A member of the public crossed to the defendant's parents while they stood outside a restroom and told them the case should never have been brought, and someone from the defense team led the couple away. CNN, August 27, 2:05 p.m.
• 14:30CBS Boston set the trial out in figures while the jury deliberated: 21 days of testimony and 85 witnesses in all, 72 of them called by the Commonwealth, 10 by the defense and 3 in rebuttal; closing arguments of 52 minutes for the defense against 56 for the Commonwealth; and 18 jurors reduced to the 12 now deciding the case, with 6 alternates standing by. CBS Boston, August 27, 2:30 p.m.
• 14:38ABC set out how the panel narrowed, while the jury deliberated. The eighteen who sat through the evidence were twelve women and six men, none of them knowing until Thursday which six would be alternates, and the twelve now deciding the case were drawn at random from a box. ABC News, August 27, 2:38 p.m.
• 16:02CNN set out, while the jury was out, what a verdict of not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility would mean in practice, and it is not release. The court may begin proceedings to commit her, and after a hearing on whether she is mentally ill and on whether letting her go would create a likelihood of serious harm, a first commitment runs six months and each one after that a year, with no limit on how often it can be renewed. CNN adds that Tewksbury Hospital has held her since 2023, that she is partially paralyzed, and that she is still on medication for her mental health, on the account of Dr. Paul Zeizel, the psychologist who examined her. CNN, August 27, 4:02 p.m.
• 16:09Court sat again briefly at the end of the afternoon so that Judge Sullivan could excuse the jury for the day. The twelve had reached no verdict. He told them once more to look nothing up on their own and to discuss the case with no one. NBC News puts the length of the deliberation at almost three and a half hours, where CNN puts it at just over three; the two are describing the same afternoon and neither gives an exact figure. The hour of the excusal is also given differently: CBS Boston has the jurors called back shortly after four, where Boston 25's filed story and the Boston Globe both put them sent home shortly before half past four. NBC News, August 27, 4:09 p.m.; CBS Boston, 4:10 p.m.; Boston Globe, 4:30 p.m.; Boston 25.
• 16:10boston.com gives a third account of the excusal, and it lines up with NBC News on the length and with CBS Boston on the hour: it has the jurors sent home shortly after four, after roughly three and a half hours out. On the length that makes two accounts against CNN's one; on the hour it leaves two outlets on each side, with the Boston Globe and Boston 25 still putting the excusal shortly before half past. boston.com, August 27, 4:10 p.m.
• 16:11The jury had been out a little over three hours, having gone to deliberate at about half past twelve, and is to come back on Friday morning at nine o'clock to go on. CNN, August 27, 4:11 p.m.
• 16:27Kevin Reddington left the courthouse at the end of the afternoon and was met by a crowd of reporters. He was carrying a paper coffee cup and what the Boston Globe described as a bag of exhibits, and when he was asked how the day had gone he said: “Don’t know, we’ll see. I think it went OK.” The remark was made outside the courtroom. Boston Globe, August 27, 4:27 p.m.
• 16:30The Boston Globe, describing the same excusal, gives what Judge Sullivan said as he sent the jurors home. He told the twelve and the alternates that he could not stress it more than he had over the past five weeks: “Don’t read anything about this case. Don’t talk with anyone about this case, even at home. Don’t listen to anything.” He told them to put it out of their heads, thanked everyone and excused them until Friday morning. He then asked both counsel whether there was anything to be taken up before Friday, and each said there was not. Boston Globe, August 27, 4:30 p.m.
• 16:42Kevin Reddington, still with the reporters who had met him outside the courthouse, was asked how his client was bearing the wait. He said she was doing all right but that she was nervous and she was scared. Asked whether the Commonwealth's closing argument had surprised him, he said of Jennifer Sprague that she did a nice job. The remarks were made outside the courtroom. CNN, August 27, 4:42 p.m.
• 17:04Kevin Reddington, in the same gathering of reporters outside the courthouse, was asked whether he was confident. He said he never is. He was asked whether he had got back the quarters he laid on the prosecutors' table during his closing, and declined to answer, saying that what lawyers say to one another in a hallway is not something he discusses. Of the jurors he said they had been great and had been amazing. The remarks were made outside the courtroom. CBS Boston, August 27, 5:04 p.m.
• 17:19NBC News, describing the same departure, reports the crowd of reporters around Kevin Reddington as the largest the trial has drawn. It was the outlet's own question, about how his client was doing after a day in which she had been visibly upset in court, that drew the answer CNN and CBS Boston also carried: she was doing all right, but she was nervous, and she was scared. The remarks were made outside the courtroom. NBC News, August 27, 5:19 p.m.
• 18:34A fourth outlet gives the departure gaggle, and one exchange in it looks past Friday. Fox News reports that its correspondent Bryan Llenas asked Kevin Reddington, as he left after the first day of deliberations, how long he thought the jury would take. Reddington answered that there was no way of knowing, pointing to the amount of evidence, the length of the trial and the number of exhibits the jurors have with them. He said again that the jurors had been attentive and had worked hard. Asked whether everyone might still be at the courthouse on Monday, he said he did not know. The remarks were made outside the courtroom. Fox News, August 27, 6:34 p.m.