If the Lindsay Clancy jury returns to court today and once again tells Sullivan it cannot reach a unanimous decision, viewers following the trial may suddenly hear an unfamiliar and rather dramatic phrase, the “dynamite charge.”
It sounds considerably more explosive than a judge giving instructions to 12 jurors. In reality, it is a special direction intended to do exactly what the nickname suggests by breaking through a jury deadlock.
Massachusetts officially calls it a Tuey-Rodriguez charge. In federal courts and many other states, a similar instruction is known as an Allen charge. Strip away the legal terminology and more than a century of court history, however, and the idea is fairly simple. The judge tells jurors to return to the room, listen to one another again, reconsider whether their own position might be wrong and make another serious attempt to reach a verdict.
Nobody is ordered to change their vote, and nobody is told whether Lindsay Clancy should be convicted or acquitted. The prosecution does not receive a lower burden of proof, while a juror who genuinely believes the evidence does not justify conviction is not supposed to abandon that belief simply so everyone can go home.
Even so, it is much more pointed than merely telling a jury to keep deliberating.
That is why it could matter so much in Clancy’s trial.
The jury has been deliberating since Thursday afternoon after hearing more than five weeks of testimony concerning the deaths of Clancy’s three children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan. By Tuesday morning, jurors had spent more than 17 hours discussing the case when they sent Judge Sullivan a message saying they were “unable to come to a unanimous decision.”
Sullivan did not give them the dynamite charge. Instead, he reminded jurors of the size and complexity of the case, which included more than 80 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits, before asking them to return to the jury room and continue their deliberations. They spent several more hours trying. By the end of Tuesday, the jury had deliberated for more than 23 hours without reaching a verdict and was sent home until 9 a.m. today.
That leaves the trial in a very different position as Day 5 begins. Jurors have formally declared themselves unable to agree once, then spent several more hours trying to overcome that disagreement anyway. If they return and tell Sullivan essentially the same thing again, he will have to decide whether they genuinely need more time or whether ordinary deliberations have run their course.
That is where the Tuey-Rodriguez charge comes in.
There would be no shouting, no threats and no demand that the jury reach a verdict. Sullivan would instead remind jurors that each of them must ultimately make an individual decision while asking them to reconsider their position with an open mind.
The Massachusetts instruction tells jurors to respect the views of the people sitting around the table and seriously consider why other equally conscientious jurors, who heard the same evidence, reached a different conclusion.
It applies in both directions. Jurors leaning toward acquittal are asked to consider whether the doubts they hold remain reasonable when those doubts have failed to persuade their fellow jurors. Jurors favoring conviction are likewise asked to consider whether the continuing disagreement of other jurors should make them question whether the prosecution truly proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Most importantly, jurors are specifically told not to abandon an honestly held belief merely because everyone else disagrees or because they want the trial to end.
Massachusetts’ model instruction makes clear that each juror’s decision must remain their own and that the Commonwealth continues to carry the burden of proving its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
In ordinary language, the message is essentially this.
You have heard all the evidence and listened to one another’s arguments. Before deciding that agreement is impossible, go back and make absolutely certain there is nothing somebody else has said that should genuinely change your mind.
Judges have used versions of the instruction for more than a century to break seemingly hopeless deadlocks.
Massachusetts’ version traces back to an 1851 case called Commonwealth v. Tuey. The U.S. Supreme Court later approved a similar federal instruction in Allen v. United States in 1896, giving rise to the term “Allen charge.” Massachusetts revised its own version after Commonwealth v. Rodriguez in 1973, producing the state’s rather cumbersome modern name, Tuey-Rodriguez.
The much better nickname survived for obvious reasons. Courts themselves have referred to such instructions as “dynamite,” “shotgun” and even “nitroglycerin” charges because they can shake loose a verdict from jurors who previously seemed incapable of agreement. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has acknowledged that the instruction has a “sting” and warned judges not to use it too early.
That concern is easy to understand. Imagine being the only juror in a room of 12 who believes Clancy should be acquitted, or the only one who believes she should be convicted. Everyone has argued for days and nobody has changed your mind. Then the judge summons the entire jury back into court and sends you away with instructions to reconsider everything again. The psychological pressure can be enormous. The instruction therefore has to walk a narrow line between encouraging jurors to rethink their positions and pressuring a holdout to surrender a genuine belief simply because 11 other people disagree.
A dynamite charge would confirm that Sullivan believes the jury has reached a serious enough impasse to justify the special instruction. It would not reveal how the jurors are divided. The split could theoretically be 11-1, 10-2, 8-4 or 6-6, and the public would have no way of knowing which side held the majority.
The disagreement might concern whether Clancy was criminally responsible at all. Jurors could also agree that she was responsible while disagreeing over whether the evidence supports first-degree murder, second-degree murder or manslaughter. That matters particularly in this case because Clancy’s defense is not arguing that somebody else killed Cora, Dawson and Callan. She has admitted murdering all three children with exercise bands inside their Duxbury home on January 24, 2023. The central dispute is what was happening inside her mind at the time.
Prosecutors say Clancy understood right from wrong, deliberately created an opportunity to be alone with the children and intentionally killed them. Her attorneys say postpartum psychosis destroyed her ability to understand the wrongfulness of her actions and left her without criminal responsibility.
After weeks of conflicting psychiatric testimony, medical records, internet searches, text messages and accounts from people who saw Clancy before and after the killings, 12 jurors must somehow agree on what was happening inside another person’s mind during a period that lasted only minutes.
The fact that they have struggled to do so is hardly surprising.
A dynamite change does not necessarily mean a mistrial is likely as the entire point of giving the instruction is to avoid such a result. Sometimes it works. Jurors who believed they were hopelessly divided return to the room, reconsider the evidence and eventually emerge with a unanimous decision.
Massachusetts courts have treated the instruction as a legitimate way to encourage jurors to give more serious consideration to opposing views after ordinary deliberations have failed. If it does not work, though, the trial moves much closer to the end of the road.
Massachusetts law limits how often jurors can simply be sent back after they have completed “due and thorough” deliberations and twice returned without reaching agreement. After a second genuine deadlock, jurors generally cannot simply be ordered back into the room yet again without their consent unless they themselves ask for further explanation of the law.
That is why another jury note could matter so much. There is no automatic three-strikes rule under which a third note instantly produces a mistrial. Sullivan has discretion to decide whether the jury has genuinely exhausted its efforts and whether the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction is appropriate. Eventually, though, a judge has to accept that disagreement is no longer temporary.
If Sullivan gives the dynamite charge and the jurors later return saying they remain hopelessly divided, a mistrial becomes a very real possibility.
Trial watchers do not have to look far back for a famous example.
Karen Read’s first murder trial in Massachusetts reached almost exactly this point in 2024. After more than 22 hours of deliberations, Read’s jury told Judge Beverly Cannone that it was deeply divided and unable to reach agreement. On the fifth day, Cannone delivered the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction and sent jurors back for another attempt. It did not work. Later that day, jurors returned again and said their differences were so fundamental that further deliberations would be futile. Cannone declared a mistrial.
The Clancy case does not have to follow the same timetable, and Sullivan is not bound by what Cannone did. The similarities, however, are difficult to miss. Clancy’s jury is entering Day 5 after approximately 23 hours of deliberations. Jurors have already announced one deadlock, while Sullivan has already asked them to keep trying without using Massachusetts’ strongest deadlock instruction. If they tell him that nothing has changed, the words “Tuey-Rodriguez” could become some of the most important heard during the entire trial.
Despite its theatrical nickname, the dynamite charge is not really about blowing up a jury. It is one final attempt to prevent the entire trial from blowing up instead.
