On the fourth day the jury spent deciding whether Lindsay Clancy was guilty of murdering her three children, Massachusetts State Police arrested a 56-year-old retired nurse outside the courthouse where that jury was deliberating — and accused her of secretly filming them.
A car backed into a restricted space, aimed at the jurors' door
Dawn Light, of Sutton, was taken into custody Tuesday, September 1, 2026, after troopers noticed her car backed into a restricted section of the Plymouth Superior Court parking lot on Obery Street — a spot that gave a clear sightline to the door jurors use to enter and exit the building. When state police approached her, Light said she'd only been trying to get a photograph of Clancy, the former labor-and-delivery nurse standing trial on three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children in January 2023.
That explanation didn't hold up. Troopers examined her phone and, according to court records, found a video in her recently deleted files showing several people leaving the courthouse. A court officer identified them as jurors who had just finished their fourth day of deliberations.
Charged with aggravated intimidation of a juror
Light was arraigned the next morning in Plymouth District Court on a single count of witness intimidation and pleaded not guilty. Assistant District Attorney Nicole Piacentini asked the court to hold her on $50,000 cash bail and to bar her from the courthouse, its grounds, and any contact with jurors or witnesses in the Clancy case. "The sanctity of the judicial system is at risk because of her actions," Piacentini told the court.
Judge Shelby M. Smith released Light on personal recognizance but ordered her to stay away from the courthouse entirely and barred her from sharing any images she'd stored of jurors. Judge William F. Sullivan, who is presiding over the Clancy trial itself, separately questioned members of the jury under oath to determine whether any of them knew they had been filmed.
Light's attorney, Jennifer White, called the arrest "a complete misunderstanding," telling reporters her client "was seeking a picture of Ms. Clancy and had no interaction with the jurors." White described Light as a retired registered nurse "who has the utmost respect for our judicial system." Court records show Light held a Massachusetts RN license from 1993 until it lapsed in 2022, with no disciplinary history. She has no criminal record beyond a minor traffic case in Florida.
I understand the pull of this case better than most people watching it from the outside. Clancy was a labor-and-delivery and NICU nurse before she was a defendant, and cases like hers get under the skin of anyone who's worked a maternity or postpartum floor — you can't help replaying every warning sign you'd want a colleague to catch. But that instinct to get closer to a case doesn't come with a license to interfere with the twelve people whose job is to weigh it fairly. If you're a nurse and a case like this has its hooks in you, watch it from your couch. A courthouse parking lot is not the place to work through it.
The trial that ended a few days later
Light's arrest came during what turned out to be the jury's final stretch of deliberations. On September 4, 2026, Judge Sullivan declared a mistrial after jurors reported they could not reach a unanimous verdict on any of the three murder counts following roughly a week of deliberation. A status hearing on whether prosecutors will seek a retrial is scheduled for September 29, 2026. It is not yet clear whether Light's case will have any bearing on that decision.