How long will the Lindsay Clancy trial jury take to reach a verdict?

The jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial continued their deliberations Friday and it could be days before they reach a verdict in the Massachusetts murder case, according to a legal expert.

Jurors deliberated for three and a half hours Thursday after the prosecution and defense made their closing arguments in Plymouth Superior Court. They will decide whether Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children - 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan. The defense says she was overmedicated and suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time, while prosecutors argued she planned the murders and knew right from wrong.

"I don't think we're seeing a verdict before Monday or Tuesday of next week," WBZ-TV legal analyst Jennifer Roman said.

Roman said that jurors usually take a straw poll when they start deliberations, even though they're not technically supposed to, to see how everyone is leaning.

"Just by the sheer fact that they didn't come back [Thursday] at 4:20 means they are not unanimous," she said. "Even if it's not guilty by reason of insanity, it has to be unanimous."

Roman pointed out that jurors have to consider testimony from 85 witnesses in their deliberations, and "it just takes time."

"It's not like Karen Read where there's a lot of physical evidence they had to go through," Roman said. "They have a lot of medical reports and notes and her journals. Although there's not much of it, it's going to take a while for them to get through it, and then they're going to have to parse that out with the actual testimony."

On Friday morning, jurors asked to see pill bottles and the knife that was in evidence, according to defense attorney Kevin Reddington.

After alternates were randomly drawn Thursday, the jury was whittled from 18 jurors to 12 - nine women and three men. Judge William Sullivan named an older woman as foreperson.

"Sometimes I think that women can be harsher on other women and hold them to a higher standard," she said.

But more women on the jury means some of them could relate to what Clancy went through, Roman said.

"Presumably some of them are mothers or are grandmothers," she said. "They may have had somebody in their life, including themselves, who may have suffered postpartum depression following a pregnancy or known someone who has and that could also color their perspective too."

Jurors have five choices on their verdict slips. The least likely outcome is a straight "not guilty" finding, Roman said, though it's legally required to be an option.

"She's acknowledged she did this," Roman said. "It's just a question of was she able to conform her conduct to the law at the time of the killings."