A single holdout juror prevented Lindsay Clancy from being acquitted, even after acknowledging during deliberations that he had reasonable doubt about whether she was criminally responsible for killing her three young children, the jury’s foreperson said in a television interview Tuesday.
The revelation came four days after a judge declared a mistrial in the closely watched Massachusetts case, ending seven days of deliberations without a unanimous verdict on whether Clancy was legally responsible for the deaths of her children.
Three jurors described the tense deliberations in an interview with Boston’s NBC10, offering the first public glimpse inside the jury room.
Foreperson Ronni Carlson said she believed the jury had finally convinced the lone juror favoring a conviction to accept an acquittal. He had admitted he had reasonable doubt, she said.
Carlson began filling out the paperwork.
“I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” she told NBC10. “There were three forms I had to fill out, and I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one.”
Then, she said, the juror stopped the process.
“And then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”
The jurors had been instructed that they could not convict Clancy if the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible for the killings.
The holdout juror’s name remains temporarily sealed by the judge, and he has not publicly explained his position.
Carlson told the judge during deliberations that one juror appeared unwilling to follow the court’s instructions concerning reasonable doubt. On three separate occasions, jurors sent notes to the judge saying they could not reach a unanimous verdict.
Judge William Sullivan questioned the jurors, repeated his instructions on reasonable doubt and sent them back to continue deliberating.
Juror Paula Devlin described the holdout as “arrogant.”
“He really did not take anything that anybody said,” she told NBC10.
Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, has previously said he believed his client would have been acquitted if not for the lone juror.
“They were robbed by one man,” Reddington said, describing the juror as someone who, “for whatever his agenda was,” took away seven weeks of the other jurors’ lives.
The 911 call that left jurors in tears
The jury’s struggle came after 21 days of testimony about Clancy’s deteriorating mental health following the birth of her youngest child.
Clancy, 36, a former labor and delivery nurse, never disputed that she killed 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan. Her defense argued that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis, a rare psychiatric condition that can develop after childbirth and can involve severe breaks with reality.
Prosecutors argued that Clancy knew exactly what she was doing. They said she deliberately strangled the children with exercise bands and engineered a reason for her husband to leave the house, sending him to pick up medicine and dinner.
But for jurors who believed Clancy’s mental illness had overwhelmed her ability to understand her actions, the evidence painted a very different picture.
Carlson said Clancy’s journals and testimony from her former mother-in-law showed that she had been a loving, nurturing mother.
“So she had to have snapped, and not known what she was doing,” Carlson said. “To me, it was proof that she didn’t know what she was doing.”
Jurors also heard the 911 call made by Clancy’s husband after he returned home and found the children strangled.
Juror Kellie Farina called it “the most horrific thing” the jury heard.
The jurors played the recording again while deliberating. They cried, Farina said.
“We were just like, ‘My God, the desperation.’ The despair in his voice was … it’s something that will stick with me.”
The recording became one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of evidence in a case already filled with difficult testimony.
Farina also said she felt prosecutors had been cold and lacked compassion toward Clancy.
“I know it’s their job,” she said, “but in a case like this, you expect a little bit.”
What happens next for Clancy
Clancy could have faced life in prison if convicted of murder.
An acquittal on the grounds of insanity would not necessarily have meant her immediate release. The judge could have ordered her committed to a mental health facility until she was determined no longer to pose a danger to the public.
Instead, the jury’s deadlock means the case could go to trial again.
The mistrial leaves unresolved the central question that divided the jury: not whether Clancy killed her children, but whether, at the time, she understood what she was doing and was legally responsible for it.
And according to the foreperson, that question ultimately came down to one juror who said he had reasonable doubt — but still could not bring himself to vote for an insanity acquittal.
