Three of the jurors involved in Lindsay Clancy’s triple murder case say one holdout juror would not listen to the rest of the panel and ultimately led to the judge declaring a mistrial last week.
Roni Carlson, Kellie Farina and Paula Devlin spoke with NBC Boston’s Sue O’Connell on Sept. 8 about the emotional rollercoaster of jury deliberations that lasted seven days and yielded no unanimous verdict.
The jury was responsible for determining whether Clancy, 36, was criminally responsible for killing her three young children in 2023 or whether she was not guilty by reason of mental illness from what her defense said was postpartum psychosis.
The three women told NBC Boston that most of the jury was prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible for the deaths of her children, but one male juror did not agree.
“He was very arrogant,” Devlin said. “He really did not take anything that anybody said.”
Carlson, a former elementary school teacher who served as the foreperson on the jury, initially thought they had a verdict.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt, and I started filling out the forms,” she said. “I was so excited. There were three forms I had to fill out, and I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one, and then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”
“He would not interact with us and try to understand,” Farina said.
The deliberations grew heated at times, according to the three jurors.
“Every one of us, in the hours of a frustration, would get up and walk the room because you just couldn’t sit any more,” Farina said.
After the third deadlock, one of Clancy’s attorneys, Dana Goldblatt, asked a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judge to remove a holdout juror from the panel for refusing to “follow what the law states,” in a last ditch effort. The state’s top court denied the stay, according to NBC News. Judge William Sullivan then told the court he was declaring a mistrial in the case.
NBC Boston attempted to reach out to the juror described as the holdout but did not receive a response.
It’s now up to Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz to decide whether to retry Clancy in front of a different jury on first-degree murder charges or bring different charges. Clancy had pleaded not guilty to three first-degree murder charges.
In the first comments by Clancy’s attorney since the mistrial was declared, Kevin Reddington called on President Donald Trump to pardon her. Presidential pardons only apply to federal convictions, not state charges like the ones Clancy faced.