Three people who served on the jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial are speaking publicly for the first time after last week’s mistrial, saying a lone holdout prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict.
The jurors, including the foreperson, said one juror acknowledged having reasonable doubt but still refused to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, according to interviews with NBC10 Boston. The jurors’ accounts offer the first public glimpse inside the deliberations that ended in a deadlocked jury.
The mistrial came after days of deliberations in the closely watched case against Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of killing her three young children in January 2023.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson told NBC10 Boston.
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But the foreperson said the juror then added, “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
The foreperson said she had already begun completing the verdict paperwork after believing the jury had reached an agreement.
“There were three forms I had to fill out, and I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one,” she told the station. “But then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.'”
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Clancy admitted to the killings but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, arguing she was suffering from severe mental illness at the time. Prosecutors maintained she was criminally responsible for the deaths.
The foreperson also told the station she wrote the note to the judge raising concerns that one juror had expressed reasonable doubt but would not agree to a verdict. The three jurors said they became frustrated with the holdout during deliberations, claiming he refused to consider the views of the rest of the panel.
“He was very arrogant. He really did not take anything that anybody said,” one juror told NBC10 Boston.
The juror said the holdout questioned evidence about Clancy’s medications even after the panel reviewed toxicology reports from South Shore Hospital that had been admitted into evidence.
“There were nurses on the jury. Yes, they spoke to that specific thing,” the juror said. “That was a question that he had, and he just completely disregarded the information that they gave him.”
“Every one of us in the hours of our frustration would get up and walk the room because you just couldn’t sit anymore,” another juror told the station. “He would not interact with us and try to understand.”
The juror said the panel repeatedly read the judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt to the holdout. “We read to him, on numerous occasions, the definition of reasonable doubt from Judge Sullivan’s instruction,” she said.
The same juror said the holdout “had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children,” despite the panel’s discussions about whether Clancy met the legal standard for insanity.
NBC10 Boston reported it attempted to contact the juror identified by the others as the holdout but had not received a response.
A judge declared a mistrial last week after jurors informed the court they were hopelessly deadlocked following several days of deliberations.
It remains unclear whether prosecutors will seek to retry the case.
