Lindsay Clancy trial jurors speak out after mistrial
Clancy's trial resulted in a hung jury, leading to a mistrial.
Jurors in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy are speaking out after the 12-person group was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, triggering a mistrial in the high-profile case.
In an interview with NBC 10 Boston, which aired Tuesday, the jurors discussed their task of determining a verdict after a weekslong trial which centered around the events of Jan. 24, 2023, when Clancy was accused of strangling her 5-year-old daughter Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson and infant son Callan at the family's home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb.
Clancy and her attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued that she killed her three children but should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths, because she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings.
Prosecutors argued that Clancy was criminally responsible for the children's deaths and was capable of understanding the severity of her actions.
Throughout Clancy's trial, much of the testimony centered on whether or not Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she strangled her children and attempted to take her own life.
"We weren't trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did," said foreperson Roni Carlson. "We're trying to figure out, 'Did she know right from wrong at that time?'"
"With everybody saying she loved her children so much, and everything proved she loved her children ... she had to have snapped," Carlson added.
Jury deliberations spanned seven days, eventually yielding an 11-1 split in favor of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the final juror would not relinquish his position in favor of conviction, according to the jurors who spoke out publicly.
"He was very arrogant, he really did not take anything that anybody said," said Paula Devlin, another juror.
The judge overseeing the trial, Judge William Sullivan, sought to emphasize to jurors during deliberations that it was their duty to determine whether prosecutors had successfully proven Clancy's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard prosecutors must surpass in order to secure a conviction in a criminal case. Sullivan repeated that instruction to the jury multiple times across the seven-day span, but it had little to no impact on the holdout juror, Carlson said.
Carlson alleges that at one point, the holdout juror admitted to having reasonable doubt about Clancy's guilt but would not change his mind.
"He admitted he had reasonable doubt," Carlson said. "I started filling out the forms, I was so excited ... and then he said, 'But I'm still not gonna say that she's not guilty by reason of insanity.'"
Jurors also opened up about the significant impact the evidence in the case had on them, specifically the gut-wrenching 911 call made by Clancy's then-husband Patrick Clancy, who found his wife after her suicide attempt and discovered his three children in the basement of the home the day of the killings.
"It's something that I will never not hear, if I think about it," juror Kellie Farina said. "It was the most horrific thing."
The jurors also touched on their feelings about each side's legal representation.
"I just found it to be harsh," Farina said of the prosecution's case.
The jurors said they found defense attorney Kevin Reddington both "entertaining" and "arrogant."
Reddington told ABC News in an interview this week that he could understand why there was so much passion around this case.
"You've got three dead children," he said. "You've got a lot of lightning rod emotion on both sides, unbelievable emotion on both sides."
Reddington ultimately said he believes Clancy should have been acquitted.
"She deserved an acquittal, not because of me, but because the evidence that was there or not there," he said.