Three jurors discussed what happened behind closed doors during Lindsay Clancy’s closely watched triple murder case, which ended in a mistrial last Friday, with one revealing that the lone holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt.”
When speaking to Sue
O’Connell of NBC10 Boston, Kellie Farina, one of the jurors, discussed listening to the 911 call made by Clancy’s now-ex-husband, Patrick Clancy, on the night of the incident. “It’s something that I will never not hear if I think about it,” said Farina. “It was the most horrific thing, and when we we heard it again in the jury room, we were crying again,” she continued, recalling the “desperation, the despair” in Patrick’s voice. “It was absolutely genuine. There’s no doubt about that,” she added.
The jury foreperson, Roni Carlson, clarified that the jurors “weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did, and she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out: Did she know right from wrong at that time?” Carlson said that “everything proved she loved her children — from her journals to her mother-in-law — everything proved that she loved her children, so she had to have snapped.”
During the trial, prosecutors argued that Clancy was deeply troubled but understood that what she was doing was wrong when she strangled her three children with exercise bands. They asked the jurors to convict her of three counts of first-degree murder.
Clancy’s defense argued that she killed her children after suffering a postpartum psychotic break. Her lawyers claimed Clancy heard a commanding male voice in her head when she strangled her children with exercise bands, then she tried slashing her own throat and wrists before jumping out a second-story window of her home. (The fall left Clancy paralyzed from the waist down.)
Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s defense attorney, argued that the she should be found not criminally responsible due to improperly treated mental illness, a verdict that likely would have resulted in her indefinite commitment to a forensic psychiatric facility.
O’Connell said that while things got tense during jury deliberations, including some “name calling,” there were also “hugs and words and actions of support and self care.” O’Connell said that three jurors were persuaded to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, but that one juror was immovable.
Juror Paula Devlin told NBC10 that the lone holdout was “very arrogant” and that although “he admitted he had reasonable doubt,” he would not agree to a verdict.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” said the foreperson. “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.”
The jury spent a week deliberating the case but ultimately told the judge they could not reach a unanimous verdict due to the holdout.
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