A juror from Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is speaking publicly about the deliberations, including the lone holdout whose refusal to agree ultimately led the judge to declare a mistrial.
Nick Dargie, one of three men on the 12-member jury, said the holdout staged a disturbing demonstration during deliberations, appearing to recreate how Clancy strangled her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan — using exercise bands.
“He took the exercise band out of the bag, grabbed an empty water bottle and tied the band around the water bottle and pulled it,” Dargie told Good Morning America in a Sept. 10 interview. “I was just so shocked that he did that.”
Dargie described the demonstration as “disgusting” and said he could not understand why it happened. “It didn’t make any sense to me,” he said. “We’re not in here to play detective—it’s not a game of Clue. This is serious.”
Clancy pleaded not guilty, though she acknowledged killing her children. Her defense attorney argued that she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time. Prosecutors, however, maintained that while Clancy had mental health issues, she intentionally killed the children.
The jury heard 21 days of testimony and spent seven days deliberating, telling the court three separate times that it was deadlocked. The case ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4 after one juror appeared to acknowledge reasonable doubt but would not join the others in finding Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity.
“It was definitely frustrating,” Dargie told GMA. “He explicitly said, ‘I don’t know if the prosecution or the defense proved their case.’”
Dargie emphasized that every juror had the right to reach their own conclusion, even as he questioned the holdout’s reasoning during the failed deliberations.
“There’s nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion,” he said. “That would be a hung jury—that is our justice system.”
The real issue, he said, was that the juror could not point to evidence to support his position on several occasions.
“There [were] times he wouldn’t engage,” Dargie recalled. “He’d be scrolling on this phone while people were talking to him, things like that.”
Dargie was not the first juror to speak out on serving alongside the lone member.
“He was very arrogant,” Paula Devlin told NBC10 Boston in a Sept. 8 interview. “He really did not take anything that anybody said. He tried to ask a question about the medications, and we went back to the report from South Shore Hospital.”
“I don’t know if rogue is the right word,” another juror told the outlet. “He would not interact with us.”
Added fellow juror Kellie Farina, “I don’t know if rogue is the right word. But every one of us, in the hours of frustration, would get up and walk the room because you just couldn’t sit anymore, and we’d all go into the cart with the exhibits. He got up to the cart once, very briefly, and went back to his seat. He would not interact with us and try to understand.”
