The lone juror who prevented a unanimous verdict in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial failed to cite a “single piece of evidence” to justify his belief that she was guilty of killing her three young children, another juror said.
“There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News in an interview Wednesday.
Dargie, 25, said the jury finally sent a note to Judge William Sullivan on Friday stating that it remained deadlocked after 38 hours of deliberations. According to Dargie, the impasse came because the holdout juror could not point to any evidence that supported his opposing view.
That message led Sullivan to declare a mistrial in the high-profile Lindsay Clancy case after seven days of jury deliberations and five weeks of testimony.
“Otherwise, like there’s nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion … that would be a hung jury. That, like that, is our justice system,” Dargie added.
Dargie, one of just three men on the 12-person jury, said he entered the trial with no prior knowledge of the case because he was serving in the military when Clancy strangled her three children — Dawson, 3, Cora, 5, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands inside their Duxbury, Mass., home on Jan. 24, 2023.
During the tense, week-long deliberations, Dargie said he repeatedly pressed the holdout juror to identify the evidence behind his firm stance, but said the juror never did.
“There was several times I would ask him to show us evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying, and … he couldn’t,” Dargie, the fifth juror to speak publicly about the trial, told the outlet.
A total of three notes were sent to the judge throughout the deliberations detailing the panel’s deadlocked 11-1 position.
From the start of deliberations, a majority of the panel — which was composed of nine women and three men — attempted to convince the holdout juror to change his vote, according to juror No. 5 who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity.
The stand-alone juror, who has been called “arrogant” by fellow panelists, “admitted he had reasonable doubt” but refused to say Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity, foreperson Roni Carlson told NBC10 Boston Tuesday.
“The stand-alone juror was not the only one that was unwilling to see things from the other side. So, I’m going to kind of defend that individual in a sense,” juror No. 5 said.
“There were some big personalities in that room. But at the end of the day, I feel like it just came down to an inability to kind of move past your convictions,” the anonymous panelist added.
The jury ultimately yielded an 11-1 split in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity — siding with the defense’s argument that the mom was suffering from postpartum psychosis and could not be held criminally responsible for the killings.
Clancy, 36, remains in state-run psychiatric facility, Tewksbury Hospital. Her next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 29.
