The Only Black Juror In The Lindsay Clancy Trial Was The One Who Refused To Acquit Her

A Lindsay Clancy juror revealed on national television Friday that the lone holdout who blocked her acquittal and forced a mistrial was the only Black person on the panel.

Paula Devlin, who sat on that jury and voted with the majority, told Gayle King on CBS Mornings that the panel was made up of nine women and three men ranging in age from 22 to about 70, and that only one member was a person of color. King asked whether that juror was a man or a woman. Devlin said a man. King asked if the holdout was a Black man. Devlin confirmed it and estimated he is in his 30s. King paused before responding. “I have to sit with that for just a second,” she said.

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Clancy, 36, is a former labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts. In January 2023 she killed her three children, Cora, who was 5, Dawson, who was 3, and Callan, who was 8 months old, and then tried to take her own life. She survived with injuries that have kept her in a wheelchair through the proceedings. Her defense never disputed that she caused their deaths. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, which meant the jury was not being asked whether she did it. They were asked whether she could be held responsible for it.

Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare and severe condition that can follow childbirth and can leave a person detached from reality, hearing things that are not there and unable to understand what she is doing. Prosecutors argued the opposite, that she understood exactly what she was doing and that the killings were planned. Plymouth County Superior Court Judge William Sullivan presided over five weeks of testimony before handing the case to the jury.

What happened next is why another Lindsay Clancy juror after another has been willing to sit for interviews. The panel deliberated for seven days and more than 38 hours. They sent Sullivan three separate notes saying they could not agree. Eleven of them wanted to find Clancy not criminally responsible. One wanted to convict her of first degree murder. Sullivan declared a mistrial, which means the case ended with no verdict at all and the prosecution is free to try her again.

Roni Carlson, the jury foreperson and a former elementary school teacher, told NBC10 Boston she believed at one point that the holdout had come around. “He had reasonable doubt. He admitted he had reasonable doubt,” Carlson said, adding that she was so certain the deadlock had broken that she pulled out the three verdict forms and signed her name to each one. Then he told her he still was not going to vote not guilty by reason of insanity.

Nick Dargie, 25, the first male juror to speak publicly and one of the three men on the panel, went further on Good Morning America. He said that toward the end the holdout stopped participating in the discussion, would not offer evidence to support his position, and scrolled his phone while the rest of them argued. Dargie said he confronted the man after he acted out the killings during deliberations using an exercise band and a water bottle. “I think we felt defeated,” Dargie said of how it ended, pointing to the seven weeks of their lives the trial consumed.

Reddington tried to have the juror removed before the mistrial was declared, telling Sullivan the man was refusing to follow the instructions he had been given on reasonable doubt. Sullivan declined, saying it was not his place to take the side of one juror over eleven. After the mistrial the defense attorney was blunt about how he saw it. “They know that they were robbed by one man,” Reddington said of the other jurors.

Devlin offered a theory about why the man dug in. She said he may have felt attacked in that room and refused to move for that reason. She also said there was a moment, after the jury watched video of an interview with Clancy, when the holdout appeared to accept that the case was not first degree murder, and that the rest of the panel could see his doubt.

She pointed to one witness as the turning point for her own vote. Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s husband and the father of the three children, took the stand for the prosecution. Devlin said prosecutors tried to get him to say something damaging about his wife and he would not do it, and that a man who had lost all three of his children still refusing to speak badly of her landed harder than anything else she heard. “I was leaning towards not responsible from all the evidence I had heard,” Devlin said.

The holdout has said none of this himself. Sullivan ordered the names of all twelve jurors sealed for at least 14 days. The man has not been identified, has not come forward, and has not given his account of what happened in that room. At least five of his fellow jurors have now told theirs on morning television, and what the public knows about him comes entirely from the people who spent a week trying to change his mind.

Reddington filed a motion Thursday asking the judge to throw out the mistrial and find Clancy not criminally responsible on all three charges without another trial, arguing prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was not psychotic. He said he decided to file it after hearing jurors describe how the holdout conducted himself. Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not said whether his office will retry the case, telling reporters only that he would meet with his team and address it at the appropriate time. Clancy has returned to the mental health facility where she has been held since her arrest.