Lindsay Clancy juror admits holdout wasn't the only one who refused to budge

A juror from the Lindsay Clancy murder trial is defending the lone holdout who forced a mistrial, and says most jurors on the panel were just as unwilling to change their minds from the start.

The anonymous female juror, identified only as Juror No. 5, told WBZ-TV that the single male juror who held out against eleven others was not the stubborn outlier that post-trial coverage suggested. Other jurors, she said, were equally dug in, and had been from the beginning of deliberations at Plymouth County Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Clancy, 36, is charged with strangling her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old, with exercise bands at the family's home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, on January 24, 2023. After a weekslong trial, the jury split 11-1 and deadlocked three times over seven days before Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial.

Juror No. 5 says "big personalities" dominated the room

In the interview, conducted on condition of anonymity, Juror No. 5 pushed back on the narrative that one rogue juror singlehandedly derailed the verdict. She described a deliberation room where conviction ran deep on both sides.

"The majority of the people, it doesn't matter what side it was on, was very firm in their like stance and their beliefs kind of from the beginning."

She went further, saying the holdout juror deserved a measure of defense.

"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. 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 jury of nine women and three men sent three impasse notes to the court during deliberations. In one note sent Thursday, the day before the mistrial, jurors claimed the holdout was not following the law on reasonable doubt.

Defense tried twice to force the holdout off the panel

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington moved aggressively to remove the dissenting juror. He asked Judge Sullivan to either replace or interrogate the holdout, arguing the juror refused to follow the court's instructions. Sullivan declined. The judge told the courtroom he would not take sides in a split deliberation.

"I don't feel it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations. I don't feel it's appropriate for me to say, I agree with one juror or the 11."

In an unusual moment, Clancy herself, paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair, was brought to a sidebar with the judge for the first time during the trial. Reddington told reporters afterward: "She has a right to know what's going on."

When Sullivan moved toward declaring a mistrial, Reddington escalated further. He filed an emergency appeal with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, seeking to stay the mistrial and force additional inquiry into the holdout juror's conduct. The state's highest court denied the request, and the mistrial stood.

The prosecution had a different read on the holdout. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague argued during the trial that Clancy made deliberate choices the night of the killings. "A puppet can't do those things," Sprague said in closing arguments. "Those are decisions and choices and actions that she's controlling." Prosecutors also argued that the holdout juror's stance simply reflected a disagreement about how to weigh the evidence, not misconduct.

From "guilty" to "gray area", one juror's shift

Juror No. 5 admitted she walked into deliberations leaning toward conviction.

"Originally I felt as though she is guilty and she is criminally responsible for it."

But she said her view evolved as the jury worked through the evidence, or, more precisely, the absence of it.

"The prosecution didn't have a figurative smoking gun. There was not a single moment throughout the presentation of that case where you could say 'Yup, 100% I'm certain she did it' or that she didn't do it. There was too much gray area."

By the end, she said, she came to see Clancy as someone in the grip of a severe mental health crisis. "This was a woman who, you know she was not mentally healthy. She was someone that was in the throes of a significant mental health crisis," the juror said. She added that doubt overwhelmed her initial certainty: "At the end of the day, there was so much doubt."

Her final framing was striking. She said she ultimately believed the path to justice for the three children, and for their father, Patrick Clancy, ran through treatment, not prison.

"Eventually I just felt like the only way to get justice for Cora, Dawson and Callan, and Patrick and her parents and anyone else that was close to this was to get her the help that she desperately needed, and there's no way she's getting that help in prison."

That reasoning may sit uneasily with many who followed the case. Three children are dead. The facts of what happened in that Duxbury home are not in dispute. The only question at trial was whether Clancy's mental state, the defense argued she suffered from postpartum psychosis, made her not criminally responsible for the killings. Eleven jurors apparently concluded it did. One disagreed. And the system held: a unanimous verdict is the law, and the judge refused to override that principle by removing the dissenter.

Patrick Clancy faces the prospect of a second trial

The mistrial leaves the case in limbo. Patrick Clancy's attorney, David Meier, said the possibility of reliving the ordeal is agonizing. "The prospect of reliving this tragedy through another trial is extraordinarily painful, for Patrick, for his family, and for all us," Meier said.

Judge Sullivan has indicated he wants any retrial to happen "sooner rather than later." Clancy's next hearing is scheduled for September 29. She remains at Tewksbury Hospital, a state-run psychiatric facility in Massachusetts. Whether prosecutors will pursue a second trial has not been announced.

High-profile criminal cases that hinge on dramatic courtroom decisions, such as the recent ruling to keep the death penalty on the table in the Tyler Robinson case, often test the boundaries of judicial process. The Clancy case tested a different boundary: whether a single juror's refusal to agree with eleven others is an act of obstruction or the system working exactly as designed.

The defense's push to remove the holdout raised pointed questions about jury integrity. Reddington wanted the court to intervene on behalf of the majority. Sullivan said no. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court said no. Juror No. 5 now says the holdout wasn't even the most rigid person in the room, just the most outnumbered.

That distinction matters. A jury system that protects the majority's conclusion by removing the minority's voice is no jury system at all. Sullivan understood that. Whether the next jury reaches a verdict, and whether that verdict satisfies a public that watched a mother admit to killing her three children, is a question only a second trial can answer.

Three children are still dead, and no amount of deliberation changes that. The system owes their memory a verdict, not an endless loop of mistrials and excuses.