The end of Lindsay Clancy’s heavily scrutinised murder trial seemed, at last, to be within reach. Following nearly 40 hours of deliberations, and two separate reports that the jury was at an impasse, the long-awaited verdict was eagerly anticipated.
Eleven jurors had voted not to convict Clancy, who maintained that she had been in the throes of postpartum psychosis when she killed her three children. One juror, however, remained unmoved.
The jury foreperson had written to Judge William Sullivan to say that this holdout juror was refusing to follow the court’s instructions on the standard required to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
However, with the deadlock unbroken, Sullivan ultimately declared a mistrial. And so, a trial that has deeply infiltrated the public consciousness — igniting a plethora of wild conspiracy theories while also spotlighting the poor understanding of postpartum mental illness and the burdens of motherhood — ended without a verdict.
Now, for the first time, three members of the jury have spoken publicly about what unfolded while they were sequestered for deliberations.
Roni Carlson, a former elementary school teacher who served as the jury’s foreperson, told NBC10Boston that the holdout juror acknowledged that he had reasonable doubt.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” Carlson said. Then, she said, he added: “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
The other jurors interviewed by NBC10Boston were Kellie Farina, a senior centre chef, and Paula Devlin, who works for a defence contractor. The three women described deliberations that grew increasingly fractious as the hours wore on, with arguments loud enough, they said, that the six alternate jurors could hear them from another room.
Devlin said she found the juror “very arrogant,” while Farina recalled members of the panel pacing the room when they could no longer sit still, gathering around the cart where the trial exhibits were kept and revisiting the material they had spent weeks absorbing. The holdout, she said, largely remained apart from them.
“I’m not sure if rogue is the right word,” Farina said. “But every one of us in the hours of our frustration would get up and walk the room because you just couldn’t sit anymore. And we would all go to the cart with the exhibits. He, I think, got up to the cart once very briefly and went back to his seat. He would not interact with us.”
For the three women, however, the evidence repeatedly pointed to Clancy being a loving mother.
“Everything proved she loved her children, from her journals to her mother-in-law, everything proved that she loved her children,” Carlson said.
“So she had to have snapped and not known what she was doing.”
It was ultimately that question, not simply what Clancy did, but what was happening inside her mind when she did it, that lay at the heart of the trial.
Following the mistrial, a status conference was scheduled for 9am ET (or 11pm AEST) on September 29. At that hearing, prosecutors could reveal whether they intend to pursue a retrial with a new jury.
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