The lone holdout juror who led Lindsay Clancy’s trial to end with a hung jury didn’t provide a “single piece of evidence” supporting his vote that she was guilty of murdering her three young children, according to a fellow juror.
“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 “ultimately sent in that note,” to Judge William Sullivan on Friday advising of their deadlocked position following 38 hours of deliberations because the holdout juror wasn’t able to provide a shred of evidence to support his opposing stance.
That note ultimately prompted Sullivan to declare a mistrial after seven days of 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, who was one of only three male jurors on the 12-person panel, said he came into the trial blind as he was serving in the military when Clancy strangled her three children — Dawson, 3, Cora, 5, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands at their Duxbury, Mass. home on Jan. 24, 2023.
Throughout the grueling week-long deliberations, he said he asked the holdout juror to provide evidence that supported his stubborn position — but claimed he 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 out, 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.
