Four days after a mistrial was declared in the Lindsay Clancy case, three jurors explained in their first media interview why they wanted to acquit her of murder charges.
“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did, and she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out, ‘Did she know right from wrong at that time?’” juror Roni Carlson, a former elementary school teacher, told NBC10 Boston reporter Sue O’Connell on Tuesday.
“ … From her journals to her mother-in-law, everything proved that she loved her children. So she had to have snapped and not known what she was doing.”
Clancy, 36, was tried on three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months. On Friday, Plymouth County Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial after 38 hours of jury deliberations over seven days.
During the trial, which began July 20, the defense did not contest that, on Jan. 24, 2023, Clancy strangled her children in her Duxbury home, then attempted suicide. Instead, the defense argued that she was not guilty by reason of insanity because postpartum psychosis had left her unable to control her behavior and incapable of understanding that the killings were criminal or immoral.
Plymouth County prosecutors claimed that Clancy planned the killings and “left [her children] discarded on the basement floor like broken toys because she was done playing the game.”
What impacted the jurors’ decisions
All three jurors interviewed by O’Connell criticized the way prosecutors made their case, describing them as “harsh,” “cold” and “without a heart.”
“We didn’t find any compassion in the prosecution. I mean, I know it’s their job, but in a case like this, you expect a little bit,” said juror Kellie Farina, a chef at a Plymouth County senior center.
Farina said that the absence of any character witnesses to testify to Clancy “being a bad mother” and the prosecution’s reliance on testimony from medical professionals also impacted her decision.
“I honestly feel like the prosecution did themselves more damage than good by just not thinking about Lindsay. The whole picture, not just postpartum depression, not just delusion, not just the boys, but the meds, the whole cocktail of her mental health, these doctors that are prescribing this and prescribing that, and they’re taking her off this, and none of them communicated with each other,” she said.
Meanwhile, Farina felt that Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, “shot from the heart,” bringing in witnesses who knew and loved Clancy.
“We appreciated the fact that he didn’t just delay and drag it on with a bunch of more medical BS and got more to the point of really who Lindsay is and what her life was like,” she said.
Juror Paula Devlin told O’Connell she agreed with Farina and Carlson, though she also found Reddington to be “arrogant, but entertaining.”
Devlin added that the testimony of Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychologist, regarding “altruistic filicide” was a major factor in convincing her to side with the defense.
During the trial, Resnick testified that Clancy was under the delusion that if she was separated from her children by social services or suicide, her children would suffer so greatly that they would be better off dying with her.
“It doesn’t need to be a diagnosis, but just to have somebody that is in that deep of a depression, that thinks that that’s the only way that they’re gonna be able to get out of it,” she said.
According to O’Connell, the jurors said three members of the jury who were undecided were swayed to acquit Clancy during deliberations, but one refused to budge. Devlin, Carlson and Farina were concerned that the holdout juror was not following the jury instructions, O’Connell said.
As of Tuesday, Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not said whether he plans to retry Clancy.
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Susannah Sudborough; masslive.com; (TNS) || ©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit masslive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
