It had looked like the end of deliberations in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy.
Eleven of twelve jurors had agreed not to convict Ms. Clancy. Then the one holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” the jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said in an interview with the television station NBC10 in Boston on Tuesday.
According to the judge’s instructions, if jurors had considered all the evidence but still had reasonable doubt about the charges against Ms. Clancy, they had to acquit her.
So Ms. Carlson, a retired teacher, started to fill out the three verdict forms, she said in the interview. She got as far as writing her signature on each sheet. But then, Ms. Carlson recalled, the holdout juror said, “I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
In the first public statements by jurors since the monthlong trial, Ms. Carlson and two other jurors opened up about the grueling week of deliberations in which the jury of nine women and three men were deadlocked, prompting Judge William Sullivan to declare a mistrial.
Ms. Clancy has not denied that she strangled her children — Cora, Dawson and Callan — at their Massachusetts home in 2023. Instead, her trial in Plymouth, Mass., was over whether she should be held criminally responsible for their deaths.
Her lawyer argued that she had suffered from postpartum psychosis when she strangled her children with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. The prosecution disputed the severity of her condition and said Ms. Clancy had planned to kill her children before attempting to die by suicide.
The three jurors said in a group interview with the station that they believed the evidence showed that Ms. Clancy clearly loved her children and repeatedly sought help for her mental health struggles.
“Everything proved that she loved her children, so she had to have snapped,” Ms. Carlson said in the interview.
The juror who disagreed with the other 11 does not yet appear to have been publicly identified or interviewed.
One of the three jurors interviewed, Kellie Farina, a chef for a senior center, told NBC10 Boston that the holdout juror “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
The third juror interviewed, Paula Devlin, who works for a defense contractor, said that the holdout “completely disregarded” information that nurses on the jury provided to help interpret medical reports from the hospital where Ms. Clancy stayed after she killed her children.
The jurors said that the testimony and evidence presented at the trial were brutal at times. Ms. Farina described the 911 call made by Patrick Clancy, Ms. Clancy’s then husband, the night the children were killed as “horrific.”
“When we heard it again in the jury room, we were crying again,” she said.
The jurors were critical of the prosecution, with Ms. Farina describing it as “harsh,” in comparison to the defense’s style, which she described as “compassionate.”
Ms. Farina said the prosecution presented a lot of medical experts but no witnesses that said Ms. Clancy was a bad mother, a factor that weighed heavily with the three women.
The jurors said that Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, was arrogant, but they also found him compassionate and occasionally entertaining.
The case has deeply divided Americans, with some supporting the prosecution and others — especially women who report negative experiences with the postpartum mental health care system — expressing sympathy for Ms. Clancy.
Ms. Clancy, who was paralyzed from the waist down after her suicide attempt, is currently being held at Tewksbury Hospital, a state-run psychiatric facility.
Prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will retry the case.
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