‘He couldn’t get over the fact that Clancy viciously killed her children.”
Those are the words of one of the insufferably condescending female jurors from the Lindsay Clancy mistrial who have gone public with their disdain for the lone male juror who refused to go along with their not guilty verdict.
Good for him.
The children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, have been the forgotten victims in this case.
The Massachusetts nurse does not dispute that she strangled her children one by one on Jan. 24, 2023, with exercise bands around their necks after she sent her husband, Patrick, out on an errand.
Patrick returned to his kids dead and his wife bleeding on the snow-covered yard after she cut her wrists and throat and leaped out a bedroom window 12 feet above the ground, rendering herself paralyzed from the waist down. Rather than accepting blame, Lindsay, 36, pleaded not guilty, claiming she could not tell right from wrong at the time because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, even though evidence for that was thin.
Withstood pressure
A mistrial was called last Friday because the jury of nine women and three men could not agree on a verdict after more than seven days of deliberations so contentious that yelling reportedly could be heard outside the room.
Now that several of the jurors have come out and exposed themselves, we can see the immense pressure that the lone holdout juror was under day after day in that jury room, being harangued and browbeaten by women infuriated that he refused to be persuaded by their self-proclaimed superior wisdom.
Jury forewoman Roni Carlson, a former elementary school teacher, Kellie Farina, a chef for a senior center, and Paula Devlin, who does work for a defense contractor, were interviewed on camera by NBC10 Boston, and it’s hard to imagine a more smug group lacking in self-awareness or any humility. They revealed that there were a number of nurses and teachers on the jury.
“He was very arrogant,” Devlin said of the holdout. “He did not take anything that anybody said.”
She complained there were multiple nurses on the jury who took it on themselves to explain the toxicology reports to the holdout juror.
“He tried to ask a question about the medications,” said Devlin. “We had the toxicology report. We could see exactly the amounts. The nurses in the room spoke to that. And talked to that.
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“And they spoke to that . . . And he just completely disregarded the information that they gave him.” As was his right.
Carlson, the forewoman, said she thought they’d won the argument at one point. “He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited . . . And then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’ ”
As was his right.
Another woman, Juror No. 5, spoke to CBS Boston anonymously in defense of the holdout:
“The majority of people . . . was very firm in their stance and their beliefs from the beginning . . . The standalone juror was not the only one who refused to see things from the other side so I’m going to defend [him]. There were some big personalities in that room.”
Originally, she thought Lindsay” was guilty and she was criminally responsible for it, and maybe I still believe that in a certain way.” Several other jurors reportedly felt the same way but over time were persuaded to find Lindsay not guilty — all but the holdout.
Lawyer’s big show
The outspoken female jurors absolutely loved Lindsay’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, and gushed about how “entertaining” and “compassionate” he was. In their minds he had proved that Lindsay was not a bad mother and she “loved her children” and that was all that mattered.
Yet Reddington behaved like an emotional bully, inside and outside the court, especially when he put a target on the holdout juror, whom he blamed for the mistrial in an extended public tantrum outside the court on Friday.
“I hope that guy can sleep well at night,” Reddington said. In court he called the same juror a “liar” and said he “stole seven weeks of the life” of the other jurors,” which is rich considering that in the entire seven-week trial Reddington barely mentioned the three entire lives stolen from the Clancy children by his client.
Reddington also fueled false internet rumors that Patrick was involved in the killing of his own children by refusing to exonerate him when asked and instead praising the TikTok sleuths who have damned Patrick.
“I certainly don’t dismiss them. It’s amazing what people on TikTok . . . how they’re able to ferret out facts and they do investigations.”
Reddington must have realized he went too far because this week he appeared on “CBS Mornings” and recanted, saying, “It’s obvious that Patrick was a man who stood by his wife through all of the difficulty. [He] ought to be able to move on with his life.”
Despite Reddington’s flaws, the outspoken female jurors preferred him to prosecutors Jennifer Sprague and Shanan Buckingham, whom they criticized as lacking “compassion” and being “unprofessional.”
For the children
The prosecutors were entirely professional. Did Carlson and pals disdain them because of their plump appearance, because they don’t have time to go to Pilates every morning?
Sprague and Buckingham have 50 years of prosecutorial experience between them and children of their own, earning modest salaries for draining work in child protection cases. They did their best, although their speedy four-day jury selection leaves something to be desired.
Their boss, District Attorney Tim Cruz, who has been protecting the 500,000 residents of Plymouth County for the past 25 years, was heckled relentlessly outside the court Friday.
The son of a plumber with children and grandchildren of his own, he is the longest serving DA in Massachusetts, even though he is a Republican in a Democrat-majority area.
Plymouth has street signs declaring it “America’s Hometown,” since it is where the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 and founded the first permanent European settlement in New England. The affluent, predominantly white town, which voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by almost 10 points in 2024, also adopted the slogan “No Place for Hate.”
Officials abandoned that name last year, but it still appears on some signs around town.
In spite of the heckling, Cruz spoke with understated dignity, saying: “I understand that this has been an emotional trial for everybody . . . But in the end I bring it all back to the child victims in this case, Cora, Dawson, and Callan . . .
“Children were murdered, and it’s our job to seek justice.”
Justice is important, regardless of feelings. The trial was not just about Lindsay and her tragedy. It was about the children and precedents set for child murder. Already there are reports of at least one copycat murder.
For the sake of all the other children yet to be born, we cannot afford to become a society that normalizes mothers killing their babies.
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