Last Friday, as the jurors in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial filed into a Massachusetts courtroom one last time, rapt followers of the case knew the outcome would come down to a lone holdout who had either held firm or joined the majority at the last minute.
With the news that the jury was still deadlocked 11-1, and the judge’s declaration of a mistrial, the reaction from Americans was — like the jury itself — fiercely and unbridgeably divided.
The holdout was a hero. Or he was a pariah.
In a country mired in political discord, it was no surprise that people disagreed on what the verdict should be for Ms. Clancy, 36, who admitted to strangling her three children in 2023 while experiencing severe mental illness.
Her supporters around the country, and nearly all of the jury, concluded that Ms. Clancy had been too sick to understand her conduct was criminal on the night she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, and should be found not guilty — and confined in a psychiatric hospital indefinitely — as a result. Another faction believed that Ms. Clancy should be held criminally responsible for her horrific acts, despite her mental heath crisis, and should spend the rest of her life in prison.
To them, the anonymous juror who cast the only vote for her conviction — who has not been identified or spoken publicly — acted with inspiring moral courage, resisting mounting pressure to conform during nearly 40 hours of deliberations. One commenter on Facebook described the holdout as saving the souls of his fellow jurors by forcing a mistrial.
But to many who had hoped for Ms. Clancy’s acquittal, empathizing with her unsuccessful efforts to find effective mental health care in the months before the killings, the holdout juror embodied society’s lack of compassion, particularly toward people with mental health struggles and postpartum mothers.
Several jurors have said in interviews this week that the holdout did not follow the judge’s instructions, or the law, in reaching his decision, and stood by his vote even after acknowledging he had reasonable doubt about Ms. Clancy’s guilt.
Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, on Thursday filed a motion for the mistrial to be thrown out and for Ms. Clancy to be acquitted.
The subtext of the conflict has at times been explicitly political, with some admirers of the holdout juror quick to presume that the 11 others were bleeding-heart liberals giving a pass to a killer they mistook for a victim. Gender, too, played a role: Some women who supported Ms. Clancy saw the holdout as yet another man unwilling to listen to, or believe, a woman in crisis, while one widely shared social media post said the nine women jurors had “traded justice for feelings,” casting aside the evidence and letting their emotions guide them.
The jurors had barely left the courthouse last Friday when attacks on both sides turned personal.
“I hope that guy can sleep well at night,” Mr. Reddington said of the holdout at a news conference. “Whatever his agenda was, he stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.”
“They were robbed by one man,” he added.
The holdout, one of three men on the jury, has not come forward to shed light on how he decided Ms. Clancy was criminally responsible for her children’s deaths. But several other jurors have offered public critiques. One described him as “arrogant.” Two said he scrolled on his cellphone at times instead of discussing the case, and was unwilling or unable to cite evidence to back up his opinion.
Nick Dargie, one of the other two male jurors, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he was shocked, and found it “disgusting,” when the holdout juror picked up one of the exercise bands that Ms. Clancy used to strangle her children and tied it around an empty water bottle.
“It’s not a game of Clue,” Mr. Dargie said. “It’s serious.”
The day before they deadlocked for good, jurors sent a note to Judge William Sullivan complaining about the juror, who they said had acknowledged having reasonable doubt about Ms. Clancy’s criminal responsibility, but refused to change his vote to not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge quizzed each juror individually to assess their understanding of reasonable doubt but did not conduct a deeper inquiry, as requested by Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, into the holdout juror’s conduct.
As critics demonized the holdout after the mistrial, others reposted memes on social media depicting him as a guardian angel protecting the Clancy children from injustice.
The impassioned reaction to the holdout reflects the rarity of such scenarios, experts said. Hung juries are infrequent, occurring in some 5 to 7 percent of criminal cases, but deadlocks caused by a single dissenter are even rarer.
“A lone holdout almost always folds,” said Michael Asimow, professor emeritus of law at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It’s very hard to resist the social pressure of 11 jurors.”
Valerie Hans, a psychologist and legal scholar at Cornell University, said her research into hung juries, based on surveys of jurors in 400 trials, found that holdouts are much more commonly in favor of acquittal than conviction, making the Clancy juror even more unusual.
Dissenters who favor conviction tend to think that they understand the testimony of experts better than their peers, Dr. Hans said. And a juror who causes a hung jury typically does not start out as a lone voice. “They usually had help, an ally, at the beginning,” she said — an early psychological boost that seems to strengthen their grip on their position for the long haul.
That finding matches what jurors in the Clancy trial have said about the jury’s evolution, from a group with more mixed opinions to their final 11-1 split.
Contrary to expectations, Professor Hans’s research did not find common traits that holdout jurors shared: Their race, gender and education did not predict their likelihood of dissent.
“There’s no clear demographic pattern, which was a surprise to us,” she said.
Regardless of one’s view of Ms. Clancy’s guilt, the idea of a lone holdout resonates, Professor Asimow said, invoking the challenge and discomfort of standing alone. The intensity of that experience, and the way it contrasts with our instinctive preference for consensus, helps explain the enduring appeal of the classic movie “12 Angry Men,” he said.
Released in 1957, it stars Henry Fonda as a lone holdout juror who resists his colleagues’ rush to judgment in a murder trial and insists on a methodical review of evidence, eventually turning the tide from conviction to acquittal.
Regardless of what went on in the jury room in Plymouth, Mass., the caustic criticism of the jurors poses risk.
“People will do almost anything to avoid being on a jury,” Professor Asimow said of the public’s willingness to serve. “If anything, this is going to make them less likely.”
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