The only juror who refused to find Lindsay Clancy not criminally responsible for strangling her three young children was a Black man in his 30s and the sole non-white person on an otherwise all-white panel, a fellow juror said Friday.
Paula Devlin, who sided with the 11-member majority that favored not holding Lindsay Clancy accountable for strangling her own children to death responsible, told “CBS Mornings” co-host Gayle King that the jury ranged in age from 22 to “70-ish.”
“One person of color, and then everybody else was white,” Devlin said.
HELP LIFENEWS SAVE BABIES FROM ABORTION! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation!
Asked whether that juror was the holdout, she said yes.
“A black man is the holdout juror?” King asked. Devlin confirmed it.
“Whoa. I have to sit with that for just a second,” King said.
The exchange came a week after Superior Court Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the first-degree murder case. Jurors had deliberated more than seven days and repeatedly told the court they were deadlocked 11-1. The majority said they were prepared to find Clancy not responsible for the January 2023 killings of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan at the family’s home in Duxbury. The holdout, according to those jurors, would not join them.
Clancy has not denied using exercise bands to strangle the children in the basement while her husband was out picking up food.
Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead that night. Callan was flown to Boston Children’s Hospital and died three days later.
Clancy then cut herself and jumped from a second-story window.
Her lawyers argued she was overmedicated and in the grip of postpartum psychosis and therefore lacked criminal responsibility. Prosecutors said she planned the killings, got her husband out of the house, and knew right from wrong.
The holdout has not spoken publicly. Other jurors have.
Foreman Roni Carlson told NBC10 Boston that the man at one point “admitted he had reasonable doubt.”
“I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” she said. “There were three forms I had to fill out, and I started filling them out. I wrote my signature on each one. And then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”
Juror Kellie Farina said the holdout “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
Devlin, in the earlier NBC interview, called him “very arrogant” and said, “He really did not take anything that anybody said.”
On CBS, Devlin said the panel spent days trying to move him.
She also said the two jurors who initially voted guilty “felt attacked,” adding, “There is no way to not do that.”
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington has asked the court to set aside the mistrial and enter an acquittal, arguing the holdout refused to apply the judge’s instruction on reasonable doubt. Reddington told reporters after the mistrial that the other jurors “were robbed by one man, for whatever his agenda was.”
Sullivan declined to remove the juror during deliberations, saying it was not appropriate “to agree with one juror or 11.”
The Plymouth County district attorney has not said whether Clancy will be tried again. A status hearing is set for Sept. 29.
Pro-life writers have called that reaction a moral inversion: compassion for a mother who killed her children, with far less public focus on Cora, Dawson and Callan themselves.
Journalist Caitlin Flanagan wrote that “what began as admirable compassion for a woman who says she was driven by mental illness to commit the world’s greatest form of evil has turned into something strange: an almost exultant, fan-like celebration of Lindsay Clancy.”
Paul Batura of Focus on the Family argued that a culture already trained to treat a child’s death as secondary to a mother’s distress — first in abortion, then in cases like this one — struggles to say plainly that killing children is wrong even when the mother is ill. Postpartum mental illness is real, he wrote, but “an individual can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible.”
Abby Johnson, CEO and founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries, who herself experienced postpartum psychosis after the birth of one of her children, said the intense identification with Clancy reveals a deeper moral distortion long cultivated by abortion advocacy.
“I am not arguing that compassion for Lindsay is wrong…What concerns me is something different. We have become extraordinarily practiced at looking at a dead child and asking first what his or her mother was going through. And abortion taught us how to do that. For decades, the defense of abortion has depended on shifting the moral center of the story away from the human being who dies and toward the human being experiencing the crisis. The mother’s suffering becomes the justification. But suffering does not make killing good,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson stressed that mental illness may affect legal culpability without changing the moral nature of the act.
“Mental illness may affect a person’s culpability for an act. It does not change the moral nature of the act itself,” she said. “Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them.”
Johnson argued that culture has spent more than 50 years training itself to begin with a mother’s fear, financial stress, lack of support or depression until the child’s humanity nearly disappears—first in abortion and now in cases like this one.
“We can demand better postpartum mental-health care in their names. We can acknowledge that their mother may have been gravely ill. We can pray for Lindsay,” Johnson wrote. “None of that requires us to forget where the greatest irreversible harm occurred. Three children went to bed on January 24, 2023, in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never get to grow up.”
Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot be allowed to become peripheral to their own story.
