The juror whose lone dissent left Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial unresolved offered no “single piece of evidence” to back up his belief that she was guilty of killing her three young children, another member of the panel said.
“There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was,” juror Nick Dargie told ABC News during an interview Wednesday.
Dargie, 25, said the jury eventually submitted a note to Judge William Sullivan on Friday saying they were deadlocked after 38 hours of deliberations, explaining that the holdout juror could not point to any evidence supporting his opposing view.
The message led Sullivan to declare a mistrial, bringing the proceedings to an abrupt end after seven days of jury deliberations and five weeks of testimony in the closely watched Lindsay Clancy trial.
“Otherwise, like there’s nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion … that would be a hung jury. That, like that, is our justice system,” Dargie added.
Dargie, who was one of only three male jurors on the 12-person panel, said he came into the trial blind as he was serving in the military when Clancy strangled her three children — Dawson, 3, Cora, 5, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands at their Duxbury, Mass. home on Jan. 24, 2023.
Throughout the grueling week-long deliberations, he said he asked the holdout juror to provide evidence that supported his stubborn position — but claimed he never did.
ALSO READ: Asian Stocks Slide as Oil Prices Hold Above $100 a Barrel
“There was several times I would ask him to show us evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying, and … he couldn’t,” Dargie, the fifth juror to speak out, told the outlet.
A total of three notes were sent to the judge throughout the deliberations detailing the panel’s deadlocked 11-1 position.
From the start of deliberations, a majority of the panel — which was composed of nine women and three men — attempted to convince the holdout juror to change his vote, according to juror No. 5 who spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity.
The stand-alone juror, who has been called “arrogant” by fellow panelists, “admitted he had reasonable doubt” but refused to say Clancy was not guilty by reason of insanity, foreperson Roni Carlson told NBC10 Boston Tuesday.
“The stand-alone juror was not the only one that was unwilling to see things from the other side. So, I’m going to kind of defend that individual in a sense,” juror No. 5 said.
“There were some big personalities in that room. But at the end of the day, I feel like it just came down to an inability to kind of move past your convictions,” the anonymous panelist added.
The jury ultimately yielded an 11-1 split in favor of finding Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity — siding with the defense’s argument that the mom was suffering from postpartum psychosis and could not be held criminally responsible for the killings.
Clancy, 36, remains in state-run psychiatric facility, Tewksbury Hospital. Her next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 29.