A juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has offered new details about the lone holdout whose vote led to a mistrial.
Paula Devlin, one of the 12 jurors, described the dissenting juror as a “quiet” man who often watched videos on his phone and spoke with his wife, she told the Daily Mail in an interview published Sept. 11.
“The main thing he focused on is sometimes we would all want to talk at once, and that was very upsetting to him,” Devlin told the outlet. “He would get upset and say, ‘Listen to what she’s saying, listen to what he’s saying, be respectful.’”
According to Devlin, other jurors challenged his concerns about the group’s discussions.
“We were trying to say to him that sometimes somebody says something and they get lost in their thought or they can’t find the right word, and somebody else puts that word in there for them or finishes their thought,” she added. “That’s how normal conversation works.”
“But when that would happen,” Devlin continued, “he would get upset and just take all this time lecturing us about not being respectful.”
Clancy admitted to strangling her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan — in January 2023. Her attorney argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, while prosecutors maintained that the killings were intentional.
The jury deliberated for seven days and reported being deadlocked three times. “He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” foreperson Roni Carlson told NBC10 on Sept. 9. Carlson said the holdout then added, “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Devlin said jurors understood that disagreement was permitted, but said the panel struggled to understand the holdout’s reasoning.
“We asked the lone juror, what are the things that are making you think that she’s guilty, and we asked him, and he didn’t want to write on the board,” she recalled. “He didn’t say a word, and so one of the jurors jumped up and said, ‘I’ll write for you,’ and then he said the things that he said, and then we talked about each one of those things.”
One of his concerns, Devlin said, was the amount of blood in Clancy’s home. Her attorney argued that, after the killings, she cut her neck and wrists before jumping out the window in a suicide attempt.
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“He thought there was too much blood in the bedroom,” Devlin said. “We had lots of testimony around the blood. We had a blood expert that was very compelling and she was really good at how she described it to us.”
“He said that he thought there was too much blood for the wounds that she had,” she added. “We all asked him what he meant by that, because we heard experts talk about the blood spatter and explain to us how it all was what it was supposed to be.”
Devlin said jurors were puzzled by the man’s alleged fixation on the subject.
“I feel that he didn’t make any sense,” she told the outlet. “I feel like if he could have pointed to one specific thing to show us, to back up what he was thinking or why he was thinking it, then all of us would have a different feeling.”
Devlin acknowledged how jurors could draw different conclusions from evidence: “That’s part of the process. It’s okay to disagree.”
The man went wrong, Devlin said, by allegedly refusing to apply reasonable doubt to his vote.
“If you say you have doubt, then you have to follow the law,” Devlin said. “And if you don’t follow the law, that’s not right. Can I say whether he understood that or not? I don’t know, because we didn’t have him explain it back to us.”
“We felt defeated,” she said. “And I can’t lie, there was definitely anger.”
On the day of the mistrial, Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington weighed in on the outcome.
“I don’t know, I don’t know the man,” Reddington told reporters. “I don’t know what his background, his feelings are. I don’t know. I mean, our jury system, we like to say that people have a right to have their opinions and stand by their beliefs. I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem where 11 hardworking jurors after all of those days of deliberation in a seven-week trial say that this man had doubt but still would not apply the law.”