Lindsay Clancy's murder trial ended in a mistrial after 38 hours of deadlock.
One juror on that panel refused to change his mind no matter how long the others pushed.
Another juror on the panel just explained exactly why that holdout would not move.
The Juror Who Defended the Holdout Said It Came Down to Conviction
Juror No. 5 was one of nine women on the 12-person panel in Plymouth Superior Court, and she spoke to CBS News on the condition of anonymity.
She said other jurors tried for hours to change the holdout's vote, even though he had reportedly "admitted he had reasonable doubt."
He still would not say Lindsay Clancy was not guilty.
"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," she 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."
"There was too much gray area," she added.
Judge William Sullivan declared the mistrial on September 4 after jurors said they were deadlocked.
Jurors who have spoken publicly describe an 11 to 1 split favoring not guilty by reason of insanity, though the court has not confirmed that breakdown.
Another Juror From the Trial Described How the Holdout Made His Doubt Physical
Nick Dargie, 25, sat on the same panel as Juror No. 10, and he told ABC's Good Morning America what the deliberation room actually looked like.
Dargie said the still-unnamed holdout wrapped an exercise band, the same kind used on the children, around a water bottle to show the other jurors exactly what he meant.
"There's nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion," Dargie said. "That would be a hung jury. That is our justice system."
Dargie said several jurors leaned toward guilty at first, but he ended up finding the prosecution's case inconsistent and the defense's experts more believable.
Nobody in that room ever disputed that Clancy killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
The entire fight was over whether postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate that what she was doing was wrong.
Judge Sullivan told jurors a defendant is not criminally responsible if mental illness leaves her lacking "the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law."
He also told them mental illness alone does not erase criminal responsibility.
Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, has already gone further than the courtroom.
He asked President Trump on Good Morning America to pardon Clancy, a request that means nothing, since a president cannot pardon a state murder charge.
Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not said whether he will retry the case, only that his team will "address this case further at the appropriate time."
Reddington says he is preparing for a retrial this fall.
The Insanity Defense Already Cleared Mothers Like Andrea Yates Before Clancy
This is not the first time a jury has had to weigh a mother's diagnosis against her children's bodies.
A Bronx judge cleared Dimone Fleming of murder just weeks before Clancy's trial even began, ruling that postpartum psychosis excused her for stabbing and drowning her two sons, ages 3 and 11 months, back in 2022.
Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub outside Houston in 2001, and a jury convicted her before an appeals court threw the verdict out.
A second jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006, and she has lived in a state psychiatric hospital ever since.
The insanity defense shows up in fewer than one out of every thousand felony cases, according to legal experts who study it.
Neither Yates nor Fleming walked out of a courtroom and back into a normal life. Both walked into a psychiatric hospital instead.
The sympathy that built around Yates over those five years is already building around Clancy in real time, right down to the same medications and the same undiagnosed instability that got missed.
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 made a harder argument: decades of abortion advocacy taught this culture to center a mother's pain over a child's death, and that habit now makes it nearly impossible to just say killing children is wrong, sick mother or not.
"An individual can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible," Batura wrote.
Abby Johnson, who leads And Then There Were None and has survived postpartum psychosis herself, put it more bluntly.
"Mental illness may affect a person's culpability for an act," Johnson said. "It does not change the moral nature of the act itself. Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them."
One juror in Plymouth County still remembered that when eleven others wanted to move on.
Sources:
- Steven Ertelt, "Anonymous Lindsay Clancy Juror Defends Holdout, He Stood on 'Convictions,'" LifeNews.com, September 10, 2026.
- "Before Lindsay Clancy, a Houston Mother's Case Questioned How We View Postpartum Mental Health," Texas Monthly.
- "Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity," Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute.
- "Lindsay Clancy Trial Ends in Mistrial With No Verdict. What Happens Next?" CBS News, September 2026.
- "Bronx Mother Found Not Responsible for Killing Her Two Boys Because of 'Postpartum Psychosis,'" Breitbart, August 29, 2026.
- "Lindsay Clancy Used the 'Insanity Defense.' How Often Is It Successful?" NPR, September 6, 2026.
