Three of the jurors who could not agree about Lindsay Clancy went on television on Tuesday and described what happened in that room. They used their names. The man they were describing could not answer, because his name is still sealed by court order.
Paula Devlin, Roni Carlson and Kellie Farina sat down with NBC10 Boston, in an interview conducted by Sue O’Connell and Asher Klein and picked up nationally by NBC News. One of the three is the jury’s foreperson.
What they said is the clearest account anyone has of the seven days that ended in a mistrial. It is also, almost certainly, testimony they could never have given in a courtroom.
What the foreperson described
The account turns on a single moment near the end.
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson said.
Then, she said, the holdout added: “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
That is the whole case in two sentences. A juror who conceded he had a reasonable doubt, and who would not convert that doubt into the verdict the law says it produces.
The three described him as someone who would not listen to the rest of the panel. They said the arguments got loud enough that the six alternate jurors, sitting elsewhere, could hear them and assumed the jury was fighting. They said they were determined to reach a verdict.
They did not. The jury split eleven to one, with the eleven prepared to find Clancy not criminally responsible, and Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on 4 September.
One note on terminology, because it matters to how the verdict form actually reads. In Massachusetts the finding is not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, not “insanity.” The foreperson used the common phrase. The distinction is legal rather than moral, and nothing turns on her using the everyday version of it.
This confirms what Reddington told the judge, and it would still not have mattered
Here is the part worth sitting with.
During deliberations, Kevin Reddington asked Sullivan to remove that juror. His argument was that the man had acknowledged doubt but would not apply the reasonable doubt standard as the judge had given it. Reddington put it bluntly at the time, saying the juror had stood in front of the judge, looked him in the eye, and lied.
The foreperson has now said publicly, in her own words, something very close to the factual premise of that motion.
And it still would not have changed the ruling.
Massachusetts confines juror removal to personal reasons unrelated to the case. As the legal outlet JURIST put it in its analysis of the mistrial, if a foreperson’s report that a dissenting juror was applying reasonable doubt incorrectly were enough to remove him, it would become impossible to tell misconduct apart from disagreement. Sullivan could not determine from the notes whether the dissenter had misunderstood the standard or the majority had.
That is not a technicality. It is the mechanism that makes a holdout possible at all. A rule that let eleven jurors report the twelfth for reasoning badly would end the hung jury as a category.
The rule they did not break, and why it nearly applied
There is a Massachusetts rule that would normally shut this conversation down, and understanding why it does not apply here is the useful part.
A juror may not testify about any matter or statement concerning the validity of a verdict if it occurred during deliberations, or about anything influencing a juror’s mind or concerning a juror’s mental processes. That comes from Commonwealth v. Tavares, 385 Mass. 140 (1982), tracking the rule at Mass. G. Evid. 606(b). Its stated purpose is to safeguard jurors’ privacy.
There are narrow exceptions. A juror may testify about whether extraneous prejudicial information reached the jury, Commonwealth v. Fidler, 377 Mass. 192 (1979), with extraneous matter defined as information not part of the trial evidence that raises a serious question of possible prejudice, Commonwealth v. Guisti, 434 Mass. 245 (2001). A juror affidavit may also be used to show racial or ethnic bias in the room.
The Supreme Judicial Court has explained why the rule exists at all: it protects jurors from harassment, reduces the incentive to tamper with them, promotes finality, and maintains public confidence in verdicts.
Two things put Tuesday’s interview outside it.
The rule governs what a juror may say as testimony, in a legal proceeding. It is a rule of evidence, not a gag order. Nothing in it stops a discharged juror from talking to a reporter, and courts have consistently treated post-discharge speech as the juror’s own to give.
And there is no verdict here to impeach. The rule protects the finality of a verdict. A mistrial produced none. The thing the rule guards does not exist in this case.
So three jurors have now given a detailed public account of deliberations that, had there been a conviction and an appeal, they would almost certainly have been barred from putting before a judge.
The asymmetry
The privacy that Tavares protects belongs to jurors, and jurors can give it up. Eleven of these did, or at least three of them have.
The twelfth did not consent to any of it, and he is the one being described.
He is also, at the moment, the only participant in this case who cannot respond, because Sullivan impounded the list of empanelled jurors for fourteen days after the mistrial, citing the attention the case drew and an arrest during trial over someone secretly recording jurors leaving the courthouse. We wrote about that order and what happens when it lapses on Monday.
That order sealed the list. It never stopped any individual juror from identifying themselves, which is exactly what three of them have now done, four days later. The seal was never a gag. It was a document control.
It runs out around 18 September. On that day the names of all twelve become available in the ordinary way, including his, eleven days before the parties return to court on 29 September.
So the sequence is: eleven jurors free to characterise him by name and on camera, the twelfth anonymous but only for another week and a half, and then a status hearing on whether the Commonwealth tries the case again.
What this does to a retrial
District Attorney Timothy Cruz has still not said whether he will retry Clancy. If he does, twelve new jurors have to be found in Plymouth County.
Those jurors will be drawn from a population that has now watched three named members of the last jury explain on television that eleven of them were ready to acquit, that the one who refused had conceded reasonable doubt, and that he would not listen. That is a specific and memorable narrative, and it is running on national television before a single juror in a second trial has been summoned.
It cuts both ways, which is the honest reading. A juror who absorbed it might arrive sympathetic to the defence, on the view that eleven reasonable people already got there. Or might arrive determined not to be the one who folds under pressure from the other eleven, which is the lesson a different viewer takes from the same footage.
Nobody can measure which effect is larger. What is not arguable is that the pool is now more informed and less blank than it was on 4 September.
What to watch
Whether the holdout speaks after 18 September, and whether his account of that final exchange matches the foreperson’s.
Whether the defence uses any of this. Reddington has already asked Cruz to work something out, and three jurors saying publicly that eleven were ready to acquit is useful material for a lawyer arguing that a second trial is not worth the Commonwealth’s time.
And whether Cruz says anything at all before the 29 September hearing, which so far he has declined to do.
Related: Reddington’s push for a plea, why a presidential pardon is not available, and where Lindsay Clancy is now.