Less than a week after a Massachusetts judge declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy triple murder trial because the jury – made up of nine women and three men – could not reach a unanimous verdict following seven days of deliberations, the jurors have started to speak out.
Eleven jurors wanted to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity, but there was one male juror who refused to join the group. On Tuesday, NBC Boston sat down with three of the females on the panel, including the foreperson, about the lone holdout.
“These female jurors are straight out of your nightmares for what kind of juror might wind up at the Lindsey Clancy or any other trial, to be honest” Megyn said on Wednesday’s Megyn Kelly Show. “I think most of us thinking people were horrified when we heard them speak. I mean, genuinely horrified. One soundbite was worse than the next.”
Slamming the Holdout
In one head-scratching moment, jury foreperson Roni Carlson, a retired fifth grade special needs teacher, claimed the juror admitted he had reasonable doubt, which led her to start filling out verdict forms seemingly without taking a formal survey of the jury.
CARLSON: I mean, he had reasonable doubt. He admitted he had reasonable doubt after we watched that video of the interview. I think that’s when it was. He admitted he had reasonable doubt. I started filling out the forms. I was so excited. I actually, there were three forms I had to fill out. 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.’
“[That is Clarkson] appearing to try to complete the jury verdict for him without taking a final vote. She was already she was so excited to find her not guilty,” Megyn noted. “He rained on her parade. He pissed all over her pen as she was excitedly writing down not guilty, and now she’s mad.”
Also mad? Juror Paula Devlin, who worked for government contractors and claimed the holdout wouldn’t listen to analysis from nurses on the jury that was not part of the evidence and testimony presented during the trial.
DEVLIN: He was very arrogant. He really did not take anything that anybody said. The nurses, he tried to ask a question about the medications, and we went back to the report from South Shore Hospital. We had the toxicology report. We could see exactly the amounts. The nurses in the room spoke to that… specific thing. That was a question that he had. And he just completely disregarded the information that he gave.
On X, The Federalist’s Sean Davis wondered if those nurses violated the jury instructions given by Judge William Sullivan that said “you are not to decide this case based on anything you may have read or heard outside of this courtroom.” He went on to explicitly say that if someone had a question, “you are not allowed to try and answer it by anything other than through the exhibits and evidence you have heard.”
There was more about the frustrations with the holdout juror from juror Kellie Farina, a retired chef, who just couldn’t seem to understand why this man was so hung up on the fact that Clancy killed her three children – 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan – with exercise bands in the basement of their family home on January 24, 2023.
FARINA: We read to him on numerous occasions the definition of reasonable doubt from Judge Sullivan’s instruction. He actually said one day in the end, ‘Why don’t we have the judge come in and read it again?’ And we were like, ‘No, we have it in front of us’… But he had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.
“Did he? Was that difficult for him? Why wasn’t it difficult for you,” Megyn asked. “She actually thinks we’re gonna hear that sentence and be on her side, not his, and we’re gonna say, ‘Oh, this unreasonable prick! He had a really difficult time getting off the fact that she viciously killed her children. Yeah, same.'”
“I guess there is some woke liberal annoying contingent that is listening to this, saying, ‘Yeah, that pisses me off,’ [but] I think the vast majority of normies out there are on the side of the man,” she added. “Yes, we also had a really difficult time getting past the fact that she viciously killed her children. Yes, that’s a normal human reaction to what she did.”
Criticism of Prosectors
The jurors were also critical of the prosecutors. Farina, for one, took issue with the vibes and went so far as to call out the attorneys’ professionalism. “I just found it to be harsh… Very, very harsh,” she said of the prosecution’s case.
“The fact that they had no character witnesses in regard to Lindsay of being a bad mother. I mean, right out of the gate, it’s like you’re presenting all these medical professionals, but nobody’s presenting, for the prosecution, a woman and a mother of three children,” Farina claimed. “I found to be biased right out of the gate. I found them also to be kind of unprofessional, and just without a heart… I thought it was very cold.”
The forewoman had a similar take, at least as far as witness testimony was concerned. “We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did, and she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out did she know right from wrong at that time, and with everybody saying she loved her children so much, and everything proved she loved her children – from her journals to her mother-in-law – everything proved that she loved her children, so she had to have snapped,” Carlson explained.
While Megyn called out prosecutors for “fail[ing] on jury selection” and said “that is where this case was clearly lost,” she also had a word for Farina and Carlson. “The prosecutor had compassion for the babies who were murdered. She had a lot of compassion for the three children, and was there to represent them,” she scolded.
“She was not supposed to be Oprah Winfrey, you fucking idiots,” Megyn continued. “She was unprofessional and biased because she didn’t call a character witness telling everybody that Lindsay Clancy was a bad mom? I mean, you figure that out. I can’t figure it out. She didn’t have compassion for Lindsay Clancy, the murderer who she was trying to convince the jury should be locked up behind bars? What are you talking about?”
Love for Reddington
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the women had a much more favorable view of Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington, whom Megyn theorized they “had the hots for” based on their commentary.
Carlson fawned that Reddington’s “whole demeanor was funny” and “entertaining,” which she considered “good” due to the serious nature of the case. Devlin, meanwhile, chimed in that he managed to be “both arrogant and entertaining.” Oh, and Farina doesn’t want you to forget Reddington was also “compassionate through and with his arrogance.”
“I mean, Kevin Reddington played them like a fiddle. Good for him. It’s a total win for him in that way. [He] just completely had them eating out of his hand,” Megyn observed. “You’re so dumb you didn’t even realize this was all a manipulation of you know-nothings.”
Juror No. 5
Meanwhile, CBS Boston spoke to juror number 5, a female who wished to remain anonymous. She had a different take on what happened with the holdout juror.
JUROR 5: I will say the majority of the people on it doesn’t matter what side it was on was very firm in their like stance and their beliefs kind of from the beginning. You know, the standalone juror was not the only one that was unwilling to see things from the other side. So, I’m gonna kind of defend that individual in a sense.
She went on to admit there were “some big personalities” in the jury room, but she still threw him under the bus for not bending to their will. “At the end of the day, I feel like it just came down to an inability to kind of move past your convictions, and, you know, even through that dynamite charge, to be unable to self-analyze yourself and be like, okay, am I missing something,” she explained.
In Megyn’s view, it was Juror 5 who was missing the point. “He wasn’t swayable? Tough shit. That’s what it means to be on a jury… Why should you move past your convictions when you hold a person’s freedom in your hands? Isn’t that the moment that you really should hold on to your convictions,” she asked.
“This is so absurd. If the shoe were on the other foot, we would see this so clearly. If the holdout had been for a not guilty verdict, and everybody else had been for guilty, he should have just moved past his convictions to convict somebody,” Megyn wondered. “No, we would all see how absurd that is. Well, the same holds when the shoe is on the other foot… This jury need to grow up.”
Interestingly, the anonymous juror also shared that she too originally thought Clancy was “criminally responsible” and, therefore, guilty. That admission tracks with NBC Boston reporting that four jurors initially did not want to vote for not guilty by reason of insanity before three were eventually persuaded to join the majority.
“They managed to get three out of the four over to their side, but not the fourth,” Megyn concluded. “And now they’re just, I guess, going to spend the next few weeks and months trying to paint him like he was some rogue dude who wouldn’t apply the law.”
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,394 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.