The lone holdout in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial offered little explanation to support his position and behaved strangely, according to a fellow juror.
Nick Dargie said that he and ten jurors on the case came to a consensus that the mother of three accused of killing her children did so while experiencing a mental health crisis. But one man refused to join in that consensus for reasons that remain unclear. That led to the jury passing a note to the judge saying that, despite five weeks of testimony and a week of deliberation, a unanimous verdict couldn’t be reached. A mistrial was declared.
“There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was, which is why we ultimately sent in that note,” Dargie told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
The 25-year-old juror called it “frustrating” that the holdout allegedly ignored the court’s orders that Clancy should be convicted only if her guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
“He explicitly said ‘I don’t know if the prosecution or the defense proved their case,’” Dargie said.
At one point the holdout allegedly took one of the exercise bands the defendant allegedly used to strangle her children, wrapped it around an empty water bottle, and squeezed it as though mimicking a murder.
“I was shocked,” Dargie confessed.
He claimed that, at other times, the juror responsible for the mistrial scrolled on his phone and refused to engage with the other jurors.
Prosecutors must now decide if they want to try Clancy for murder a second time. She’s currently housed in a psychiatric hospital and confined to a wheelchair due to injuries she sustained from jumping out of a second-floor window when her children were killed. A plea agreement that could keep her there is among the possibilities.
Dargie believes a retrial would find Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.
He was serving overseas in the military when Clancy allegedly killed her young kids in January 2023. Dargie said that he heard nothing about the case at that time.