A male juror in the mistrial of Lindsay Clancy said the lone holdout on the 12-person panel wrapped one of the exercise bands the mom used to kill her children around a water bottle to mimic their strangulation in the deliberation room.
Juror number 10 Nick Dargie said the holdout had every right to his opinion but that the reenactment using the same exercise bands left the room speechless.
“I was so shocked. We’re not here to play detective – it’s not a game of Clue. This is serious,” Dargie, 25, the fifth juror to come forward in the macabre case out of Duxbury, Mass., told ABC’s “GMA” in an interview that aired Thursday morning.
“I asked him why are you doing that? That’s a band that was used to strangle a child. That’s disgusting.”
He also accused the still-unnamed holdout, who hung the jury in an 11-1 deadlock leading to the mistrial, of seeming disengaged during the deliberations, saying he would frequently be scrolling his phone while people were talking to him.
When pressed to explain his refusal to budge, Dargie said he made no effort to explain his reasoning.
“There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was,” the juror said.
“Otherwise, like there’s nothing wrong with somebody having a completely opposite opinion … that would be a hung jury. That, like that, is our justice system,” Dargie added.
It was this that prompted the jury to send a note alerting Judge William Sullivan they remained deadlocked after 38 hours of deliberation.
Dargie admitted “several” jurors were initially leaning toward a guilty verdict, but ultimately said he found the prosecution’s case “inconsistent” and the experts called by the defense more believable.
He said he believes the 11 members of the jury in the not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity majority felt “defeated” after the non-verdict.
“We spent seven weeks on this trial, almost two months of all our lives dedicated to it.”
Juror No. 5 in the case, one of nine women on the panel, said the others tried in vain to convince the holdout juror to change his vote after he allegedly “admitted he had reasonable doubt” but refused to say she was not guilty.
However, the juror, who spoke to CBS on the condition of anonymity, actually defended the holdout, and said he wasn’t entirely alone in his view.
“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,” the anonymous panelist added.
“At the end of the day, there was so much doubt,” she said.
“The prosecution didn’t have a figurative smoking gun. There was not a single moment throughout the presentation of that case where you could say ‘Yup, 100% I’m certain she did it’ or that she didn’t do it. There was too much gray area.”
Clancy, 36, remains in a state-run psychiatric facility, Tewksbury Hospital. Her next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 29.
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