A juror who favored finding Lindsay Clancy not criminally responsible for killing her three children laughed when an interviewer observed that the trial had succeeded in getting people talking about postpartum mental health.
“Lindsay’s decline was so fast,” juror Paula Devlin said in an interview with NBC 10. “We really thought this was an opportunity to get people talking. That’s all we really thought, get people talking.”
“Well, they are certainly talking now,” the interviewer replied.
Devlin laughed and answered, “Yes, they are.”
Devlin said the trial could serve as a “stepping stone” to help people better understand what women can experience after giving birth.
“I think that’s the moment that maybe we started saying out loud, this can really be a stepping stone to have people look at and understand what women go through when they have babies and what postpartum looks like,” she said. “Every person is different. Every person that has ever had it … You try and talk about it in your doctor’s office and they’re like, ‘Try and take a nap when the baby’s sleeping. Try and get some sleep.’”
“It was very clear to us that we were there because Lindsey didn’t get the help that she was asking for so desperately,” Devlin added.
Devlin said the trial also gave some of the male jurors a new perspective on postpartum mental health.
“Even the guys in the room, you know, one of them had kids and he was even thinking like, ‘Wow, this is what my wife went through?’” she recalled.
Her remarks came after several jurors who favored Clancy’s insanity defense drew criticism online for publicly discussing their deliberations.
“One of the jurors admits that multiple nurses on the jury used their experience and medical background to ‘explain’ toxicology reports to the holdout juror,” Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis said. “I showed that clip to a trial attorney who immediately saw it as an admission that the pro-Clancy jurors were using outside information and evidence from outside the trial process to bully a juror toward a particular outcome.”
Jurors may draw on their general experience during deliberations, but they are not permitted to introduce outside evidence or effectively act as unsworn expert witnesses.
Another juror expressed disappointment that the jury had failed to acquit Clancy.
“I wish we could have come through for Lindsay,” the juror said. “I feel very sad that we couldn’t.”
Clancy strangled her three young children with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s Duxbury, Massachusetts, home in January 2023. Her husband returned from running errands to find Clancy outside after she had jumped from a second-story window in a suicide attempt. He then discovered the children in the basement.
Clancy’s defense did not dispute that she killed the children but argued that postpartum psychosis left her unable to know that her actions were wrong. Prosecutors said that she planned the killings and was criminally responsible.
The trial ended in a mistrial on September 4 after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict. Eleven jurors favored finding Clancy not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, while one juror favored conviction.
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