Lindsay Clancy Juror Describes Shocking Scene Inside Deliberation Room Before 11-1 Deadlock

Nick Dargie is one of the three male jurors on the Lindsay Clancy trial.ABC News

A juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is revealing new details about the tense deliberations that ended without a verdict, including a moment involving the lone holdout that he says left him stunned.

Nick Dargie, 25, one of three men on the 12-person jury, said the unidentified holdout used an exercise band and a water bottle during deliberations in an apparent attempt to recreate an aspect of the deaths of Clancy’s three children.

Dargie said he immediately challenged what the juror was doing.

“I was so shocked. We’re not here to play detective – it’s not a game of Clue. This is serious,” Dargie said in an interview that aired Thursday morning.

The revelation offers another glimpse inside a jury room that ultimately became divided 11-1, resulting in a mistrial after days of deliberations.

Juror says reenactment crossed a line

Lindsay and Patrick Clancy pose with their children Cora, 6, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in 2022.Plymouth Superior Court

According to Dargie, the holdout wrapped an exercise band around a water bottle as the panel considered evidence in the case.

The exercise bands were significant evidence in the trial surrounding the January 2023 deaths of Clancy’s children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.

Dargie said he found the demonstration deeply inappropriate given the nature of the case.

“I asked him why are you doing that? That’s a band that was used to strangle a child. That’s disgusting,” he recalled.

The holdout’s behavior became one of several points of friction described by jurors after the mistrial. Dargie also alleged that the man sometimes appeared disengaged during discussions, including looking at his phone while other jurors were speaking.

The holdout juror has not been publicly identified.

An 11-1 split ends the trial

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.ABC News

Clancy, 36, faced first-degree murder charges over the deaths of her three children at the family’s home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.

The central dispute at trial was not whether Clancy caused the deaths. Her defense acknowledged that she did, but argued she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors maintained that she understood what she was doing and was criminally responsible.

The jury ultimately could not reach the unanimous decision required.

Jurors later revealed that 11 members supported a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, while one man refused to join them.

Dargie said disagreement itself was not the problem. He acknowledged that every juror had the right to reach an independent conclusion.

What frustrated him, he said, was the holdout’s alleged inability to point to evidence or testimony supporting his position.

“There wasn’t a single piece of evidence or witness testimony that he used to prove why he was thinking the way he was,” Dargie said.

In a separate interview, he described repeatedly asking the juror to identify evidence or witness testimony supporting his view but said the man could not do so.

Dargie stressed that a genuine disagreement would simply be part of the jury system. His concern was how that disagreement was being reached.

Several jurors initially leaned toward guilty

Dargie also acknowledged that the jury did not begin deliberations united behind the insanity defense.

He said several members initially leaned toward finding Clancy guilty.

His own assessment changed as jurors reviewed what they had heard during the lengthy trial. Dargie said he ultimately found inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case and considered the defense experts more persuasive.

The panel spent roughly seven weeks hearing the case before entering days of deliberations.

“We spent seven weeks on this trial, almost two months of all our lives dedicated to it,” Dargie said.

By the end, he believed the 11 jurors who had reached the same conclusion felt “defeated” when no verdict could be returned.

Another juror offers a different view of the holdout

Not every juror who has spoken publicly has condemned the lone dissenting man.

Juror No. 5, one of nine women on the panel, spoke anonymously after the trial and offered a more complicated picture of what happened behind closed doors.

She acknowledged the sharp disagreement but defended the holdout to an extent, arguing that he was not the only person in the room unwilling to reconsider deeply held views.

“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.

She described “some big personalities” in the jury room and suggested that the impasse ultimately reflected an inability among jurors to move beyond their convictions.

For her, however, the evidence left too much uncertainty to support a guilty verdict.

“At the end of the day, there was so much doubt,” she said.

Her account adds an important counterpoint to the criticism of the holdout: while several jurors have questioned his approach, at least one panel member has cautioned against portraying the deadlock as entirely the fault of a single person.

Dispute over reasonable doubt

Defendant Lindsay Clancy watches jurors enter the courtroom on Friday, September 4, 2026. The jury resumed deliberations for an eighth day.USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Other jurors have said the dispute became particularly serious when the holdout allegedly acknowledged having reasonable doubt but still would not agree to a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict.

The foreperson and other jurors raised concerns about whether he was applying the judge’s legal instructions correctly. The jury repeatedly informed Judge William Sullivan that it remained unable to reach a unanimous decision.

Clancy’s defense sought intervention over the holdout’s conduct and later made an emergency appeal to Massachusetts’ highest court in an effort to prevent the mistrial from becoming final.

That effort failed, and Sullivan formally declared a mistrial on September 4.

The result left one of Massachusetts’ most closely watched criminal cases without a verdict.

What happens next for Lindsay Clancy

Clancy allegedly strangled her daughter Cora, five, and son Dawson, three, and tried to suffocate her baby son before plunging from the second-floor window.Facebook / Lindsay Marie Clancy

The mistrial does not resolve the charges against Clancy.

Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz has not yet announced whether prosecutors will pursue another trial.

Meanwhile, defense attorney Kevin Reddington has said he intends to ask for the case to be dismissed on double-jeopardy grounds, arguing there was no “manifest necessity” for the mistrial. He plans to raise that issue at the next scheduled hearing.

Clancy remains at a state psychiatric facility.

Her next court hearing is scheduled for September 29.

For Dargie, however, attention remains fixed on what unfolded during those final days behind the jury-room door — when 12 people who had spent weeks listening to the same evidence reached an impasse that no amount of further deliberation could overcome.

And his account of the exercise-band demonstration has now added another troubling detail to the story of how an 11-1 divide ultimately brought the trial to an extraordinary end.