by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News September 11, 2026
The lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial is a black man in his 30s. The other 11 jurors were white.
One of those white jurors, Paula Devlin, revealed the holdout was black during an interview Friday on CBS Mornings.
Lindsay Clancy / Video Image
Host Gayle King was so taken aback by the reveal that she said she would “have to sit with that for just a second,” and took a pause before continuing the interview.
In the CBS interview, Devlin said the age range of the rest of the panel is between 22 and 70 years old, adding that “a lot of the jurors had children.”
She also revealed that when deliberations began, “eight people were leaning toward not responsible, two hadn’t decided and two thought guilty.”
Later in the proceedings, the panel shifted to a 10-2 split in favor of Clancy being found not criminally responsible, Devlin said.
The jury’s white female foreperson, Roni Carlson, sent a note to Judge William Sullivan on the sixth day of deliberations accusing the lone holdout of not following the court’s instructions on reasonable doubt.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked that the holdout juror be replaced — which Sullivan ultimately denied.
Instead, the judge questioned each juror individually and re-read his instructions on the law.
After the jury sent a third impasse note indicating they were deadlocked 11-1 after 3 hours of deliberation, Sullivan declared a mistrial.
Clancy is due back in court on Sept. 29.
Recent events related to the Clancy case and the ultimate ruling of a mistrial “offer some interesting clues” to why King had to “sit” with the news, Eddie Scarry noted in a Friday op-ed for The Federalist.
“First, this lone black male juror is the one whose peers in the trial complained in a note to the judge that he wasn’t following instructions by the court with regard to ‘reasonable doubt,’ suggesting that the juror was either unwilling or unable to do his duty. In essence, a room full of white people, ready to excuse a white woman for strangling her three young children, had grown frustrated with a black man who wouldn’t conform and also excuse Clancy.
“Second, Clancy’s defense aggressively pleaded that the judge remove the one black man — the only ‘person of color’ — from the otherwise all-white jury pool because he wasn’t following along with what the white jurors had decided. What they had decided was to absolve a woman of responsibility for professing to have killed her own kids. You might say Clancy’s defense tried to win the case through nullification.
“Third, after the judge declared a mistrial, several of the other white jurors publicly disparaged the holdout. Devlin, the same one interviewed by Gayle King, called him ‘very arrogant.’ Another juror, Kellie Farina, faulted the single black juror for not ‘getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.’ (To be sure, Farina said he ‘had the hardest time getting over [it].’)
“This might account for at least some of the reason Gayle King needed to ‘sit with that for just a second’ when she found out that the holdout was a black man. For some people, it’s a lot to take in. Namely, white witches and warlocks who excuse the murder of children.”
