As it turned out, the pre-mistrial perception that the Lindsay Clancy jury was divided 11 to one was correct. With three jurors speaking out, it’s become clear that one juror, despite believing that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, refused to vote for “not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Eleven of twelve jurors had agreed not to convict Ms. Clancy. Then the one holdout “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” the jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said in an interview with the television station NBC10 in Boston on Tuesday.

So that was the end of deliberations? Not quite.

So Ms. Carlson, a retired teacher, started to fill out the three verdict forms, she said in the interview. She got as far as writing her signature on each sheet. But then, Ms. Carlson recalled, the holdout juror said, “I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”

How could that be, since the court instructed the jury that if they had a reasonable doubt, they must vote against conviction?

According to the judge’s instructions, if jurors had considered all the evidence but still had reasonable doubt about the charges against Ms. Clancy, they had to acquit her.

There is a word that explains this, although many will refuse to utter it aloud. Nullification. You remember jury nullification, the mechanism by which a juror could ignore the law and do whatever he pleased because, well, he wanted to?  The darling of the advocates against over-criminalization and the anti-carceral state, jury nullification has been held up by many an unduly passionate activist as the cure, or at least one of the cures, for what ails the criminal legal system. So what if the evidence is overwhelming? So what if the law says it’s a crime? So what if the dude (or dudette) did the dirty? You’re a juror and you can find any damn way you please. If you vote not guilty, then not guilty he is. Or at least you can hang the jury. Just stick to your guns and don’t let those other nasty jurors push you around. Victory!

But I told you. That same jury nullification that you assumed only worked in the direction of the defense could just as easily work against the defendant. Once jurors believed that the legal instructions given by the judge were voluntary, despite the court telling jurors that they must follow the instructions, all bets were off.

Ms. Clancy has not denied that she strangled her children — Cora, Dawson and Callan — at their Massachusetts home in 2023. Instead, her trial in Plymouth, Mass., was over whether she should be held criminally responsible for their deaths.

Her lawyer argued that she had suffered from postpartum psychosis when she strangled her children with exercise bands on Jan. 24, 2023. The prosecution disputed the severity of her condition and said Ms. Clancy had planned to kill her children before attempting to die by suicide.

After the first deadlock note, MAGA speculators assumed the jury broke down by sex, with women voting for acquittal and men voting for conviction, because of course they did. There is no way they could have known such a thing, but they had a culture war to fight and fight it they would. When it later became apparent that the breakdown was 11 to one against conviction, the one became the MAGA hero, holding firm for “justice” for the three dead children.

And there was no doubt that Clancy had killed her three children, which was all they needed to know to be certain that she should have been found guilty. That her defense was postpartum depression gave rise to her act in complete contradiction with her otherwise being a loving mother was just woke voodoo to enable her to escape responsibility for being a murderess.

For those of us who were taught the M’Naghten Rule in 1L, we understood the rationale behind the insanity defense. We also understood that it wasn’t a free ride for the defendant, who would spend much, if not all, of her life institutionalized. Whether Clancy lacked the capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her acts was a question for the jury to decide. Contrary to the twitteratti, they neither get to decide her fate nor know better than the jury.

But one juror shared their simplistic grasp of the law, that three children had been killed and someone must pay. So the holdout juror wrapped himself in the warm blanket of nullification, ignored the judge’s instructions and refused to vote for not guilty by reason of insanity. And now that he’s a hero among the people he cares about, he can take comfort in his decision. So too can others who will nullify an acquittal, safe in the knowledge that he will be a hero to the MAGA faithful.