The One Juror Who Hung the Lindsay Clancy Jury Was Charged With Choking His Wife in 2021, Police Records Show. Trump Says the Case Is 'a State Situation.'

The lone juror who refused to acquit Lindsay Clancy was arrested in September 2021 and charged with domestic assault and battery after his 13-year-old nephew called 911 during an argument between the juror and his wife, according to a Brockton, Massachusetts, police report obtained by CBS News. The report says the man allegedly grabbed his wife by the throat and threw her into a dresser. He pleaded not guilty, and court records show the charge was later dismissed.

The disclosure adds a new complication to a case that ended without a verdict nine days ago. On Sept. 4, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial after the Plymouth Superior Court jury reported three times that it was deadlocked. Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, admitted killing her three children at the family's home in Duxbury; the only question for jurors was whether she should be held criminally responsible given evidence that she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness. Several jurors and her defense attorney have said the panel split 11 to 1 in favor of finding her not criminally responsible. The holdout has not been publicly identified, and CBS News said it is not naming him because the court has not released the jury list. He and his family members did not respond to requests for comment.

Whether the arrest matters legally turns on what he said when he was screened. "The test is whether he made purposeful misrepresentations during the jury selection process. If he did, that's a crime," CBS News legal analyst Caroline Polisi said, while noting that "an arrest is not an automatic disqualification for serving on a jury." The juror questionnaires are sealed as part of the court record. "It's unlikely we will find out whether the juror made misrepresentations unless there is an official court-sanctioned inquiry," Polisi said. And because the trial already ended in a mistrial rather than a conviction, she added, "it's unclear how this will affect the case moving forward." A juror's undisclosed record would typically be grounds to attack a guilty verdict; here there is no verdict to attack.

The case reached the White House over the weekend. Clancy's attorney, Kevin Reddington, used his first interview since the mistrial to ask President Donald Trump for a pardon, while acknowledging that a president has no power to pardon a state offense and saying he hoped Trump might influence the outcome anyway. Asked about it Sunday, Trump called the case "very sad" but said it is a "state situation," not a federal one. "Three children are dead," he said, and added that the prosecution and defense would have to resolve it at the local level, while praising Reddington's work.

What happens next is up to Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz, who has not announced whether the state will retry Clancy. The next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 29 at Plymouth Superior Court. Between now and then, the question hanging over the courthouse is no longer only whether a second jury would see the case the way the first 11 jurors did, but whether the 12th should have been seated at all.