Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case on September 4, after seven days and more than thirty-eight hours of deliberation. The jury split 11 to 1 in favor of not guilty by reason of insanity. One man would not move.
Since then, five of his fellow jurors have given interviews to national and local outlets.
Foreperson Roni Carlson told NBC10 Boston that the holdout admitted having reasonable doubt, that she had already begun signing the three verdict forms, and that he then told her he still would not vote not guilty by reason of insanity. Nick Dargie, 25, told ABC News the man could never point to evidence or testimony supporting his position. Kellie Farina said he would not engage with the group and went to the exhibit cart once, briefly. Paula Devlin called him arrogant.
The judge has temporarily sealed the jurors' names. The holdout has not come forward and has given no public account of anything.
So the score is five interviews to zero.
He did not do anything wrong.
This needs saying, because nobody in the coverage is saying it.
A juror is not required to persuade anyone. He is not required to produce evidence for his fellow jurors, explain himself to a reporter, or justify his conclusion to the country. His job is to reach a verdict he can sign in good conscience, and if he cannot, his job is to say so.
The American jury requires unanimity precisely so that one person can stop eleven. That is not a bug in the system that occasionally gums up a trial. It is the entire point of the design. It exists so that a single citizen who is not convinced cannot be steamrolled by a room that is.
An 11-1 hung jury is the system doing exactly what it was built to do.
And the one measured account complicates the story considerably.
Juror No. 5, who spoke to WBZ-TV and asked to stay anonymous, described something different from the arrogant-obstructionist portrait.
She said there was so much doubt in the case, that the prosecution never produced a figurative smoking gun, and that there was too much gray area. Then she said the part that should have led every story: the lone juror was not the only one unwilling to see the other side. In her telling, the majority of the room, whichever side they were on, was firmly locked in from the very beginning.
Read that against the framing everyone else is using. If the entire room arrived with fixed positions, the holdout was not uniquely stubborn. He was outnumbered.
The part that should genuinely bother you.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Judge Sullivan to remove the holdout juror from the panel, arguing he was refusing to apply the law on reasonable doubt.
Sullivan denied it, and he was right to.
Sit with what was being requested. A lawyer asked a court to strike a sitting juror because that juror had reached the wrong conclusion. Whatever you think about this case, that is a road with no end to it. If a judge can dismiss the juror who will not go along, unanimity becomes a formality and a jury becomes a focus group.
Reddington is now reportedly preparing a motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds, built on what the jurors have been saying in interviews. That is an aggressive argument and it will very likely fail, but note the mechanism: the public statements of eleven jurors are being assembled into a legal weapon against a verdict the twelfth prevented.
None of this makes him right.
He may well have been wrong. Under Massachusetts law, prosecutors had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clancy did not suffer from a mental disease or defect at the time. Carlson says he conceded doubt and voted to convict anyway. If that is accurate, it is a real problem, and the eleven have every right to be furious about it.
But being wrong in a jury room is not misconduct. Eleven people convinced of something and one who is not is a scenario the Founders anticipated and built for. The remedy is a retrial, which the Commonwealth is free to pursue.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. The question of what their mother is responsible for is still open, and it will stay open until a prosecutor drops it or another twelve people answer it.
In the meantime, a private citizen who cast an unpopular vote is being described to a national audience as arrogant and unreasonable by people whose names are sealed while his silence is treated as an admission.
He does not owe anyone an interview. That is the whole idea.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
- Article Source:
Based Apparell
- Photo:
