ive days ago we wrote that the lone juror in the Lindsay Clancy case was being tried in public by people whose names were sealed while his silence was treated as an admission. We said he did not owe anyone an interview, and that the whole point of a unanimous jury is that one citizen can refuse to go along.
Here is where that stands now.
The juror is in hiding with his family. His brother told the New York Post that strangers have been leaving notes at their mother's house, that relatives are being called relentlessly, and that the family cannot leave home.
"They won't leave us alone and we don't know anything."
They did not know anything. The family had no idea he was serving on the trial until Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on September 4. He never told them.
The judge has now sealed the jurors' identities indefinitely.
This is the part that should end any argument about whether the concern was overblown.
Sullivan had temporarily sealed the list. He has now made it indefinite, citing safety concerns and the risk of immediate and irreparable injury if the names become public.
That is a sitting judge making a formal finding that identifying these people would put them in danger. Not a columnist's worry. Not a talking point. A judicial finding, entered because of what has already happened to one of them.
Juror intimidation is a crime.
It is worth saying plainly, because a great deal of what has unfolded over the past eleven days has been treated as entertainment.
Federal law and Massachusetts law both criminalize retaliating against or intimidating a juror for a verdict. Camping on a man's mother's doorstep because you did not like how her son voted is not commentary. It is not accountability journalism. It is the thing the statute was written about.
And the target here is a private citizen who was summoned by the state, sat through twenty-two days of testimony, eighty-plus witnesses, and roughly thirty-eight hours of deliberation, and then declined to sign a verdict he did not believe. That is not misconduct. That is the job.
They went after his religion.
Online discussion of the mistrial fixated heavily on the juror's Catholic faith, with people claiming his beliefs drove his refusal to find Clancy not criminally responsible.
His brother had to go on the record to deny it. He said religion had nothing to do with it, that his brother looked at the case and made the call, and that he would have done the same, listened to the evidence and gone from there.
Think about what was demanded of that family. A devout Catholic man from a Haitian immigrant household, who served when the court called him, now has relatives publicly assuring the internet that his faith did not contaminate his judgment.
We would not accept that standard applied to anyone else, and nobody should accept it here.
The asymmetry has only gotten worse.
Five of his fellow jurors have given interviews. The foreperson. A twenty-five-year-old. Two others by name. They have described him on camera as arrogant, as disengaged, as unwilling to point to evidence.
Nobody is leaving notes at their mothers' houses.
The one juror who has said nothing at all, who has given no account, who has defended himself nowhere, is the one whose family is trapped indoors. He has reportedly remarried recently. He is in hiding.
None of this means he was right.
He may well have been wrong. The foreperson says he conceded reasonable doubt and voted to convict anyway, and if that is accurate, it is a serious problem worth arguing about.
Argue about it. Write that he was wrong. Say the eleven had the better reading of the evidence. All of that is legitimate and some of it may be true.
What is not legitimate is the address of his mother's house.
Meanwhile Kevin Reddington has filed a motion asking the court to enter a finding of not guilty outright, without a retrial. That is the actual legal fight, happening in a courtroom, where it belongs.
Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Whatever their mother is responsible for remains unresolved, and it will be resolved by a court or not at all.
It will not be resolved by a mob outside an elderly woman's house in Massachusetts, hunting a man who did exactly what the law asked of him.
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