One juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial was a “person of color,” according to one of the other jurors. And he was the lone holdout, refusing to acquit Clancy on the grounds of insanity, which led to a mistrial.
“Whoa, I have to sit with that for just a second,” said a stunned Gayle King on CBS News.
Why was King so taken aback by this discovery? Because a black man is supposed to be woke enough to acquit a mom who confessed to brutally murdering her three young children. You can always count on leftists to have trouble when a minority thinks differently. Call it an ideological plantation.
Using the Left’s racial measuring stick, The Federalist’s Eddie Scarry wryly notes, “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.”
Paula Devlin was the juror who spoke to King, and when King asked, Devlin guessed that the black juror in question was “in his 30s.” She called him “very arrogant.”
Devlin was one of several jurors who have taken their deliberations public in media interviews after the high-profile trial. While Clancy’s attorney poisoned the system with his comments deriding that lone holdout juror, other jurors have likewise berated their erstwhile colleague for not falling in line.
“He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children,” complained one of the women.
Read that again, slowly.
It wasn’t only the women attacking the holdout. Nick Dargie was one of two other men on the jury, and he was appalled at the holdout. “There was [sic] several times I would ask him to show us, like, evidence or, you know, describe a witness testimony that helped to prove what he was saying. And — and he couldn’t.”
I’m not sure what the holdout juror was unable or unwilling to say, but Clancy confessed to her crime, and prosecutors presented loads of evidence that she sent her husband out on errands to remove him from the scene before she strangled their children, Cora, Dawson, and Callan.
What more evidence do you need?
When deliberations began, “eight people were leaning toward not responsible, two hadn’t decided, and two thought guilty,” said Devlin. She expressed some sympathy for the holdout. “We all worked together, and I don’t know if it was to convince him to start with; we all worked together to convince ourselves,” she elaborated. “Once we got to that point where it was 10-2 ... I felt very bad for them because they felt attacked, and there’s no way to not do that because that’s where we were talking.”
The attacks were more than talking. According to the New York Post, “The 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.”
In other words, the holdout juror was attacked throughout the process, and yet he held firm. He’s had a target on his back since before the mistrial was declared and he’s not out of the woods.
“Court documents and interviews with family members reveal a history of domestic violence allegations,” reports Boston’s NBC affiliate. “We discovered a pending eviction case tied to months of not paying rent. The NBC10 Boston Investigators also found an active restraining order against him, while he was listening to evidence in the case.”
It sounds like a case of “if you can’t beat him, take him out some other way.”
Still, leftists are in quite the pickle now — do they keep attacking the holdout juror because he’s part of “the patriarchy” and supposedly “violent,” or do they back off because, according to their own standards, it’s racist to skewer a black man and accuse him of violent tendencies?
Massachusetts law does not prohibit jury service based on accusations, only a felony conviction in the preceding seven years or current felony charges.
As with all 49 other states, however, Massachusetts law does prohibit juror intimidation. Yet here we are. Fellow jurors, the defense attorney, and the media are all intimidating this lone juror for refusing to say that Lindsay Clancy was not responsible for murdering her three kids.
The bigger issue here is what this means for juries and the selection process in the future. If you can be called and selected for jury duty, suddenly you face pressure to vote a certain way on high-publicity cases, or you risk having your life destroyed by Leftmedia hacks and internet sleuths. No one seems to be investigating the backgrounds of the 11 jurors who want to let Clancy off the hook.
Devlin illustrated the national moral crisis in another interview over the weekend. “We knew that this was a turning point,” she said of the trial, “and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women.” That sounds like she predetermined the outcome and ignored the evidence to get there. A trial is not about people who aren’t involved; it’s about weighing the evidence against the accused.
As Hot Air’s David Strom put it, “It was the OJ trial all over again.”
At least Devlin had the humanity to add, “Justice for those children is this never happening again.”
Tragically, it already has happened again. An Illinois woman is accused of murdering her two-year-old after she became “very invested” in the outpouring of sympathy for Clancy, rather than her children, coming primarily from leftist women.
When you make killing children in the womb all the way until birth a religious sacrament, as the Left has, you inevitably slide down the slippery slope.
