It seems that anytime a criminal trial captures the attention of the nation it gets likened to a movie.
The Lindsay Clancy case, especially during the last week of deliberation by the jury, has most commonly been compared to 1957’s 12 Angry Men.
If you haven’t watched it, you need to. It’s a gripping court case drama based around a seemingly cut-and-dried murder case that explores so many facets of the flawed human thought process. One juror, played by Henry Fonda, expresses some doubt over the case. The rest of the film centers around him trying to persuade the other 11 jurors that the defendant is not guilty. Spoiler alert: they all eventually come around to a unanimous not guilty verdict.
What happened in the Lindsay Clancy case today was nearly the opposite.
Nine women and three men walked into the deliberation room, and it seems from that point the majority of them had their minds made up on a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict. Over the course of the last week, the jury sent multiple notes to the judge telling him that they were deadlocked.
The notes, drafted and submitted by the female foreman, became very specific, with the final note relaying that one juror was reportedly refusing to apply the judge’s instructions concerning reasonable doubt to the facts of the case.
The note seemed to read more like a tantrum than a status update.
Eleven jurors were set to effectively set Clancy, a triple-child-murderer, free. She would be committed to a state psychiatric facility for an undetermined amount of time until she is found to no longer be a risk to herself or others.
A single juror, a man, was the only one to see with any clarity that Lindsay Clancy was guilty of the gruesome murders of her own three children and that’s all there was to it.
We’ve gone from twelve angry men to just one in a span of less than 70 years.
Twelve seated jurors watched the entirety of the trial, listened to weeks of testimony, heard the 9-1-1 call Clancy’s husband, Patrick, made after discovering his dead children in the basement of their home.
Twelve seated jurors.
And only one saw Lindsay Clancy there in the courtroom, stone-faced with no signs of psychosis or mental illness.
Only one juror saw premeditation when Clancy sent her husband to get food that day, previously searching her navigation app to determine how much time she would have to slaughter her kids.
Only one juror saw pure evil upon hearing that Lindsay answered her husband’s phone call with a calm demeanor while she had an exercise band taut around the throat of one of their kids.
My heartfelt thanks, as a parent, to that one juror who stood in the gap for those three brutally murdered children while the rest of the jury looked upon a monster with compassion.
I suspect that this case could go on ad infinitum with retrials. That’s the best case scenario considering that with the first trial we were only able to find one juror who considered facts over feelings.