The Lindsay Clancy eleven and the sole holdout
Seems there are two extremes right now on the subject of the Clancy case, at least in terms of the bulk of online discussion. I don’t fit into either camp – not those who say Clancy is some sort of heroic persecuted figure (or that her husband did it), nor those who say she’s nothing but a vicious killer who wanted her kids dead and came up with the excuse of mental illness for her own evil actions.
Modern-day jurors have a tendency to discuss trials and deliberations publicly, and a number of Clancy case jurors have come out with a lot to say, post-trial. Their decision came down, as I figured it would, to the idea of reasonable doubt, held by eleven jurors who would have put Clancy in a mental hospital for an undetermined amount of time rather than in prison for life.
I’ve written before about the fact that Massachusetts law supports that verdict (whether you think it’s a good law or not, and personally I do not) and how unusual that law is. Here’s a post I wrote on the subject.
I will add that in law school I studied the law of criminal responsibility as it relates to mental illness, and I also have my training as a family therapist, and I have long thought there is no good solution to the problem of psychosis and crime. There is a wide variety of legal approaches – very wide, actually – all with pros and cons, and all unsatisfactory.
The approach I prefer is to sentence the person, and if there is diminished responsibility because of a psychosis, the person starts serving the sentence in a mental hospital and finishes out the term in prison when the hospital deems the person recovered from the psychosis, with the total in both institutions being the time served. It’s not a great solution at all, but I think it is probably better than the others.
But it’s very far from the law prevailing in Massachusetts, the law under which Clancy was tried and which operates in this case.
Those who believe Clancy should have been found guilty seem to perceive a sex divide in the jurors’ opinions because the lone holdout was a male – as well as a race divide because he was also black. But there were two other males on the jury, and they sided with the nine women on the panel. The jurors are being portrayed by many on the right more or less this way (the following excerpt is by John Hinderaker):
You know the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case? The one who thought strangling her three children was a crime worth punishing? The one the liberal white women jurors denounced as dumb? Unable to understand the jury instructions and comprehend the subtle concept of reasonable doubt? Turns out he was the only juror “of color.” The holdout juror was a black guy …
But that’s a false dichotomy. Based on Massachusetts law, I might even have reluctantly sided with those “liberal white women jurors” in their verdict (not necessarily in their descriptions of the lone holdout, which by the way don’t seem to have actually included the word or even the concept “dumb”). Was the holdout the only person on the jury who thought strangling three children was a horrific crime “worth punishing”? But the jurors were not being asked if it was a serious crime worth punishing. They were being asked whether Clancy’s moral sense and criminal responsibility were compromised by her serious mental problems:
“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did. And she’s admitting that. We’re trying to figure out did she know right from wrong at that time,” foreperson Roni Carlson said.
Legally in Massachusetts, if the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy knew right from wrong and also could have restrained herself from those criminal acts, then the verdict of the eleven would be quite appropriate. That seems to me to be the case, whether I like that verdict or not. But instead, the lone holdout is being considered by the right as a hero and as the only virtuous person on the jury, and the eleven others (nine women and two men) are considered to be excusing the murder of children rather than trying to follow the law while realizing full well how horrific these crimes were.
But the most important reason the holdout should come in for criticism is this (at least, according to the other jurors who gave interviews): he had agreed with them that there was reasonable doubt that Clancy should be held fully responsible and yet he was determined to find her guilty anyway. That’s a form of jury nullification, basically, because it’s not the way the law in Massachusetts works. In Massachusetts, if reasonable doubt on the score exists, you must find the defendant not guilty:
“He admitted he had reasonable doubt and I started filling out the forms, I was so excited,” the foreperson said.
“There were three forms I had to fill out and I started filling them out, I wrote my signature on each one but then he said, ‘But I’m still not going to say she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.’”
Nor did the interviewed jurors blame Clancy’s husband Patrick instead, which was one of the conspiracy theories popular with some especially extreme online Lindsay-defenders. Here’s what two of the jurors said about Clancy’s husband:
Juror No. 5 said she “will never be the same” after hearing Patrick’s 911 call, which was not publicly broadcast.
The “horrifying” [911 call made by Patrick] dispelled any online conspiracy theories that the husband was somehow involved, according to the anonymous panelist.
“All I could think was that if these people could have heard that visceral, blood-curdling scream, I don’t think I could name a single actor or actress that could have performed that the way he did, and not that he performed it, but I will never be the same after that,” she said.
“Just to imagine living through that and being the person to find your children in that scenario, it shakes you.”
I think it’s very interesting that a great many people on the right who think Clancy absolutely should have been found guilty are playing the race card about the lone holdout juror. They are asserting that the eleven (who were white) who voted to commit Clancy are racists putting down a heroic black man.
Now it turns out that the holdout juror had a history of domestic violence allegations. The Hinderaker article says this:
It is a rule of modern life that anyone who dissents from leftist dogma must be destroyed.
However, there was a reason to reveal the information that’s not about “destroying” this man. That reason was this [my emphasis]:
The holdout juror who caused Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial has a history of alleged domestic violence such as grabbing his wife by the throat and punching his nephew, according to a report.
The still-unnamed juror, only described as a black man in his 30s, faced a criminal charge in September 2021 for allegedly assaulting his wife, NBC10 Boston reported. …
A juror questionnaire in Massachusetts asks whether someone has been arrested, charged with a crime, or been served with a court order — all boxes that the holdout juror should have checked.
If he’d answered honestly, he almost certainly would not have been serving on the jury. I think this matters and that it’s not merely some idle and vicious doxxing, as Matt Walsh writes:
They’re flat-out doxxing an anonymous juror because he didn’t acquit a triple murderer. These people are evil beasts. Demons from hell.
And Hinderaker wrote:
This was an effort by a “reporter” named Sue O’Connell and a Boston television station, NBC10, to doxx the holdout juror and ruin his life. Why? So that in the future, no one will dare to oppose the agenda of the far left while serving on a jury. Every juror must toe the line, or else.
Left out is the fact that the juror apparently lied in order to get on the jury. And so perhaps he did have an agenda after all. There’s a reason they ask that question of jurors. Do we not care about that sort of thing anymore? I submit that we should care and that we certainly would care if this juror had come to a conclusion with which we disagreed.
It’s fully possible to give a reasoned argument about why a guilty verdict would have been the correct one. But do it without playing the race card – something about which the right always mocks the left. And do it without pretending that this guy didn’t violate the jury selection rules, at least if these allegations about him are true.
Thank you for providing a balanced perspective. Perhaps those of us on the social-political right need to be more careful in what we say about this case and especially about the jury.
Neo, thank you for your balanced and nuanced summary of this sad case. I haven’t paid much attention to the case up til now, because the sensationalism distracts from more important issues we face. However, the case reveals much about our social conflicts and rot.
I also second your last paragraph. It’s disgusting that Republicans who decry the race card, jump to use it when they think it supports their narrative. If racial “color blindness” is a good thing, the holdout juror’s race is irrelevant.
Nonetheless … I can’t help but feel the endgame here is to get the holdout fully doxxed, absolutely ruin his life and maybe even, happily to their minds, get him killed.
His name is going to come out.
It is indeed possible to give a reasoned argument about why a guilty verdict would have been the correct one. To do so involves reviewing all of the facts presented to the jury, and not just the ones singled out in online commentary. The transcript of the trial and video are available online. I’ve quoted from them here from time to time.
To take one example, multiple experts testified that people in psychosis can still be criminally responsible. Multiple experts, including those called by the defense, agreed that Clancy’s psychosis, if it genuinely happened, was extremely unusual in multiple ways and exhibited red flags for malingering. Of course, the defense experts think she probably wasn’t malingering and the prosecution experts think she probably was. That’s why there’s a jury, to decide how much weight to put on that kind of testimony. That a defense expert says this or that is not enough to create “reasonable doubt” or no one could possibly be convicted of anything, defense experts always have something to say for the defense. The judge instructed the jury to consider the entire totality of presented evidence to judge Clancy’s criminal responsibility or lack of, not just medical testimony, and emphasized that “beyond reasonable doubt” does not mean “beyond any possible doubt”.
Very few people are willing to take the time and trouble to do review all the facts, instead they are just lining up behind one commentator’s summary or another. This is not a new thing, of course, it’s a very old thing. Legacy media used to do this for all of us routinely and we never were able to do it ourselves without a great deal of expensive effort. But the facts are publicly and easily available even if very few people wish to make any use of them.
As for the holdout juror, there is no doubt he was expressly targeted to deliver a lesson. Somebody who knew his name, still under impound at the time, dug through his records and fed it to a receptive journalist. We have no idea what lies the other jurors may have told to get on that jury because nobody dug into them to make an example out of them. Very soon his name will not be impounded and we will see plenty more hit pieces, which will no doubt encourage other jurors in the retrial much as the Chauvin jurors were encouraged by all the rioting.
The medical testimony re Clancy’s sudden and very transient “psychotic” state of mind is important. And the negatives of the holdout juror does not mean he was wrong in his decision. I personally feel Clancy deserves the death penalty. I cannot imagine asphyxiating three young kids, one by one, strangling them, one’s own kids, and then ahwell there’s the end of psychosis. This was a monstrous act.
neo – In a roundabout way, you address something that has been bothering me since the beginning of this mess. I have seen many advocates for Clancy’s acquittal by reason of insanity argue that the stakes of the trial were just about whether Clancy would spend the rest of her life in prison or in a mental institution.
I’m not so sure that’s true.
Isn’t it the case that a defendant who is not guilty by reason of a mental defect can be kept in custody at a mental hospital only while the mental defect is present and must be released when the mental defect resolves?
Clancy’s story is that she had one brief episode of postpartum psychosis in January of 2023 when she strangled her children. Clancy’s youngest was 8 months old at the time. That means it has now been more than 4 years since Clancy gave birth. I understand that postpartum psychosis typically resolves in a matter of months after childbirth. See the link below.
So if Clancy were to be acquitted, how long would it take for a doctor to honestly vouch that she was no longer suffering from postpartum psychosis and could be released?
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24152-postpartum-psychosis
— huxley
No doubt. Neo is right, and so are you.
The whole Clancy case has been a classic example of how the ongoing cold civil war processes everything through the lens of ‘how does this defeat the other side?’ and nothing much else. The rage on both sides existed before the case became public, and supercedes the case.
There is no such thing as unbiased news coverage, and there never has been. It just can’t exist. All coverage, all sources, have agendas, usually multiple ones.
One reason I have not commented much on the whole Clancy case is precisely that I don’t know enough to have a fully informed opinion about it, and I distrust the coverage. I distrust one side more than the other, but I fully trust neither because I recognize the agendas in play.
The stories have ‘templates’ that the subjects of the stories get slotted into, over and over and over. The Clancy case is just the latest example.
There’s the ‘mentally ill woman crushed by a patriarchal system’ template. There’s the ‘conniving murderer scams the bleeding-heart judicial system by pretending to be insane’ template. There’s the ‘heroic holdout for justice on a demented jury’ template. There’s the ‘blue State legal system that ignores justice’ template. There’s even the ‘sneaky murdering husband throws blame on his wife’ template. There are many others.
The actual facts tend to be secondary to how they can be fit into a template. If we’re not careful, we can fall into the habit of testing the validity of a possible fact by whether it matches our preferred/accepted template.
The real world is too complicated for that, though.
I haven’t seen the original documents involved with the juror’s DV charge (as in, some say there was a wife allegation in divorce proceedings, some outlets indicated he was actually arrested, some say charged and dismissed, another says a nephew sought an order of protection more recently). MA is fairly lenient about sealing, expungement, and getting orders of protection at the outset ex parte. Without seeing the actual documents, I wouldn’t decide what qualifies as being arrested, charged with a crime, or having been served with a court order. It also wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the juror was himself confused (as in, currently, or forever in time, or was there a time limit?).
I agree that the MA law is poorly written; essentially, putting the burden on the prosecution to prove a negative. I view that as a near-impossible standard, so I would then consider, what were the legislators thinking at the time when they wrote the law that way?
I think that for THIS case, on THESE facts (and mindful of our gracious host’s more in-depth experience with family therapy/dynamics issues), I would not want to be the juror who sets the precedent that you can get away with child murder if you do some doctor shopping in advance, and confess to your pastor later.
I don’t fault either juror outcome.
I can see why the holdout decided that the planning (and to me, the most damning, that she seemingly directed hubby on another errand mid-murder when he called; and picked the strongest kid to murder first), especially against the background of her medical training and experience, was evidence that she knew what she did was wrong; the “suicide” was for show; and that she was guilty.
I equally can see why the remaining jurors thought that if the legal standard is, the prosecution hasn’t ruled out the possibility that she was nuts at the time, then that standard hasn’t been met; so not guilty.
But then again, I wouldn’t have interpreted the law-drafters as having set that standard with its reasonable-doubt language.
Is the doubt reasonable or not. We, as a society, have really lost that sense of reasonable person standard (not just in criminal cases; in civil matters too). For me, a nurse, with medical training, who was evaluated at one of the best hospitals, etc., it is not reasonable to assume that she REALLY did not know what the risks/wrongs were, given the nature and extent of her planning, and actions, etc. My sense from the details I have read, is that she strikes me as one of those people who not just wanted, but expected the world to work according to the movie in their head. (One of which would include, I WILL have a happy perfect family). And when people (notably, her headstrong child, husband) do not comply, it leads them to a rage/anger where I could completely see her doing what she did with an intent to murder. I also think that is one reason why you get more of a gender skew on this issue, from those on the political left who likewise think if we just did X, we could achieve perfection. “Why can’t we just do …” are some of the worst words you would hear as a legislator from a passionate activist. Because not everyone wants to just live in the utopia you have conjured up. There are always pluses, minuses, different interest groups, stakeholders, long-term consequences, interests, goals, etc. People disinclined to accept the messiness of the human experience are your pink-wearing supporters. They want the Right people to do the Good thing so that Procedurally, we get Correct outcomes, which shows we are Caring and Just. Sigh.
Nate the Lawyer’s observation that the defense counsel successfully put the “system” on trial, is a good one. I’ll be curious if the prosecution the next time around cross-examines Patrick Clancy and the mother in law more about the pending civil cases, and how that might be creating its own bias. (The female jurors talked about how much it mattered to them that they did not think Lindsay was a bad mother; but of course those witnesses are going to say that–they can’t bring the kids back, and they lose their million dollar payday settlements from the doctors/hospitals/pharma if they were to say otherwise (and do you really want to admit you chose a monster for a mother?)). An aggressive prosecutor might also want to move for at least disqualification of the attorney in view of the juror targeting (and apparently his wife has also been snotting about on social media). I’m curious whether he is getting a cut of the civil case fees (or is attorney of record) too, hence his frustration on decision day at losing his at least 1/3 or more of the settlement paycheck.
I am also concerned that there has now been so much publicity about the case, she will never get a fair trial going forward.
A juror questionnaire in Massachusetts asks whether someone has been arrested, charged with a crime, or been served with a court order — all boxes that the holdout juror should have checked.
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Was he arrested or charged with a crime? Why would having been served disqualify you as a juror?
@Bauxite:the stakes of the trial were just about whether Clancy would spend the rest of her life in prison or in a mental institution.
Absolutely not true. There’s a new review every six months. If the court thinks she’s not a danger to herself or others, she goes free. Just having bipolar 2 is not enough to be a danger to oneself or others, literally millions of people have that. If she was malingering about her psychosis and is no longer suicidal there would be no ground to keep her in the hospital.
she was no longer suffering from postpartum psychosis
This right here is one of the false impressions created by online commentary. She only claimed to have had one episode of psychosis, that happened “postpartum”–her attorney uses that word to mean “any time in the rest of your life after you ever had a baby no matter how long you live”.
The phrase you used, that lots of people use, makes it sound like it was something that was ongoing and not just one time. But it was only one time, according to the only evidence we have that she ever had it, her own word.
Massachusetts law on criminal responsibility is foolish.
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The jury should be faced with a series of binary decisions in cases like this. Guilty or not of 1st degree murder (if that’s the top count on the bill), and, if not, guilty or not on each of the lesser included offenses.
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There is no element of this case which requires a determination of a scalar. The sentence should be specified in the statute, not at the discretion of the judge.
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If it’s your contention she should receive a dispensation because she was distressed, that would be a matter for executive clemency (in a sane legal system, which we do not have).