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The Lindsay Clancy jury has now explained itself, and the explanation is a masterpiece of civic self-regard.
Eleven people sat through weeks of evidence that a mother strangled her five-year-old, her three-year-old, and her eight-month-old, then decided the real story was their own opportunity to improve the lot of women.
One juror said it out loud: they understood the case as a turning point that could “change something to make it better for other women in the future.” If that doesn't disgust you, there's something wrong with you.
The three children were, in this telling, supporting characters in a policy seminar. They took an oath to apply the law to the facts. They then treated the oath the way a committee treats a mission statement—something to be recited and immediately subordinated to the larger project.
From the first day of deliberations, according to the holdout juror they later helped identify, eight of them arrived already committed to acquittal. That is, they had already made up their minds before the trial got underway.
They spent the rest of the week converting the remaining holdouts.
When one man declined to join the project, they complained that he was ignoring the judge’s instructions. The people who had recast a triple homicide as a chance to start a national conversation about women’s mental health were suddenly very particular about process.
The same cohort that celebrates “jury equity” when climate or Palestine protesters smash windows now discovered that equity is a one-way valve. Conscience is sacred when it produces the preferred outcome. When it produces a single vote for guilt, it becomes obstinacy, perhaps even a character defect worth leaking to the press.
These despicable jurors wrapped themselves in the language of compassion while treating the man who would not play along as the problem to be solved. Then they expressed surprise that the public noticed the mismatch.
This is the peculiar genius of the activist juror.
The courtroom is no longer a place where twelve strangers decide whether this defendant did this act with this state of mind. It is a platform. The dead children become nothing more than raw material. The oath becomes optional.
And the holdout who insists on doing the actual job is recast as the extremist. Imagine the perversion of thought to get to this point.
The system is supposed to survive this kind of improvement. It will be interesting to see how many people still believe that after watching the improvers at work.
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