Jackson Jambalaya

The internet decided what Lindsay Clancy, her husband and even the holdout juror were 

supposed to be. The evidence was considerably less convenient.

I have spent a lot of time talking about the Lindsay Clancy case over the last few weeks. Probably more time than I ever expected to spend talking about a murder trial in Massachusetts. I’ve discussed it on my radio show. I’ve been interviewed about it by national media. I’ve argued with people about it on Facebook, which is generally where good legal analysis goes to die. And after watching the trial, the mistrial and especially the public reaction to both, I’m not sure the most interesting thing about this case is Lindsay Clancy anymore. It may be us.

I spent roughly a decade as a prosecutor in Hinds County and have now been a criminal defense lawyer for years. I’ve tried more murder cases than I can probably remember. One thing that experience teaches you pretty quickly is that criminal cases are rarely as simple as people want them to be. The Clancy case certainly isn’t. There is one thing about this case that really isn’t disputed. Lindsay Clancy killed her three children. Her defense wasn’t that somebody else did it. It wasn’t mistaken identity. Her lawyer didn’t stand in front of the jury and tell them the police arrested the wrong person.

The defense was that Lindsay Clancy killed her children but was not criminally responsible for doing it because she was legally insane at the time. Those are two very different things. Mental illness and legal insanity are not synonymous. A person can suffer from severe mental illness and still be criminally responsible for a crime. The legal question is what that illness did to the person's ability to understand or control his or her conduct at the time of the crime.

That distinction matters particularly to those of us looking at this case from Mississippi because Massachusetts and Mississippi don't apply the same test. Mississippi follows the M'Naghten rule. Put very simply, the question here is whether the defendant understood the nature and quality of what she was doing and knew that it was wrong.

Massachusetts gives a defendant another avenue. A person may lack criminal responsibility if, because of mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of law. I realize I just lost about 87 percent of you. So here is the easier version.

In Mississippi, we're basically asking: Did you understand what you were doing and did you know it was wrong? Massachusetts can also ask: Even if you knew it was wrong, did your mental illness leave you without the substantial capacity to control yourself anyway?

For my fellow Gen Xers, I have been describing it as Norman Osborn arguing with the Green Goblin in the mirror. There. I just explained the insanity defense using Spider-Man. My law professors would be so proud.

But that difference in the law matters enormously in this case because the prosecution presented evidence of planning. Clancy got her husband out of the house. There were searches. There were actions before and after the killings that the prosecution argued demonstrated purpose and awareness. The difficult question is whether that ends the insanity inquiry. It doesn't necessarily. That is what makes this case genuinely interesting from a legal standpoint. Could someone plan an act and appear purposeful while experiencing a psychosis severe enough to make her legally incapable of criminal responsibility?

The defense had expert testimony supporting its position. The prosecution had evidence supporting the opposite conclusion. Reasonable people can look at that evidence and disagree. That's what trials are for. What trials are not supposed to be for is deciding what happened first and then working backward until we find something that supports what we already wanted to believe. Unfortunately, that has become a national pastime.

There has been an entire online universe built around this case. Thousands of people have dissected Patrick Clancy's behavior, his marriage, his statements and seemingly every other aspect of his life. Some have gone considerably further and suggested that he was somehow responsible for the deaths of his children. There is a fairly significant problem with that theory. Where is the evidence?

Lindsay Clancy's own defense wasn't that Patrick killed the children. Her lawyer's position was that Lindsay did it while legally insane. He even begged people recently to drop the Patrick Clancy conspiracies. If there were credible evidence that someone else killed your client’s children, I promise you, as a criminal defense lawyer, that is considerably easier to explain to a jury than the intricacies of Massachusetts insanity law. Yet somehow, we have reached a point where internet speculation can become more persuasive to people than the evidence actually presented in a courtroom.

I used to encounter a version of this when I was a prosecutor. People would come into our office and tell us what “the street” said happened in a case. My response was usually: Can I subpoena the street? I never figured out how. The internet has simply given “the street” broadband access. But there is another part of the public reaction to this case that I think deserves some examination, and I know this is going to make some people uncomfortable.

Imagine Lindsay Clancy was Bob Clancy. Bob is a father who strangled his three children with exercise bands. But Bob served in Iraq and Afghanistan, came home with severe PTSD, and his defense is that he was legally insane when he killed them.

Now ask yourself what the national conversation would look like.

Would Facebook be filled with people explaining that Bob was failed by the mental-health system? Would there be thousands of posts about how society abandoned him? Would internet detectives be investigating his wife and explaining why Bob was actually another victim in this tragedy? Or would most of America be asking whether Massachusetts could borrow a gas chamber? I don't know the answer. Neither does anyone else. But I think it's worth asking the question.

Maybe you believe Lindsay Clancy was legally insane. There is actual evidence supporting that position, and reasonable people can reach that conclusion. What I wonder is whether we'd be having remotely the same cultural conversation if the parent who killed three children were their father instead of their mother. I have a feeling Bob would have considerably fewer Facebook groups.

Then the jury deliberated, couldn't reach a unanimous verdict and the case ended in a mistrial. That brought us to another strange chapter. Suddenly people were angry at the holdout juror. I understand being frustrated by a mistrial. I've stood in courtrooms waiting for juries to return verdicts in murder cases. When that jury-room door closes, the lawyers lose control of the case. Twelve people you barely knew a few days earlier suddenly have everything in their hands.

But unanimity means exactly what it sounds like. All twelve jurors have to agree. It doesn't mean eleven jurors agree and the twelfth is required to surrender. If that were the rule, we wouldn't require unanimous verdicts. We'd require eleven votes and save everybody some time.

We weren't in that jury room. We don't know what evidence the holdout juror found persuasive. We don't know what testimony he questioned. We don't know why he wasn't convinced. And refusing to abandon your own judgment because eleven other people disagree with you isn't misconduct. It's literally the job.

Then I started seeing reactions to the fact that the holdout juror was a Black man. Apparently, this surprised people. That reaction probably tells me more about how little people understand jury selection than it does about this particular juror.

I spent years prosecuting murder cases in Hinds County, Mississippi. I tried cases in front of overwhelmingly Black juries and sometimes all-Black juries. Those juries routinely convicted Black defendants when they believed the State had proven its case. Why? Because Black people are individual human beings. I realize this is groundbreaking stuff.

Being Black doesn't mean you vote not guilty. Being white doesn't mean you vote guilty. Being a woman doesn't mean you automatically identify with Lindsay Clancy. Being a mother doesn't mean you automatically accept a postpartum-psychosis defense. If race and sex reliably told lawyers how somebody was going to vote, jury selection would take about fifteen minutes. I've apparently wasted a significant portion of my career conducting voir dire.

The entire reason lawyers spend so much time selecting juries is that human beings are complicated. We want to know about their experiences and how they view the world. We want to know whether they can follow the law even when the law might lead somewhere they personally don't like.

And after all of that, jurors will still surprise you. The reaction to this particular juror bothers me because people are trying to reverse-engineer his vote from his race. We know he was Black. We know he was the holdout. Those two facts don't tell us why he voted the way he did.

Maybe he didn’t believe the defense expert. Maybe he believed some part of the prosecution's case. Maybe he interpreted the insanity instruction differently. Maybe there was one piece of evidence that bothered him more than it bothered the other eleven people. I don't know. Neither does Facebook. And that's okay. In fact, that uncertainty is a feature of the system, not a defect. We put twelve people in a room precisely because we don't want one person deciding whether the government has proven its case. We tell each juror to listen to the evidence, follow the judge's instructions and reach his or her own decision.

Then, apparently, when one of them does that, everybody gets mad. If unanimity only matters when all twelve jurors agree with us, then we don't really believe in unanimous verdicts.

And publicly attacking a holdout juror is particularly troubling when the case still must be tried again. Lawyers are allowed to be frustrated. Families are certainly allowed to be devastated. But there is a difference between criticizing a result and attacking a citizen because he refused to surrender his own judgment.

In some ways, the reaction to that juror is a perfect ending to the first Clancy trial because it reflects what has bothered me about the public conversation surrounding this case from the beginning. We keep trying to make complicated people simple.

Lindsay is a mother who suffered from serious mental illness, so some people decided she must have been legally insane. Others saw evidence of planning and decided that meant she couldn't possibly have been insane. People thought Patrick behaved strangely, so an entire corner of the internet decided maybe he was secretly responsible. Then a Black man became the holdout juror, so people decided his race must somehow explain his vote.

We're taking pieces of information and turning them into conclusions. That's backwards. Evidence is supposed to lead us to a conclusion. The conclusion isn't supposed to lead us to the evidence.

I've spent more than two decades working in criminal courtrooms, first as a prosecutor and now as a defense lawyer. I've sat with families who lost children. I've prosecuted people I believed committed terrible crimes. I've represented people accused of terrible crimes. And I've learned something from being on both sides of that courtroom. You can be absolutely convinced about something and still be wrong.

That's why we have rules of evidence. That's why defendants have lawyers. That's why the government carries the burden of proof. That's why judges instruct juries on the law. That's why twelve citizens deliberate behind a closed door instead of checking Facebook to see which theory has the most likes.

The Lindsay Clancy case will be tried again. Maybe the next jury will convict her. Maybe the next jury will find her not criminally responsible. Maybe twelve more people will struggle with the same question that divided this jury. I don't know what they'll do. But I know what they're supposed to do. Listen to the evidence. Apply the law. And make the decision for themselves.