There has been a new development in the Lindsay Clancy case that I find deeply disturbing.
And before I say anything else, let me make something very clear:
I am not going to name the juror.
I know his name is out there. I know he has apparently been identified and doxxed. I know other people are talking about him and digging into his personal life.
I’m not participating in that.
He was a juror. He did his civic duty. He sat through an extremely difficult criminal trial and ultimately disagreed with the other jurors.
That’s it.
But apparently, for some people, that wasn’t enough.
The jury deadlocked 11–1. One juror did not agree with the other eleven jurors’ conclusion that Lindsay Clancy should be found not criminally responsible. That disagreement resulted in a mistrial.
And now that juror has become a target.
The judge has since indefinitely sealed the identities of the jurors, citing concerns about their safety and the risk of harm. The court has specifically acknowledged that jurors have been identified without permission and that threats have been made.
Think about that for a second.
A person participated in a jury.
He reached a conclusion that other people didn’t like.
And suddenly people are digging into his private life, identifying him online, harassing him and, according to reporting, creating enough of a safety concern that the court felt compelled to keep the jurors’ identities sealed.
What the fuck are we doing?
And yes, there is another uncomfortable dimension to this that we shouldn’t pretend doesn’t exist.
The holdout juror was Black.
The woman whose fate he was deciding is white.
And some of the backlash against him has come from people who are passionately defending Clancy and believe that she was failed by the justice system.
But look at what happens when that defense turns into attacking a Black man because he didn’t reach the conclusion they wanted.
At some point, you have to stop and ask yourself what the hell you’re actually defending.
Because if your idea of social justice involves destroying the life of a Black person because he exercised his own judgment as a juror, that’s a pretty fucking ugly contradiction.
And I don’t care whether you believe Lindsay Clancy is innocent.
I don’t care whether you believe she is guilty.
I don’t care whether you think the insanity defense was properly applied.
I don’t care whether you think the holdout juror got it right or got it wrong.
Those are separate questions.
The legal system has procedures for disagreements.
It has judges.
It has appeals.
It has retrials.
It has arguments from prosecutors and defense attorneys.
It has evidence.
It has jury instructions.
What it does not need is a fucking internet mob deciding that a juror deserves to have his life torn apart because he didn’t vote the way they wanted.
Because here’s the really dangerous part.
If we normalize this, we are going to make people afraid to serve on juries.
And we’re going to make people from marginalized communities especially vulnerable.
Why would someone want to participate in the justice system if they know that reaching an unpopular conclusion could result in strangers digging through their personal history, publishing their information, harassing their family or threatening them?
Jury service is supposed to be a civic responsibility.
It should not be a goddamn death sentence for your privacy.
And this isn’t just about this one juror.
It’s about what happens the next time a jury doesn’t give the internet the verdict it wants.
The next time twelve strangers disagree.
The next time one person holds a different interpretation of the evidence.
Are we going to do this again?
Are we going to find that person’s name?
Find their house?
Find their family?
Find their employment history?
Go through their past?
Try to intimidate them into silence?
Because if that’s where we’re headed, we’ve got a serious fucking problem.
And before anyone tries to turn this into some partisan argument:
No.
This isn’t about Democrats versus Republicans.
It isn’t about left versus right.
It isn’t about whether you’re pro-Clancy or anti-Clancy.
It isn’t about whether you believe in postpartum psychosis or the insanity defense.
It’s about whether people are allowed to participate in the justice system without being threatened for doing their civic duty.
You can disagree with a juror.
You can criticize a verdict.
You can argue that the jury instructions were wrong.
You can argue that the evidence supported a different conclusion.
You can argue that there should be a retrial.
You can argue.
That’s what the fucking system is for.
But intimidation isn’t argument.
Doxxing isn’t argument.
Harassment isn’t argument.
Threatening someone’s safety isn’t argument.
And trying to punish someone personally because they refused to give you the outcome you wanted isn’t justice.
It’s mob behavior.
And frankly, I don’t give a fuck which side of this case you’re on.
Leave the juror alone.
Because if we allow people to be terrorized for doing their duty as jurors, we’re not protecting the justice system.
We’re fucking with it.
And This Is Exactly What I Was Talking About
And honestly, this whole situation makes me think back to my last post about Lindsay Clancy, where I was critical of the way this case has been discussed and how, to me, it reeked of white privilege.
And now?
It reeks even more.
Because look at what is happening.
A Black juror disagreed with the majority of the jury. He stood by his interpretation of the evidence and his understanding of the law instead of simply going along with everyone else.
And rather than accepting that disagreement as part of the fucking jury system, people have gone after him.
His identity was exposed. His personal life has been investigated. He’s been subjected to intense public scrutiny. And the fact that he is Black matters here, because the backlash is happening in the context of a case involving a white defendant and an extremely passionate online movement defending her.
That doesn’t mean every person defending Lindsay Clancy is motivated by racism. I’m not going to make that accusation.
But I am going to point out the fucking contradiction.
You cannot talk endlessly about compassion, justice and protecting a vulnerable white woman while simultaneously treating a Black man as though he deserves to be punished because he reached a conclusion you didn’t like.
That’s exactly the kind of thing I was talking about in my previous post.
Privilege isn’t necessarily somebody consciously saying, “I am privileged.”
Sometimes it’s what happens when society becomes incredibly willing to extend sympathy, understanding and protection to one person while showing remarkably little concern for someone else.
And in this situation, the contrast is fucking hard to ignore.
Again, I’m not saying Lindsay Clancy doesn’t deserve due process.
She absolutely does.
So does the juror.
That’s the entire fucking point.
You don’t get to demand compassion for one person while throwing another person to the wolves because he exercised his own judgment.
If anything, this situation has made my previous criticism even more relevant.
Because justice cannot mean “protect the person I sympathize with and destroy the person I disagree with.”
That’s not justice.
That’s tribalism.
And that’s exactly the shit I want no part of.
And Here’s My Prediction
And here’s my prediction.
Watch what happens next.
Watch some of the people who initially defended this juror suddenly turn on him once they focus on the fact that he’s Black.
And then watch some of the people who have been going after this juror suddenly start defending him because he’s Black.
Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am.
But I wouldn’t be surprised.
And honestly, both groups would be wrong.
Because if your position changes depending on the race of the person involved, rather than the actual principle you’re supposedly defending, then what exactly are you standing for?
If you defended this man because you believed jurors deserve privacy and shouldn’t be intimidated, then keep defending that principle.
If you criticized the harassment because you believe people should be allowed to disagree without being doxxed, then keep criticizing it.
And if you thought the juror’s decision was wrong, you can continue thinking that too.
But don’t suddenly flip your entire position because you discovered something about his identity.
That’s the kind of inconsistency that drives me fucking crazy.
It makes me wonder how many people actually have principles they’re willing to stand by, versus how many people simply choose whichever position feels right to them in the moment.
And I’m not saying I’m better than anybody else.
I’m not.
I’m saying that I’ve tried to be consistent about this.
My position didn’t suddenly change because I learned the juror was Black.
My position didn’t suddenly change because I learned that people were defending Lindsay Clancy.
I’ve been saying that this case appeared to me to involve a troubling dynamic around race, privilege and who receives sympathy and understanding.
And if anything, what’s happening now is making that concern feel even more relevant to me.
I said before that this looked like a case of white privilege.
And now, watching a Black juror become a target for doing his civic duty while people passionately defend a white defendant, I think the issue deserves even more scrutiny.
Not because I think every person involved is racist.
Not because I think every person defending Clancy is acting in bad faith.
And not because I think every person criticizing the juror is motivated by the same thing.
It’s because consistency matters.
If your principles disappear the moment the facts become inconvenient for your side, then they’re not really principles.
They’re just positions.
And I’m going to keep applying the same standard regardless of whose side happens to benefit from it.
And there’s another thing I want to add to this prediction.
When I first saw the memes, parody videos, and social-media commentary about the holdout juror, I actually assumed he was white.
Why?
Because that’s how a lot of the online commentary was presenting the story.
The image being created was basically this caricature of a white man standing against women, or a white male juror supposedly refusing to give a woman the benefit of the doubt.
So when I later learned that the holdout juror was actually Black, I had to stop and go, wait a fucking minute.
That doesn’t prove that every meme, parody or post was intentionally racist. But it does show how easily social media can construct a narrative around somebody without people even knowing who that person actually is.
And that’s part of why I’m making this prediction.
I wonder what happens when people who built their entire opinion around that imagined version of the juror suddenly have to confront the fact that the person they were talking about isn’t who they assumed he was.
Because if someone’s principles change simply because the juror turns out to be Black, that tells me something about the principle—not about the juror.
And that’s why I’m trying to apply the same standard I had before I knew his race.
I don’t think jurors should be doxxed.
I don’t think jurors should be intimidated.
I don’t think someone should be attacked for disagreeing with the rest of the jury.
And I don’t think any of those principles should suddenly change depending on whether the juror is white, Black, male, female, or anything else.
That’s what consistency means to me.