This is not another opinion article about Lindsay Clancy.

Well, not really.

I'm not qualified to discuss the woman's actions or the validity of her insanity defense in a murder trial for several million reasons at least. I've learned over the last few weeks that I'm one of the 10 people in the world who aren't interested in learning much about the terrible events in January 2023. I guess there's just something about hearing the details of a mother killing her three small kids that repels me.

I also didn't sit on the jury, and I'm not of the opinion that I can become an expert in the case by obsessively listening to true crime podcasts or by posting on Facebook and internet message boards. I have absorbed, against my will, more than I ever wanted to know, picking it up going through my daily life like a cat owner picks up hair on black leggings. I cling to the conviction that I cannot apply my patchwork knowledge to anything like judgment in the matter.

But there's one thing I do know a little bit about, and that's juries.

In decades of being a journalist, I've watched juries be empaneled. I have waited as they deliberated. I've heard the questions they ask judges, and the excuses they use to try to get out of sitting in a trial.

And when I learned that the mistrial in the Clancy case was one juror holding out against 11 angry jurors on the other side, I had a feeling I might be able to guess a bit at how the deliberations had gone.

On social media, I saw a short clip of one of the jurors complaining about how the lone holdout had not listened to them as they talked, that he had looked at his phone, talked to his wife instead of engaging in further debate. What a human instinct, to avoid confrontation unlikely to bear fruit.

I read another tidbit that said the holdout appeared more interested in making the jurors listen to each other and not talk over one another than he did in coming to a unanimous conclusion. Sounds like a group of people having trouble communicating, who perhaps were eager to get home to their families and were tired of being reasonable.

There are allegations about the holdout juror — that he might have had a checkered past, or perhaps that he shouldn't even have been allowed to be on a jury in the first place due to an existing restraining order. I'm not a judge or an expert in Massachusetts law, so for the purposes of this discussion, let us set aside the personal details of who these jurors are. Let us only consider that there were 12 people locked in a room together for days on end, with the fate of a human being on the line, and the culpability for the deaths of three children weighing in the balance.

There is something strange and almost mystical about the environment in which a group of people, strangers at the start, come together on a jury. They are a group, but they act as one, on behalf of justice, carrying out a mission that has been relatively unchanged for thousands of years.

And yet, at the same time, juries are profoundly pedestrian. They, as individuals, get hungry. They get tired. They get lonely. They want to go home. They bring their personal experiences to a trial. They bring their opinions, their politics and their fears.

They have biases — sometimes they don't like men who wear suits and ties because it reminds them of their distant and cruel father. Sometimes they think all women will lie whenever it suits them because they once dated a pathological liar.

These are the limitations, not of the jury in the Clancy trial, but of all juries everywhere. When attorneys impanel a jury, they try to weed out jurors with the worst of these limitations, but they cannot find a perfect juror because there is no such thing as a perfect human being.

Sometimes they team up against another person; sometimes they create cliques. There are complex interpersonal dynamics that change from jury to jury and from trial to trial. The way a person behaves in one jury might be entirely different from the way that same person would behave in another, surrounded by different people, assessing a different case, in a different time and place.

All of this is to say that though there have — of course — been miscarriages of justice due to juries, the horrors they have inflicted pale in comparison to those that have been inflicted by other ways of dispensing justice. The numbers of wrongly convicted, corruptly prosecuted and improperly punished have been and sometimes still are orders of magnitude more common in dictatorships, kingdoms and anarchistic societies.

I keep that in mind before I criticize anyone or anything in this case — the mistrial, the prosecutors, the defense, the judge and especially the jurors themselves.

Because I keep thinking about one important detail: Like democracies and getting old, juries beat the alternative every time.

Photo credit: Wesley Tingey at Unsplash