The Lindsay Clancy murder trial was one in which a woman was accused of the premeditated murder of her three children but who pleaded insanity as a defense. Because juror unanimity is required in all criminal cases brought before the courts in America, and because one juror held out for conviction and refused to budge, the judge called a mistrial.
Popular opinion on the trial was divided. Liberal white women cheered Clancy who claimed that the hormonal disruption caused by pregnancy and birth was the cause of her post-partum psychosis, rendering her unable to tell right from wrong, addling her reason and good judgment. Her mental disruption was so severe that neither drugs nor counselling could right the ship. She was on an inevitable course to complete insanity.
These women who defiantly supported Clancy said that men could never know the reality of the hormonal hell that women suffer. Not only are they hostage to a punitive menstrual cycle, become depressed and irretrievably despondent during menopause, but must go through the existential crisis of post-partum depression and psychosis. Clancy was a victim, a sufferer, and should be understood and forgiven.
Not only should she be exonerated because she was not sane when she committed the murders, said her attorneys, but her psychosis had been caused by male patriarchal abuse. Her independent womanhood had been damaged by a bullying, insensitive husband, and her rationality had been completely upset and deranged by his actions. She had lost control over an ordinarily moral, just, and loving psyche.
It was a woman thing, a feminist thing.
Only one juror refused to buckle under the hectoring and badgering of the liberal white women and the two men who, cowed and fearful, went along. The holdout juror said that Clancy had deliberately, consciously, and premeditatively killed her children.
She planned the murder, sending her husband away on a lengthy errand and searched the web for information on asphyxiation times and outcomes. She rationally and cold-bloodedly strangled each of her children one by one as each watched in terror.
No defense, no excuses, no mitigating circumstances could forgive or exonerate this heinous, evil act said the prosecution. Other murderers like the infamous killer of seventeen men and boys, Jeffrey Dahmer, pleaded insanity, but in short order the jury convicted him of first degree murder. Other women accused of murdering their children and claiming the insanity defense were summarily convicted and send to prison for life.
Times had changed, said prosecutors after the mistrial, and the infection of political progressivism had so infected the public and every institution of America had spread to the courts. Only in today's fevered, hateful, divided, self-righteous society could any juror possibly defend the satanic act of Lindsay Clancy.
Now after the mistrial, the women jurors who felt that it deprived them of their rights and saw justice mishandled and corrupted, decided to speak out. The one lone male juror who refused to listen to reason was 'fixated on the murder of the three children', one interviewee said, exposing the contradictions in the trial itself. The holdout was 'fixated' by his misogynistic, hateful ways. The trial was not about the brutal murder of three innocent babies but about female sovereignty.
Now, the kicker. When a CBS reporter, a black woman, asked a female juror who had voted for acquittal about the racial makeup of the jury, and was told that the holdout juror was black, she did a double take, and flummoxed and unable to respond, could only say, 'I need to sit on this for a while'.
Everything that she assumed - that it simply had to be a white, ultra-conservative, Trump MAGA supporter, and that only a white, privileged, misogynist, racist male could be against Lindsay Clancy - was wrong. In that once instant she was befuddled. How could she join her sisters in condemning the holdout if he was black, a protected minority, an assumed victim and progressive?
The black community, already dismissive of the white liberalism which has patronized the black man for decades, jumped to the holdout juror’s defense. He was no Uncle Tom, no Yes Massa house slave, no plaything, no pitiable excuse for a man. As Malcom X said
The White liberal is the worst enemy to America and the worst enemy to the Black man... They are the people who are jockeying for power...fighting each other for booty, for power, for prestige and the one who is the football in the game is the Negro. Twenty million Black people in this country are a political football, a political pawn an economic football, an economic pawn, a social football, a social pawn...
The women on the jury had already admitted buying into the whole hormone rule premise, suggesting that women, despite all the cant of the past decades, were beholden to biology, and further suggesting that since these hormones were so disruptive, no woman should ever be given responsibility for others. Now they were admitting their reverse racism, their snide and indefensible patronizing of the black man.
If there ever was a reason to question the motives, ethics, and morality of liberal white woman, said black commentators, it was now.
The expression on CBS reporter Gayle King's face when she was told that the holdout juror was black was priceless. She was dumbfounded, shocked, rocked, and incredulous. There was no way that a brother could have been a traitor to the cause of women's rights, progressive liberalism, and blackness.
What did this say to the viewing world? That a black man actually had agency, rectitude, courage, a sense of justice, compassion and moral fidelity? How could he be any of these things without the liberal support of white women like the nine jurors of the jury?
And here was Gayle King betwixt and between - a black person who should not be surprised at the fortitude and moral compunction of a brother but who is; a woman who should support all women's claims but is a supposedly objective reporter; an avowed liberal now loosed from her moorings. It was a jaws-dropping, shameful spectacle.
'The bitch killed her kids, muthafucka. What more is there to say', said Pharoah Jones on social media immediately getting five thousand 'likes'. Indeed, what more can possibly be said about a woman who committed the most heinous crime imaginable - a mother murdering her innocent children and forcing them to watch?
No one event to demonstrated the divisions within America as did this trial - white against black, men against women, liberals against conservatives - and the divisiveness will only continue.
The prosecution has to decide whether to try Clancy again, plea bargain a settlement, or drop the case. The odds are on a new trial, and the voir dire and the judge's rulings will have to take the clear bias of the previous jurors into consideration? Should progressive women not serve? Is there such thing these days as a non-partisan American?
The lines are drawn more firmly and clearly than ever. The retrial if there is one will become an even more cause celebre than the first one, a media show, a complete circus, and a trial of whether or not the American judicial system can actually mete out justice.
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