Several jurors in the Lindsay Clancy trial appear to have openly admitted to violating jury instruction by using their own experience to make their decision on a verdict while deliberating.
In an exclusive interview with NBC 10, a handful of the female jurors who voted to acquit Clancy bemoaned the lone male holdout. The jurors, among them nurses, accused the male holdout of being “very arrogant.” One juror said that the holdout wanted to focus on the toxicology report and that “the nurses in the room spoke to that … they spoke to that specific thing” as if their expertise should have forced him to accept their interpretation of the evidence. The jurors then decried that the lone male holdout “completely disregarded” their supposed expertise, and said the male juror “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
But disregarding the nurses’ outside opinions is precisely what the judge told the jurors to do.
According to the court transcript, the judge told jurors: “If somebody has a question in that jury room, you are not allowed to try and answer it by anything other than through the exhibits and evidence you’ve heard.”
By the jurors’ own account then several of them appeared to have violated jury instructions. The jurors, by their own admission, used their own experience to interpret the evidence and then demeaned and badgered the holdout for refusing to defer to them. The lone male holdout apparently was using only the sworn testimony and evidence introduced in court to make his decision, which is exactly what the judge instructed.
As The Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said in a post on X “For purposes of a jury trial, those women have no expertise. None. The only experts are those who testify and can be cross-examined. If they tried to introduce their own alleged (and unsworn) expertise and then used it within deliberations to badger another juror, that is a bright line violation of the instructions the judge provided to the jury.”
In fact, as Davis further points out, the nurses lacked even actual expertise in the subject matter. Nurses do not undergo the same schooling that doctors go, nor can they prescribe medications or make diagnoses. Even more so, their supposed knowledge was not presented under oath, nor subject to cross examination.
While a mistrial has been declared, Davis points out that “The judge in the Clancy case needs to hold contempt of court hearings for the nurse jurors who reportedly ignored expert witness testimony and brought in external information (who could possibly understand the information without an external background lecture from nurses on the jury), rather than relying on expert witness testimony, and then used that to attempt to bully a juror into agreeing with them.”
While the jurors portrayed the lone male holdout as arrogant for refusing to defer to them, their own words suggest he may have been the only juror in the room willing to decide Clancy’s verdict based on the actual evidence presented.
