More than a
week after the Lindsay Clancy trial ended in a hung jury — with a lone holdout refusing to acquit the 36-year-old for killing her young children — the media has continued to probe how one man forced a mistrial in the triple-murder case. “I hope that guy can sleep well at night,” Clancy’s defense attorney
told
reporters. “Whatever his agenda was, he stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.”
Commentators have been strikingly sympathetic toward Clancy, showing compassion for her struggle with severe postpartum mental illness. Meanwhile, the unnamed juror, who is Black, has been widely criticized for allegedly violating his duty to follow the law. The press has dug into his own criminal history, from reports of domestic abuse, which were
dismissed
, to failure to
pay rent
.
The attention devoted to the Clancy trial — and the wave of anger over the juror’s intransigence — stands in sharp contrast with the silence over a different murder case, which is about to culminate in an execution.
At the Georgia death penalty trial of Stacey Humphreys, who was convicted of committing a double murder, a lone juror “appears to have singlehandedly changed the verdict from life without parole to death,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
wrote
last year. The woman’s actions, she concluded, amounted to “extreme juror misconduct.” Yet the high court has refused to consider Humphreys’s case — and media attention on the upcoming execution has been virtually nonexistent.
“The whole legal commentariat weighed in on what happens when a juror didn’t follow the rules in the Clancy trial,” organizer Hannah Riley Fernandez, director of programming at the Center for Just Journalism,
wrote
on social media, “meanwhile GA is about to kill someone whose juror did the same & MUCH more.”
Humphreys was sentenced
to die in 2007 for murdering two real estate agents, 21-year-old Lori Brown and 33-year-old Cyndi Williams, at a model home just outside Atla
