The Instruction Lindsay Clancy’s Jury Was Never Meant to Understand

Tony Brueski (0:01)

This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:11)

How would you have handled it if you were in the jury room in the Lindsay Clancy trial? Obviously, you know, you are entitled to your opinion and interpreting what happened in that courtroom to render your verdict. There, of course, are the jury instructions, which, by the way, you're in luck. We're going to talk about today because they're about as clear as mud. Clear as mud, mixed with a seven-layer burrito and all of the aftermath of a horrific mudslide that's gone through multiple villages, carrying people, buildings, wreckage, pieces of mountains, while being strown into the sky through a volcano, dipped to the bottom of the ocean underneath the Titanic, with all the sludge and goo that came out of the set of Double Dare in 1988 Mix all of that together. And that is exactly how clear the jury instructions are. We're going to go literally through some of these instructions and show you just how contradictory they are. This is not any sort of piece to say this juror is wrong or this juror is right. This is just to show you how broken our system is. No matter what outcome you want, this is not about guilty, not guilty, not guilty of the reason of insanity, none of that. This is just... We wonder why we end up in these places. We wonder why we end up stuck. We wonder why we end up not being able to go anywhere. Well, it would help if we actually look at the crux of how some of these machines work, the gears to which should be going together and helping the machine and the cogs turn. Yeah. Well, they got gummed up a long time ago, and nobody's ever gone back and said, maybe we should fix this.

So, you do go through this. So, give me your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Links are in the description, and press subscribe wherever you get podcasts. If you're not already taking us with you on the road where you get podcasts, please do Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever you like. Linktree is right there. There's the QR code. Follow and please press subscribe. I'm going to read you something.

I'm gonna read you a lot of things, actually, that they're gonna make you go, hmm, listen to every word, because this is what we handed 12 people and told them to use to decide a woman's future. Quote, ready? A person is not criminally responsible for her conduct if she has a mental disease or defect. And as a result of that mental disease or defect, she lacks a substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. Okay, here's what that paragraph is actually asking 12 civilians to decide. Did Lindsay Clancy have a mental illness? If she did, did that illness take away her ability to understand what she was doing or her ability to stop herself even if she understood? Okay, I'm not here to argue right, wrong, any of that. I'm just saying here's what was in the instructions because we're going to do a little comparing and contrasting here of some of these jury instructions that, like I said, clear as mud and the prosecution has to prove she could understand that she could stop. That's essentially what that rule in Massachusetts is. Prosecution, that is, that's their burden. If the jury has any reasonable doubt about that, the law says acquit and a lot of people are stopping and saying, see, according to the jury instructions, this, the holdout juror, everybody wants to hang out with the fire, who I do not agree with personally, by the way, but I am objective in my thinking and I'm going to look at all of the instructions to see was he following the law or was he not?

This is one part of the instructions. There's more to it. There's more to it. Because if that were it, you are right. He did not follow what the law was. But that's, it's not like a one that's not it. I wish the jury instructions were about a paragraph and you could summarize them in about 30 seconds because that's even a little bit more than most of us can comprehend in a sitting. No, they go on for hours.

They go on and on and on. It's like an agreement with your cell phone carrier. You know, the ones you just scroll through, like the 40,000 pages and then hit agree because you want to continue on with your life and not spend the next two months reading about the agreements and everything you're talking to your cell phone carrier about. Yeah, I mean, this is a little different.