The Lindsay Clancy Case: Everything That Led to the 11-1 Mistrial & Everyone's Reaction

Stephanie Soo (0:02)

I would bet at least one full dollar that I will not make it into a jury deliberation room for the foreseeable future. But I imagine that it's akin to being a hostage in a bank heist. You have strangers cramped into a stale room day after day, the tension keeps building, and once in a while, you can send a note out. One note to a judge on a drug case reads, Tension is high, nerves are frayed, all minds are not sound.

Then 5 minutes later, another juror from that same deliberation room sends another note that they think jury duty is worse than a prison sentence because at least someone in prison gets 3 meals a day and a free education. Jury rage and distress is very real, and it's kind of scary to think about it. Justice will be dictated by people who are getting exhausted and are quickly heading towards distress. One New York court officer says they had to break up a fist fight before, and once they heard jurors screaming so loudly at each other that other floors of the courthouse could hear that jury. It has gotten a lot better. There's a lot more thought going into how to make the process smoother for jurors. Some courts give out booklets on how to debate while being courteous. Other courts are focused on how to make jurors feel more physically comfortable to help with any distress they may feel. So bigger deliberation rooms, better food, better snacks.

But jury tension is, oh, apparently some courthouses even put the nicest clerks to deal with the jurors. Because they don't want your... Yeah, the most patient one, the most accommodating, the kindest ones.

SPEAKER_2 (1:32)

So like when they're deliberating, there's nobody else in the room, right? Except 12 of them. I see. You have the court officers outside. Outside, but not inside.

Stephanie Soo (1:41)

Do they get paid? No. Well, some trials you do.

But it's like $40 a day, I think. It's for travel and food. But no, you don't get paid. It's not like paid time off, right?

And it's not time off, but yeah. Jury tension is unavoidable during deliberations, especially when it's not a unanimous front from the beginning. That's why notes keep getting sent. One note to a judge unrelated to this case reads, the atmosphere in the jury room has turned poisonous. Deliberations are irreparably compromised. Another note reads, one juror is not participating at all in the deliberation process and sleeps most of the time. Can something be done with this situation? For one trial, there was one holdout juror, meaning everybody else agreed except this one individual. The rest of the jurors insulted the holdout, threatened them, and then eventually resorted to the completely legal and logical route of chucking a chair at the holdout. They missed, and I don't know if this is the fact that they missed, but the chair thrower immediately apologized to the holdout juror. But another juror, unhappy, still threatened to punch the holdout. Yeah, okay, side note, the holdout wanted to hold a pharmaceutical company liable for knowing about the effects of one of their drugs and not putting the warnings on the labels. Yeah. Yeah, but the other 11 did not want to hold them liable, and that was like a whole thing. She had to write a letter to the judge inside the courthouse, inside the jury deliberation room, like some sort of bank heist hostage, and she wrote, I am being intimidated, threatened, screamed at, I need a police escort out of here. I'm afraid to come back. I cannot in good conscious vote for a case because of threats. Which is arguably more admirable than another group of jurors that decided that they were going to flip a coin to see if they could convict a man for killing his girlfriend. Now, to be fair, that coin flip was not between guilty and not guilty. That coin flip was between murder and manslaughter, but it landed on murder. It did not stick though. The judge had to declare a mistrial after finding out about the coin toss. The jurors were confused why that verdict was thrown out. They said, well, we were going to be a hung jury anyway, so we thought, what do we have to lose?

If someone is deciding my fate with a coin, it better at least be a fucking quarter. For one of the Bill Cosby trials, tensions were so high that a male juror punched a concrete wall. Another juror said, I think he broke his pinky knuckle. If we kept going, there definitely was going to be a fight. They had five sheriff's deputies at the door, and they could hear us, and they kept coming in because they thought we were already fighting. Also, the room was so small for those deliberations, the jurors said we were losing our goddamn minds. One juror says people couldn't even pace. They were literally just walking in circles where they were standing because we were losing our minds. People would just start crying out of nowhere. We wouldn't even be talking about the case, and people would just start crying.