What the Lindsay Clancy Mistrial Revealed About Every Level of the System

Robin Drake (0:02)

This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre.

Tony Brueski (0:09)

Well, the Lindsay Clancy trial has obviously come to an end. But the scuttlebutt, the controversy around all of it, certainly has not. There's a lot of questions that are still out there, a lot of questions about the holdout juror. Were they following the letter of the law in terms of reasonable doubt? There's evidence, there's claims from some other jurors that on that charge, that responsibility of being a juror, that maybe they were. But were they holding true to the other part of their responsibility of holding true to their convictions? If you believe they believe they did what they did because that's what they believe, then they were.

The two can't really be in the same room at the same time, but the jury instructions ask you to make both of them coexist. We're here to explain why they can't, and why it's not necessarily a problem of maybe the juror or the jury, but more so the rules to which govern them, and the instructions to which we say, here, play by these. Oh, wait, they don't make any sense. Well, figure it out, kids. There's only someone's life on the line. Here to help us do all of that, Bob Motta, Defense Attorney, host of the podcast Defense Diaries, joins us for Tuesdays with Bob, along with Robin Drake, retired FBI Special Agency for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, and master class extraordinaire, Robin Drake. He is with us as well. Bob, I've been looking forward to talking with you about this because I mean, it gets into the the legal weeds and it gets a little confusing, very confusing as you try and work your way through it. But let's start here because the the argument that's being made on social media, and I get it to see from the the letter of the law, did this holdout juror have reasonable doubt? Other jurors are saying that he admitted to having reasonable doubt, but just flat out refused to check the box for for not guilty by reason of insanity because he was following his convictions. Both things true at the same time kind of leads to a bit of a problem now, doesn't it, Bob?

Sounds like it anyway.

Bob, your mic's off.

Bob Motta (2:39)

Sorry about that.

Tony Brueski (2:40)

Yeah.

Bob Motta (2:41)

When I drink my coffee, I mute it so you don't hear the coffee.

Tony Brueski (2:44)

How polite of you.

Bob Motta (2:46)

I mean, you know, but the end game is I leave myself muted, which happens all the time in my show. Yeah. Look, man, like before we even jump into it, everything that we know about what's been going on in that room or what went on in that room is coming from four or five of the people who in theory have lost the argument, right? So the holdout hasn't said a word.

So what I'm doing is I'm taking the account of the people that are speaking as their own accounts. It's not a finding. So you know what I mean? And until we actually hear from this guy, if we ever do.

Tony Brueski (3:24)

These are the accounts of the people who were in that room, but they are accounts. They are not, it's not a recording.

Robin Drake (3:29)

We're not looking back at the tape.

Bob Motta (3:30)

There's no transcript of it.

Tony Brueski (3:32)

There's no transcript of it.

Bob Motta (3:33)

But for argument's sake, if it's accurate, if he said, you know, I've got a reasonable doubt, I see the reasonable doubt, but I don't care. I'm not doing it. You know, reasonable doubt isn't an opinion you get to hold and then decline to act on. It's a switch. Like once you flip it, the verdict form itself is filled out. That's it. If you said, well, there's reasonable doubt, boop, that's it. It's over. There's no more conversation. Like this is, there is no back and forth. If you say that there's reasonable doubt, that's, it's done. The deliberations are done. That's how that thing operates.

It's the one thing that jurors are not permitted to do. I mean, if it's true, if he said, yeah, okay, whatever, I see the reasonable doubt after seven days of everybody screaming at him. He says, this is where I'm at with it. I see that there's reasonable doubt, but I don't care for all the reasons that we've talked about for the last month. He's one of those, maybe one of those eye for an eye guys.

She killed her kids, she gets punished, period, end of conversation.