DARREN LEWIS: 'Judging jurors makes mockery of proper justice'

Everywhere you look right now there are signs that our society is still in meltdown. Not just because of the £72million handed to far-right corporate lobby group Reform UK by a couple of billionaires and the devastating potential impact on British politics. Or Barnet Council’s move to hire Laura Johnson, the disgraced housing director who was in place at Kensington and Chelsea before and after the Grenfell fire that killed 72 people (good luck explaining that decision to Barnet residents). No. The issue that leaves this column most in despair focuses on the issue of Postpartum Psychosis [PP], a condition few of us knew anything about until last week’s Lindsay Clancy verdict. NHS UK describes it as a severe mental health emergency, sparking extreme mood swings and a sudden loss of reality within days or weeks after childbirth. Clancy, a Massachusetts mother of three, strangled her children – Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan – at her home. It took several minutes for each of them to die. In what has been a complex, nuanced case, 36-year-old Clancy had never denied killing her children but pleaded not guilty. Her legal team argued she’d been suffering from PP, so should not have been held criminally responsible. But a mistrial was declared after a lone male juror refused to accept, under pressure from a majority female jury, that Clancy was not guilty by way of insanity. This column doesn’t have an opinion on Clancy’s guilt or innocence. Yes, I’m a dad but I’m neither a woman nor a mother. Nor was I in court to hear all the facts. But now the focus has now turned on the juror – a Black man – for sticking to his honestly held opinions. His credibility and character have been ripped to shreds. One US TV station has raked through his private life, publicised his divorce and his family disputes and even revealed he was being evicted from his home over unpaid rent. What does any of that have to do with his position on Lindsay Clancy? Millions of people here in the UK hate jury service as it is. The damage the past few days will have done for future jurors – and for American justice – is incalculable. Since news of his position came to light, the holdout juror – as he has come to be known – has been portrayed by some fellow jurors as an imbecile. But perhaps he’d been concerned that Clancy had seen lots of health professionals as she struggled in the months before the killings – with none of them reporting signs of PP or that she’d mentioned it. Perhaps he was concerned that some of the female jurors were, as they’ve since shown in broadcast interviews, ignoring the facts of the case and were using it as a vehicle for activism. Perhaps he was concerned that his fellow jurors dismissed – as they’ve since admitted in an interview – the actual evidence as “medical BS” and ignored a specific instruction from the judge not to lean on what they believed to be their own expertise. And here’s the thing. Juries are made up of ordinary people, just like you or me. Not necessarily that smart. Just keen to get out of there and get back on with their lives. People who understand that some arguments can and should be taken at face value while others can be advanced by legal experts skilled in the art of sophistry on behalf of rich defendants. If we disqualified jury members unable to articulate that distinction we’d have no jury system at all. Instead, while Clancy committed the killings, the holdout juror has become the villain nationwide because, in the words of one female fellow juror: “he had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” As any reasonable person would. She gets context, sympathy and nuance. He gets his life torn to pieces. Clancy’s legal team have already soft-launched their bid to end the whole thing on the basis that she wouldn’t be able to “emotionally handle” a retrial. Her three little children couldn’t be reached for comment.