The more the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case speaks, the more I feel as if I’m watching some sort of irreverent funeral. Trial by jury is one of those ancient traditions older than even our country; it’s not so much a building block of our society as a boundary. To one side is law and order and all the ancient customs of our race, and the other side’s a steep drop into savagery which we just drove over. We have not, it is true, quite fallen into the ditch, but I’m not perfectly sanguine that we can reverse.
I was trying to withhold judgement. I said to myself, I am not on the jury. Perhaps the News has lied to me as it has always lied. Maybe I’d see things quite differently if I were there. Maybe a hung jury means there are reasonable people on both sides of the issue.
Then the jury spoke, and the memes came. I mean, how can we not laugh at the absurdity? No, the gut instinct seems to have been validated: Clancy slew her children with forethought, and no matter how crazy she is, she seems to have clearly known what she was doing. We may call her motives insane, or infernal, but she knew what she was doing. She was in the grip of insanity, except in the middle of her crime when she was on the phone with her husband. That is, whenever she was actually observed she was quite sane. She seemed rather sane in her ability to plan it all out, in her ability to do it, and only when it came time to end her own life did she lose touch with reality, cutting her wrists in a way that wouldn’t make her bleed out, and jumping to her death from a height that wouldn’t kill her.
Or so the events have been told to me. I wasn’t there. What I have witnessed are the hags of the jury. Witchcraft, the essence of witchcraft, that is, its telos, is the killing of children. The jury was convened to judge a witch, and let it not be said that Clancy was not judged by her peers: it seems a good number of witches were seated in the box. It is, as it were, a joke, something from a children’s cartoon: a person is on trial for very obviously committing a certain crime, but pan over to the judge or the jury, and you realize that those set to adjudicate are themselves quite as guilty and far from likely to care about the law in this case.
The jurors themselves went in already decided, so they themselves have said, and we all can’t help but laugh. In this world of abortion, what Clancy did is no different from what about a quarter of women in the country have done. We are a nation divided, and half of us have no real philosophical ground to condemn—let me be clearer—half of us have a philosophy that had no other course than to acquit. One half of the country mumbles, trying not to make eye contact with the nearby harpy, that, in the grand scheme of things, murder is probably wrong while the other celebrates it.
Yes, this is what trial by jury is: in this day and age, to be judged by your peers is to be judged by a coven of witches who find nothing more serene, nothing of such exquisite sublimity, than for a mother to dismember her helpless child.
Tale Told 