A Tale of Two Jurors

W hen Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) held out against eleven jurors in 12 Angry Men, he was viewed as “open-minded.” When a juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial held out, the defense told the judge he was refusing to apply the law, and the other eleven jurors spent seven days trying to wear him down. Nearly 70 years after the most beloved courtroom film of all time was released (though I, like Armond White, find that admiration absurd), which of these holdouts ought we to admire? Hollywood teaches us to respect the wrong one.

To refresh the movie’s premise: A man has been stabbed to death, and the jury must decide whether his 18-year-old son did it. The son admits he bought a switchblade after his father hit him; an identical knife was found in the father’s chest the same day. The downstairs neighbor testifies that he heard the son shout that he would kill his father, then a thud, then saw the son run down the stairs. A woman across the street swears she watched the stabbing. The son says the knife fell out of his pocket on the way to a double feature whose titles he could not name, at a theater where no one saw him. He has a checkered history: throwing a rock at a teacher at 10, reform school at 15, and arrests for mugging and knife-fighting (twice). That’s the record the film asks twelve men (and the audience) to doubt.

To refresh Clancy’s case: A labor-and-delivery nurse took her daughter to the pediatrician, built a snowman with her children, and texted the pictures to her husband and her mother. At 4 p.m., she looked up how long the drive was from her house to a restaurant, ordered dinner there, called the pharmacy about a prescription, and asked her husband to pick up both. While he was out she strangled her kids — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — with exercise bands in the basement, cut her wrists and neck, and jumped from a second-story window. Her husband came home to find the children unresponsive in the basement and called 911. Clancy has never denied her actions. She says a voice commanded her, though she had never reported hearing one before that day.

Back to the film: On the first ballot, eleven vote for a guilty verdict. Then Juror #8 reaches into his pocket and stabs a second switchblade into the table beside the murder weapon. He bought it the night before, illegally, two blocks from where the murder took place. While this makes for a dramatic movie moment, jurors are not detectives. Because the prosecution never got a chance to respond to Juror #8’s independent investigation, the jurors should have reported it, and the judge should have considered declaring a mistrial.

In the film, the jury never thinks to report the man who broke the law to buy a knife. But on the Clancy jury, when a single juror had the audacity to break ranks with the shared judgment of the other eleven, the defense tried to get him off the case — again, merely for a difference of opinion.

In 12 Angry Men, increasingly elaborate countertheories abound in the jury room. For example, one juror announces, based on his experience growing up in a rough neighborhood, he believes that no experienced knife-fighter would stab someone in a downward motion (never mind that the murder did occur that way, and at home, not in a street fight). The jurors refuse to interpret the son’s record as a sign that he might stab someone, but rather welcome it as proof that he was too experienced to stab like that. In the Clancy trial, jurors with backgrounds in nursing explained the toxicology report to the room, then complained on television that the holdout disregarded an explanation no one had cross-examined.

The prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond every conceivable objection. In the film, the son had motive (having been hit by his father), means (the precise model of knife used in the murder), and arguably opportunity (depending on whether you believe that he went to the movies). But the jury releases the only suspect. Where is the righteous anger for the murder victim?

For a story about one man standing against eleven, 12 Angry Men is mostly a study in how eleven men can be worn down. The film blames the prejudice of the jury for resisting acquittal and credits Juror #8’s lack of one. But Juror #8 came in with his prejudice, too: In his first speech to his fellow jurors, he says that the man on trial was born in a slum, lost his mother at nine, and has been kicked around all his life. He spends the afternoon in the deliberation room finding the evidence that fits with his own views.

We don’t know what prejudices the jurors brought to the Clancy trial. But, in television interviews, jurors have confessed that, midway through deliberations, they committed to group media interviews to “get that conversation going” about postpartum depression (a condition that generally fails to induce mothers to kill their children). One juror insisted that Clancy was an “amazing mother”; another asserted that the jury wanted to “come through for Lindsay.” They found the prosecutors cold and the defense lawyer compassionate, and they insisted that “everything proved that she loved her children so she had to have snapped.”

But to say of a woman who strangled her children that she “snapped” is to say that nothing was done — only that something happened. The moment we believe that, Clancy ceases to be a person and becomes a case. The whole reason why juries are made up of peers is that they are not experts. The judge has seen a thousand corpses, and the lawyer has explained a thousand of them away; the point of the juror is that he has seen none and will therefore see this one (or three). In 12 Angry Men, the jury acquits a likely murderer as they pile up unreasonable doubts. In the Clancy trial, eleven jurors were prepared to acquit a woman who admits she strangled her three children — but one man held out that murder was a fact rather than a mood. Justice may yet be done.