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One of the primary tenets of the American legal system is the importance of precedent; the common law doctrine of “stare decisis” means “to stand by things decided.” The purpose of law in such a system is to provide stability and predictability, so that people can conform their conduct to the law’s requirements.
Another way of describing this is “the rule of law.” At its core, the rule of law in this country means that all individuals and entities, including the government, are subject to the same laws, which will be applied fairly, consistently and uniformly. This principle is at the very foundation of the U.S. government and legal system.
The importance of the rule of law is one of the reasons the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy trial continues to create shockwaves. Eleven of the 12 jurors voted to acquit Clancy of murder, even though Clancy killed her three small children.
In one of her many recent interviews, Clancy juror Paula Devlin said that she and the other women on the jury saw the case as an opportunity “to make it better for other women in the future.” “Justice for those children,” she said, “is this never happening again.”
Those are manifestly incorrect statements. The jurors in the Clancy case have no control over whether some other woman someplace else kills her children. Making things “better for other women” was not their job. Nor was it their job to make sure that Clancy “gets the help she needs.” Their job – their only job – was determining whether Clancy knew right from wrong when she committed those acts.
Devlin was also the person who “outed” the juror who would not vote to acquit Clancy, by revealing to Gayle King on “CBS Mornings” that the lone holdout was one of three men and the only Black person on the jury. That man has since been under vicious and relentless attack on traditional and social media.
That juror made his decision based on his evaluation of the evidence. He decided that Clancy knew what she was doing and was therefore guilty. He had that right, just as any juror in a criminal case does.
The jurors who have given interviews have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing their feelings. That is irrelevant. If a jury’s verdict is based not upon what the law is but upon “feelings,” then the result in any given case will depend on who’s deciding the case and how you can make them “feel,” not on the facts and what the law requires.
That is unpredictable. It is subject to enormous abuse. It is a recipe for chaos. And yet it seems to be a common modus operandi for women.
Applying the law as it is, is difficult and lonely work. It sometimes produces results that are deeply unsatisfying, and it will rarely make you popular. You must be willing to consider not only the impact of your decision in this particular case, but the longer-term implications – the precedential effect. If a primary motivation for your actions is what other people think of you, how decisions make you feel about yourself, or how something is going to play on social media, you are ill-suited for the job.
In short, it takes not only intellectual integrity and a clear-headed understanding of human nature, but also vision and courage.
In truth, however, those attributes seem to be in short supply among woman and men in leadership roles, in the legal profession and elsewhere. We live, increasingly, in a culture where “truth” is a matter of opinion, “science” is whatever someone needs it to be to advance their agenda, and “right” and “wrong” don’t exist, except to the extent that you can whip up an irate consensus among your ill-informed followers on TikTok.
The American legal system as we have known it cannot survive that.
Our second president, John Adams, once wrote that “the rule of law” in the United States means that ours is “a government of laws and not of men.”
Or women.