The Lindsay Clancy Trial, Day 27: Holdout. 11-1

A judge in Plymouth, Massachusetts spent Thursday afternoon reading twelve adults the definition of a word.

Not the evidence. Not the eighty-odd witnesses. A definition. Reasonable doubt. Because a note came out of that jury room saying one person in there will not take it.

Disagreeing with eleven people is allowed. That's the job. Refusing the standard itself is something else, and it's about to blow up five weeks of trial.

Six days of deliberation. Thirty-six and a half hours. Split eleven to one. Judge Sullivan has already spent the dynamite charge, and under Massachusetts law he can't use it again without the jury's permission. Kevin Reddington stood up in open court and asked him to throw the holdout off the panel. Sullivan said no. They're back Friday morning.

This episode: what actually happened in that courtroom Thursday, why courts almost never remove a holdout juror and why you should be glad they don't, and what a mistrial would actually mean for this case.

Plus the number nobody in the discourse wants to look at. For three weeks the argument was that a jury of nine women and three men would split along sex. That prediction needed nine to three. It got eleven to one, and there is no way to reach eleven from a pool of nine women without bringing men along.

And there is one thing I'm not telling you in this episode, about the identity of the holdout, and the reason why is the most important part of the whole hour.

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