Juries of Our Peers

On March 5, 1770, an angry mob surrounded a British sentry outside the Customs House in Boston, Mass. As the mob began to throw snowballs and ice at the guard, British reinforcements arrived at the scene. By that time, the mob had grown to hundreds of people. In the resulting melee, a British soldier was knocked to the ground. The British soldiers opened fire on the crowd, killing three Americans immediately and fatally wounding two others. The incident became known as the Boston Massacre and helped fuel the movement toward the American Revolution.

The soldiers and their commanding officer stood trial for murder in separate proceedings. Their juries consisted of American colonists. Tensions across the colonies were high, and anti-British sentiment prevailed in Boston and the surrounding area. Nonetheless, after hearing the evidence in their respective cases, the juries acquitted the British officer and six British soldiers of murder. Two British soldiers were convicted of manslaughter instead of murder.

Despite their personal opinions toward the presence of oppressive British armies on American soil, the American jurists put their feelings aside in the cause of blind justice. They put their duty before politics. They put their honor before bias. They put principle before anger. And they acquitted their enemies.

And the lawyer who defended the British troops was John Adams, who went on to become the second president of the United States. Despite being fiercely anti-British himself, he nonetheless made the unpopular choice to defend them based on the same values that led to their acquittal.

How times have changed.

Nowadays, the left sees criminal trials the same way it sees everything else, i.e., as a vehicle through which to extract political power. The recent trials of Kyle Rittenhouse, Derek Chauvin, and Karmelo Anthony, as well as the cases involving Tyler Robinson, Luigi Mangione, and now Lindsay Clancy, attest to this. Defendants are pardoned or convicted in courts of leftist opinion, regardless of the evidence, based on either the political beliefs of the defendant or their utility to the leftist narrative.

Corrupt judges, unethical prosecutors, mainstream media, and the ever-ubiquitous mob all play an active, intentional part in perpetuating this. But up until recently, Americans on trial have at least enjoyed the comfort of knowing that, at the end of the day, their cases would be decided not by power brokers or technocrats or social media influencers or legalistic experts, but by a jury of their peers.

There is something we Americans find, well, just about an impartial jury made up of our fellow citizens. It lends credence to the idea that ordinary people can understand and administer blind justice, and that such comprehension and application of this justice are not only a right but a duty. Even for those found guilty, there is something more credible about being judged by neighbors in your community rather than by some distant bureaucrat.

Which is precisely why the left hates it.

And so the left set out to do what the left does best. It destroys everything it touches. Hence, a “jury of your peers” changes meaning depending on the case at hand, and on whether the left wants the defendant acquitted or imprisoned. Hence, the outcry  from race hustlers that there were no black people on Karmelo Anthony’s jury. Their message is that white jurors cannot be trusted to judge black defendants impartially, and therefore cannot be considered their “peers.”

For the record, the Bill of Rights never guarantees that a jury be composed of one’s “peers.” It simply guarantees a trial by an “impartial jury.” But the idea that only other members of one’s political or racial subgroup can be considered “peers” fits exactly into the group rights mentality of the far left. To the left, a “peer” isn’t a fellow American citizen. A “peer” must be someone of the same skin color, the same gender, the same sexual preference, and the same political ideology.

Which brings us to the Lindsay Clancy trial. It turns out that the mystery holdout juror who refused to acquit Clancy is a black man. The infanticidal lunatics marching in support of Clancy can’t exactly blame “white supremacy” on this one, can they? Had the lone holdout been a white man who prevented the acquittal of a black woman, you can bet there’d be howls of outrage about the juror not being a “peer” of the defendant.

But the activist class is not one to let standards of consistency hamper its mission. Normally, race supersedes gender on the intersectional victim hierarchy, but in this case, the courthouse-step covens have strategically chosen to sacrifice one from their own for the mission. The anonymous black juror has been doxxed, intimidated, and is allegedly being evicted by his landlord. The media ghouls dug up allegations of domestic abuse.

Not convictions. Allegations. But again, the message is clear. Jurors who buck the leftist narrative will be isolated, targeted, and destroyed.

What makes this particularly egregious is that this juror is not only being hunted by the usual suspects. It’s that he’s being betrayed by his fellow jurors. After the defense attorney put a target on the juror’s back by revealing that the juror was one of only three males on the panel, the other jurors helped hone the target by revealing that he was the only black juror.

If nothing else, being a jury member in such a politically charged case, where half the country could turn on you if you don’t reach a certain verdict, would lead one to reasonably expect a certain level of empathy from fellow jurors, even if they disagree with your position. But I guess not.

But then again, there seems to be confusion among some of the jurors as to what their role was. Unlike the white jurors , the lone black juror knew his role wasn’t to raise awareness of mental health, or to fight the patriarchy, or to placate a mob. His role was to ascertain the innocence or guilt of the defendant. And he appears to be the only juror who took his role seriously.

Two decades ago, I got into a debate with the sister of my European girlfriend at the time. She was finishing up law school, and she quite sneeringly commented to me about how primitive our American legal system was for allowing jury trials. Such lofty concepts and proceedings, she sniffed, could only be comprehended by sophisticated, trained legal minds. I made the arguments to her that I made in this article in defense of citizen juries, but they went in one ear, past her smug grin of condescension, and out the other ear. Her mind was already made up. She knew everything. She was right, I was wrong, and that’s all there was to it. She probably regretted even trying to make an American dullard like me see reason.

If I saw her today, I would point to the jury decisions in the Rittenhouse, Anthony, and Clancy trials and say, “See, I told you so.”

To which she would probably point to the jury decisions in the Rittenhouse, Anthony, and Clancy trials and say, “See, Itold you so.”

Because to the left, a defendant’s innocence or guilt is legitimate only insofar as it serves the narrative. And the left’s recent anti-jury harangues aren’t about black men or white women or motherhood or mental health or even the omnipotent patriarchy. Those are all shiny objects the left uses to churn up emotion. This particular mission is about the deconstruction of the right to trial by jury. The left hates the idea that ordinary citizens should have any say in the application of justice. That privilege, leftists feel, belongs solely to the state, to be administered by unaccountable, unelected judges. The idea of twelve unwashed bumpkins thwarting the narrative of Big Brother, in public no less, is unconscionable to leftists.

Whether he realizes it or not, that lone holdout juror almost singlehandedly upheld the integrity of our justice system. He refused to bow to the mob, especially when that mob was his fellow jurors. But if that jury is an accurate reflection of the American public — that is, if 11 out of 12 Americans are willing to let justice be shaped by their personal feelings and politics — then I’m afraid the institution of the citizen jury will devolve into the same corruption and ideological zealotry that have overtaken the rest of our judicial system.

For conservatives, juries of our peers would not be made up of people of the same skin color, or gender, or sexuality, but of people who believe in the rule of law and the fair application thereof. If any of us ever find ourselves on trial, I hope there are twelve of them left.

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