The revelation Friday morning that the one holdout Lindsay Clancy juror was a black man on an otherwise all-white jury has made news, but CBS Mornings host Gayle King’s reaction to the disclosure has given the story even more legs on social media.
King interviewed juror Paula Devlin on CBS and began asking questions about the makeup of the jury, where the one holdout who refused to budge on a guilty verdict brought about the result: a mistrial after nearly 40 hours of deliberation.
That one juror reportedly wanted to convict Clancy of first-degree murder for the deaths of her three children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan.
In a clip of the interview posted on social media by the Media Research Center and News Busters managing editor Curtis Houck, King asks, “I’m curious about the jurors themselves, because we know it was nine women, three men. What was the age range, what was the racial makeup? I haven’t heard any of that. What was it?”
“Um, 70-ish to 22,” Devlin responds. “One person of color, and then everybody else was white. A lot of the jurors had children.”
“Uh-huh,” King says. “And — one person of color — was the person of color a woman or a man?
“A man,” Devlin says.
“A man,” King says, pausing for a moment, and then asks, ”Is the holdout juror a person of— a black man?”
“Yes,” Devlin says
“A black man is the holdout juror?” King responds, almost in disbelief.
“Yes,” Devlin says.
“Whoa,” King says, blinking a couple of times, a look of concern on her face. “I have to sit with that for just a second.”
Conservative commentators pounced on King’s reaction.
“LMAO!” Florida Voice’s Eric Daugherty posted on X. “CBS is utterly SHOCKED when a Lindsay Clancy juror reveals the lone male holdout that refused to cave was a black male.”
He asked, “Why would she have to ‘sit with that?’ Is it because her assumption was it’s a ‘racist, bigoted’ white male?”
He concludes, “God bless that hero, holding out for justice!”
“Poor Gayle King,” wrote one responder on X, one of many taking King to task. “She needs time to compose herself when she realized she couldn’t play the race card.”
The juror is getting praise from those who felt the mother of three was criminally responsible for strangling her three children, though her defense argued she was in the throes of postpartum psychosis and under the influence of a dangerous combination of prescribed psychotropic drugs.
“Black excellence,” wrote a responder, posting a drawing of bearded black man.
Another wrote, “The 11 unhinged leftwing jurors tried to bully the one holdout by using their white supremacy and white privilege to force him to agree with them. He’s a modern day Rosa Parks. A true American hero, a man with honor and integrity. He deserves a medal for his service.”
Clancy’s highly publicized trial elicited a sharp division of opinions across the United States, as many felt the mother of three deserved no mercy and should have been convicted of premeditated murder, while others argued that postpartum psychosis mitigated her actions and the alleged malpractice of prescribing the mother powerful psychiatric drugs also had to be considered.
Clancy claimed she strangled her three children with exercise bands so as not to leave them behind motherless as she then attempted to commit suicide. She failed in that attempt, which included jumping out of a second story window, which has left her a paraplegic.
Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial last week after jurors could not agree upon a verdict. Now prosecutors must decide whether they want to retry Clancy. The next hearing for the case is scheduled for Sept. 29.
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
