THE HUTCHINSON REPORT: Lone juror holdout gets grief and it’s all about race

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Contributing Columnist

Malcolm X once famously said about Blacks and racist oppression. “They make the victim the criminal and the criminal the victim.”

If any African American aptly fits that characterization, it’s Michael Péguy Desronvil, the lone Black juror in the Lindsay Clancy trial.

He did the Henry Fonda number in the classic film “Twelve Angry Men.” Like Fonda, Juror X doggedly suffered the ridicule and abuse of other jurors by sticking to his guns and being the lone juror to hold out for possible acquittal in an emotionally charged case.

Desronvil is the perfect clone of Fonda. But in his case the wrath that fell on his head for his unswerving vote to convict Clancy is about race — his race.

How else to explain this. When in anyone’s memory has a battalion of attorneys, many in the media, and legal analysts publicly splashed that Desronvil was an alleged domestic violence abuser. That he was hauled into court on abuse charges. That he allegedly lied to the court about the abuse history by not disclosing that fact.

From that dubious allegation, they quickly proceeded to the not so faint hint that he should be charged with a felony for his failure to disclose the prior legal action against him. It didn’t matter that all of these allegations had either been debunked or exposed as gross exaggerations.

It mattered even less to the attackers that Desronvil made clear why he voted for conviction. And everything he said about being absolutely convinced that the prosecution scaled the sacrosanct legal high bar of beyond reasonable doubt was the only reason he held out for a guilty verdict.

The assault against Desronvil took this turn, too. His motive and even intelligence were roundly assailed. To the critics, he supposedly didn’t understand the high legal bar a prosecution has to tip past to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt to win a conviction.

In the Clancy trial much time, ink, and verbiage have spewed from the Clancy defense team, jurors, and much of the media speculating that Desronvil didn’t get or understand that legal standard.

The implication is that the prosecution didn’t meet that high bar in proving its case against Clancy. There is almost zero mention that several of the jurors had no reservation about airing their own pro-Clancy bias in expressing sympathy and supposed understanding of her mental health breakdown. To them this was more than ample explanation and justification for her murdering her three children.

One juror said there was lots of crying, lots of tears. Lots of yelling and then hugging.That doesn’t sound like a jury that’s going about its business with impartiality and objectivity and weighing nothing but the facts in the case.

But since Desronvil was supposedly so ill informed about the legal process or just a plain stupid Black man, that was more than sufficient grounds for the verdict of a mistrial to be overturned. Motion after motion will continue to be made, appeal after appeal will continue to be filed to get Desronvil booted after the fact from the jury and for Clancy to be acquitted.

The ruthless, naked and borderline racist pillorying of him also stands in sharp contrast to another racially charged trial three decades earlier. That was the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The Clancy trial jury except for Desronvil was all white. The Simpson jurors were near majority Black.

When they brought back their not guilty verdict for Simpson they were battered from pillar to post by much of the public and the media. The charges flew hot and heavy that they were racially biased against whites, emotionally swayed by Simpson’s alleged racist victimization by the Los Angeles Police Department and that the prosecution did not meet the high bar beyond a reasonable doubt standard.

When interviewed, no matter how much the jurors made the point clear that the only reason they voted to acquit was the prosecution did not meet the reasonable doubt standard it didn’t matter. The Black jurors were still called dumb, ignorant, and Black racists.

There’s only the barest scintilla of that juror flagellation of the eleven white Clancy jurors who voted to acquit. Even though several of them are merrily spinning their bias on talk show after talk show — and probably cashing in in the process.

The rage and vilification are almost solely from many quarters reserved for Desronvil. I predicted early on that the instant his identity was publicly revealed he would be a marked man. He would be hounded, harassed, picked at, bullied, for his alleged dumbness and implicit racial tinged bias.

That has come to pass. The good news is he’s fighting back, lawyering up and speaking out. But that doesn’t change the fact the hell he caught was all about race.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is “The Garbaging of America” (Amazon ebook and Middle Passage Press).