Karen Read’s lawyer says Clancy defense attorney may be ‘cut from a different cloth’ as deliberations drag on

Two juries stuck. Two cases where the facts seemed, at least from the outside, less murky than the outcome suggests. That should tell us something about how these trials are actually being run, not just about the people sitting in the jury box.

David Yannetti's comment about Lindsay Clancy's lawyer being "cut from a different cloth" is a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that says a lot. Defense attorneys who can make a jury pause, who can introduce enough doubt that twelve strangers can't agree even when the underlying facts feel grim, are doing exactly what they're supposed to do. That's not a knock on the system. It's the system working, even when it's slow and frustrating and makes for bad headlines about deadlocked juries. We'd rather have jurors who take their job seriously enough to hold out than ones who fold under pressure to just get it over with.

What's worth sitting with is why these particular cases keep producing this result. Karen Read's trial became a circus of competing narratives about police conduct and evidence handling. Clancy's case involves a mother accused in the deaths of her children, layered with questions about untreated postpartum psychosis and what she was and wasn't capable of understanding. These aren't cases where "the facts are clear" cuts it as a talking point, no matter how badly prosecutors or commentators want it to.

Maybe the lesson isn't really about lawyers being "cut from different cloth" at all. Maybe it's that our appetite for tidy verdicts in genuinely messy human tragedies is the thing that keeps getting disappointed, not the jury system itself.