Inside Our Failing Jury System

GONZO

Why I Hung A Jury

By Toby Smollett · September 16, 2026 · 11 min read

The American justice system is now a circle of hell where we witness the OJ trial on an eternal loop. We have sunk to a burning sand pit, our eyes forced open by the metal speculums of the attention economy, our souls anguished by the bail-reform-to-murdered-bystander pipeline. Recently, a lone Massachusetts juror refused to consent to such madness, blocking the acquittal of the child murderer Lindsay Clancy, whose twisted fans have whipped up such a delusional frenzy that one obsessive has already executed another child in Illinois.

This Everyman—the lone black male on the jury, who now faces character assassination in the media—is a hero to Americans with the temerity to oppose the strangulation of toddlers, but also to those alarmed by the rise in jury deliberations beset with tribal loyalty, shallow activism, and reasoning unfit for a child. We have a jury crisis in this country—a billowing plague of lawslop. If you are an American who believes in justice and has remained literate in the brave age of the doomscroll, it is your sacred duty to resist the pressure of your moronic peers and, when necessary, hang a jury. I did so in 2023, at the tail end of the Great Awokening, when I was fated to heed the call of the Intelligent Juror’s Burden. One must steel oneself to walk the lonely road of sanity through the beclowned courthouse.

This civilizational clash began with voir dire AKA jury selection, the questioning of the jury pool wherein the judge, prosecutor, and defense all attempt to dismiss jurors they deem incapable of impartiality. Jurors are typed, and many are quickly and discreetly rejected for their professions, identities, and appearance. I survived the culling, and so did my eventual nemesis, the juror with whom I would butt heads, whom I will call Darius. I am white and Darius was black, our races being salient enough to the matter at hand of convicting a black man for burglary in America. Darius did not stand up for the application of justice; instead, he acted with the same tribal protectionism as the white women who fought to acquit Lindsay Clancy.

But in the beginning, Darius and I shared something in common. We dressed well for our speed date with the law; button-down shirts tucked into slacks, with leather shoes. Our competent fits set us apart from the other potential jurors in pajamas, such as the morbidly obese woman questioned by the prosecution about her history of forging checks. I considered that I might not have the stiffest competition in the bracket. I needed to give the right answers to simple questions and thoughtful answers to sincere ones.

“Can you serve impartially?”

“I think so.”

“Would you refrain from testifying in a case if your lawyer advised you not to testify?”

“If he was a good lawyer.”

It was not difficult to avoid being placed in the “I hate cops” or “I love cops” camp, retaining some control, as I occasionally do, of my executive function.

With perfect equipoise, Darius offered irresistible morsels to both the prosecution and defense. When asked if he was biased against law enforcement, he said he rode his Harley with some law enforcement guys. The defense needed a black person on the jury, so they weren’t going to say no—the other potential black jurors had been dismissed (see: morbidly obese woman forging checks). The prosecution, for their part, thought they had found one of those conservative black guys who would vote to convict. My future nemesis had walked the line like an old pro. He played those lawyers like a fiddle.

I was a teacher, so that helped. Before teacher became synonymous with commie, we, as a class, were a toss up as far as voire dire is concerned. The prosecution imagines teachers might see the need for punishment, as what do teachers do besides dole out punishments for unruly kids all day. But the defense hopes teachers are bleeding-heart social justice reformers; more in line with the reality of the times, but the inertia of the old perception still remains. And all parties—the judge, the defense, the prosecutor—were looking for intelligent jurors who were not assholes. Everyone was rooting for me, so I soon found myself serving on a jury full of morons.

In our case, a county maintenance facility had been burglarized the night after the defendant was fired for cause. The burglar used the same code the defendant had used as an employee to enter the building and, while seeming to know where the good stuff was stored, proceeded to steal many thousands of dollars in taxpayer-funded equipment. Really genius stuff, close to the perfect crime. Cameras captured the burglar’s height and build, which were identical to the defendant. The burglar was seen on camera wearing a red drawstring backpack from a random hotel in another country, and exactly such a backpack was found by investigators in the defendant’s car, the same make and model of car that the burglar used. Some of the items stolen by the burglar were also found in the defendant’s garage. The defendant’s phone also traveled to the area of the burglary during the burglary. Shocking, I know.

But the overwhelming panoply of evidence was not sufficient for Darius. He knew I was one of the few fellow jurors who was not an idiot so he planted that great miracle of social justice, a seed of doubt. For the average moron on a jury, who with their expansive seventh-grade vocabulary certainly knows what the word doubt means, all a fellow juror needs to do is raise any doubt, any doubt at all, and your conviction goes out with the wash. Given that the average juror in the United States can barely distinguish the Moon from the Sun, much less reasonable doubt from unreasonable doubt, it is a miracle that anyone has ever been convicted of a crime at all.

Reasonable doubt cannot be based on unfounded speculation; it must arise from examination of evidence, but this did not stop Darius from spinning a tale out of 1001 Nights. “What if,” he posited, “the suspect had a brother, or cousin, who lived in the same house? And who sometimes used the car? And what if he told this person his access code? What if some other guy left the bag the burglar used in the suspect’s car?”

What if? What if I did it? What if Meghan Markle did it? What if Meghan Markle had stolen the suspect’s car, and the suspect’s backpack, and guessed the suspect’s entry code to the maintenance facility, and planted the goods in his garage? Anything is possible in America. Our woke jurors thought this was a mighty fine argument. After all, due to the racism of society, black men are perniciously mistaken for each other all the time. It could have been a brother from another mother. If the glove fits, perhaps it’s just—somebody else’s glove! Who knows, man! How can we ever be certain of anything? This is the very question great philosophers ask in caves, deserts, and on mountaintops.

I could not reason easily against this. I certainly tried. I maintained good manners, spoke rationally, and pointed out the major pieces of evidence. But I was not dealing with the signatories of the Magna Carta. If you serve on an American jury and have half a brain, there is not much hope for you. This is why I had to channel all inner strength and come to terms with standing alone.

At first, I was the only one voting against acquittal. But there was another juror, whom I will call Anna, a young woman from a neighboring rural county who was convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that our suspect was guilty, but who felt the pull of the gynocratic hivemind. This was 2023; we were out in the boonies where the vibe shift was not yet to land, the Great Awokening was not yet splayed magnificently upon the autopsy table, and she certainly did not want to look racist, red-headed country girl as she may have been.

Anna was relying on the smartest white woman on the jury for clues, but that woman, a young mother from the burbs whom I will call Cindy, was treating the jury like the voting booth and responding to the insinuations of racism with enough virtue signaling to replace the entire city’s traffic light system. Cindy had said to me at lunch, “I think they chose a younger jury on purpose,” and it was true: it appeared the entire jury was under the age of 35—this being a state where there are six people on juries—and Cindy seemed to take this as a sign of our jury’s hipness. She was clearly, in the sandwich shop, integrating this into her identity: she was hip, she was woke, social justice would be delivered by the young, sexy jury. If we were to be hung, it would be only with a valiant BBC.

I eventually won over Anna, the rural maiden, by presenting myself exactly as I was: a dude who was not going to let BS smother the facts. She found this liberating. At the eleventh hour, she declared that she, too, would vote guilty. She needed someone to show her the way.

Once it was clear we were heading toward a hung jury, my powers of persuasion declined as I dug in. The heat of anger rose toward the fluorescent lights and white ceiling tiles of the broom closet of justice. Darius was mentioning something asinine about a “lack of forensic evidence.”

I said not all cases are investigated in real life the way they are on TV. The suspect worked at the site, so finding his DNA there would not have meant anything to the trial. Plus, I said, this was not a rape or murder case. “Bringing up a lack of DNA is just something the defense attorney brings up to trick the weak-minded,” I said.

Darius knew this was his winning moment. “Weak-minded?” he asked icily. He widened his eyes and moved back in his chair, “That’s offensive.”

This moment was where the hung jury was settled for good. I was now christened the racist, and Darius the noble victim. We were never going to get a conviction out of the white women under 35, not in the final years of the Great Awokening, not being such a young, hip, sexy, and moronic jury.

I apologized. I could have, perhaps, caved in shame, wanting to save face. But I had no factual basis in the evidentiary record to doubt our suspect’s guilt. Cindy exhorted me to think of his life. It was revealed to her that I was not the hip, woke, high school teacher under 35 that the defense lawyers must have hoped I was. I supported sending burglars to the slammer—I was a callous, retrograde Neanderthal. I believed that stealing should be punished; George Wallace incarnate.

When the bailiff, who was black, made some joke on our way back to the courtroom to tell the judge, for a final time, that we could not reach an agreement, I made some chummy joke to him. His face was stern; he could sense, perhaps because I was the white guy with my shirt tucked in, that I was the voice without doubt. Perhaps as I made my joke, Darius had shot him a glance: get a load of this guy. The bailiff said something about how some people would be happy that the jury was hung—it was, after all, more a victory for the defendant than a conviction.

The judge read us our release instructions in a shaming tone. Cindy and I walked to the parking garage, gently diffusing our Millennial tension. Although on the surface the debate had been between Darius and me, at its heart, my struggle had been with Cindy. It was a white-on-white crime, our hung jury; if she had flipped, the other jurors would have gone with her, except Darius—he would have been the lone holdout. She acknowledged, walking to the car, that it sure seemed like the guy had probably done it. She was ashamed, in a way. She could feel the sands of Western Civilization falling a little too quickly through the wide neck of her body-positive hourglass.

The next morning, I wrote an email to the prosecutor explaining what had happened. This is every juror’s legal right. I gave him tips on how he could secure the conviction in a future trial. You need, I explained, to eliminate The Theory of the Secret Twin Brother. You might consider, I suggested, not placing too much trust in Harley riders.