The Holdout

By Earl O'Garro

I am writing this from my office in Connecticut, on a Saturday I had set aside for other work, because the other work can wait and this cannot. I published a piece eleven days ago called “The Why Has Never Mattered,” and I wrote it from this same desk on a Thursday morning while the jury in Plymouth was still deliberating, and the argument I made was simple enough that I can restate it in a single sentence: this country decides in advance whose interior is worth entering, and the sorting has nothing to do with conduct. I named the mothers. I named the dead children. I named the shelter in the Bronx and the pink shirts outside the courthouse and the seven-figure fundraiser and the five-part documentary and every mile of the road the press built toward Duxbury and never thought to grade toward Dimone Fleming. And I closed the piece the way I close all of these pieces, with what I owe my children, and I went home. The jury sent its second note the next morning. Judge Sullivan declared a mistrial on the fourth. And then, on the eleventh of September, a juror named Paula Devlin sat down on CBS Mornings across from Gayle King and said the words that have sent this country into a week of the most revealing confusion I have witnessed in my adult life. The holdout, she said, was the only Black person on the jury.

Let me name the argument at the top of this page and spend the rest defending it. That man did not fail his duty. He performed it. He performed it in the only country he has ever lived in, which is a country that has never once extended to a defendant who looked like him the courtesy it spent three and a half years building for Lindsay Clancy, and when he declined to extend it himself, when he sat in that room with eleven white jurors and said no, the country did not pause to wonder whether his refusal might contain a lifetime of information about how the law has treated people who share his face. It called him arrogant. It called him stubborn. NBC came to his house. They contacted his family. They pulled his landlord. They dug up an old domestic violence allegation and an active restraining order and twelve thousand dollars in unpaid rent, and they did this to a citizen whose only public act was to vote his conscience in a jury room, which is the single thing the Constitution asks of him and the single thing the Constitution promises he may do without reprisal. That is the argument. The rest is evidence.

I want to stay on the word arrogant, because the word is doing work, and I do not think the people using it have stopped to listen to what it is saying. Eleven jurors, all of them white, voted to acquit a white woman of killing her three children on the ground that her mind was not her own when she did it. One juror, the only Black person in the room, voted to convict. He did not, according to every account now public, produce a binder of counter-evidence. He did not deliver a closing argument. He said, by the foreperson’s own description, that she viciously killed her children, and he could not get past it. And the eleven called him arrogant. Consider what that word contains. It contains the assumption that his position required justification and theirs did not. It contains the belief that the medical evidence presented by the defense was self-evidently dispositive, such that any person of ordinary intelligence who refused to accept it must be defective in character. It contains, whether the people using it know this or not, the precise inversion of the pattern I described eleven days ago, because for the first time in this story a Black person is being asked to explain his why, and the people asking are white, and they have decided before the conversation starts that nothing he produces will be sufficient, and they are leaking his name and his address and his court records to make sure the next person who sits in that chair understands the cost.

Now the Gayle King moment, which is the cleanest piece of evidence this country has produced about itself in years. King is a Black woman who got her start on Channel 3 in Hartford, which is my city, and has been in broadcast journalism for decades. She has covered race and criminal justice for her entire career. And when Devlin said the words, King closed her eyes and said, “Whoa. I have to sit with that for just a second.” I do not think King said anything wrong. I think she said something involuntary, which is more useful, because involuntary reactions are diagnostic. What she was processing, in that second with her eyes closed, was the collision between two assumptions she had been carrying at the same time. The first assumption was that the holdout juror was a white man, probably older, probably unsympathetic to mental health defenses, the kind of juror whose refusal could be filed under the ordinary stubbornness of people who do not read. The second assumption, which she would never have stated and may never have consciously held, was that a Black juror would have sided with the majority, because the majority position was the compassionate one, the educated one, the one that cared about the why. Those two assumptions cannot survive the same fact, and in the second it took her to close her eyes the country watched one of its most sophisticated Black journalists discover that she had been carrying a version of the same expectation the system carries, which is that Black people will perform their Blackness in a predictable direction, and when they do not, something must be explained.

I wrote eleven days ago that the press built a road toward Duxbury and never graded one toward the Bronx, and I described the road in detail, the New Yorker profile, the Slate essay, the STAT reporting, the PBS documentary, the three hundred people in pink shirts. I said the road was not a conspiracy but a pipeline, and that pipelines have intakes calibrated to detect certain things and not others. Now I have to add a chapter I did not anticipate. The road was not only built toward a defendant. It was built toward a jury, and the jury was expected to drive on it, and eleven of them did, and the one who did not is now being dismantled in public so that the next twelve understand what is expected of them. That is not accountability. That is intimidation dressed as journalism, and the people doing it have not troubled themselves to notice that the man they are dismantling is the same man their system has spent four hundred years declining to wonder about.

I said in the previous piece that the asymmetry is not about sympathy. It is about curiosity. The country is willing to loathe a white defendant and still grant her an interior, a why, a sequence of events it considers itself obligated to excavate. It has never extended that curiosity to us. And now a Black man has returned the favor. He sat in a room where eleven people asked him to be curious about a white woman’s mind, and he said no, and the no did not come from nowhere. It came from a country that has never been curious about his. It came from every courtroom that looked at China Arnold and saw a punchline instead of a person. It came from every sentencing hearing where a Black mother’s poverty was treated as her decision rather than her condition. It came from Debra Harrell’s seventeen days in a cell for letting her daughter play in a park, and from Shaquan Duley’s thirty-five years built on a single wire story that nobody ever bothered to follow up. That juror carried all of that into the deliberation room, because he is a human being and human beings carry what they have lived, and the eleven who called him arrogant did not ask what he had lived, because they were not curious. They were certain, which is the opposite of curious, and certainty about a Black man’s interior is the oldest American habit there is.

So let me say it plainly, because I have learned by now that if I do not say it plainly somebody will say I was being coy. I do not know whether that juror was right. I was not in the courtroom. I did not hear the testimony. I did not see the bloodwork or sit through the cross-examinations. What I know is that he had a constitutional right to vote his conscience, and that his conscience is not required to be identical to mine or to the eleven people who disagreed with him, and that the act of disagreeing with eleven white jurors in a room where he was the only Black face is not arrogance. In a country that has spent centuries ensuring that Black people’s reasons for doing things are never investigated, never wondered about, never granted the weight of interiority, a Black man who refuses to extend the very courtesy that has been withheld from him is not failing the system. He is the system’s own product, behaving exactly as the system taught him to behave, which is to look at the act and not the why, because the why has never mattered.

I said I would close with what I owe my children and I am going to keep that promise. My children are growing up in a country where three hundred people in pink shirts can assemble outside a courthouse to demand that a jury consider why a mother did what she did, and that is a beautiful thing, and I mean that without irony, and I want every mother in America to be able to walk that road. But my children are also growing up in a country where a Black man who sat on a jury and voted his conscience is having his landlord called and his court records published and his photograph circulated, and the lesson being taught to every Black person watching is the same lesson this country has always taught, which is that your interior does not matter when the country needs you to convict, and your interior does not matter when the country needs you to acquit, and if you make the wrong choice in either direction your life will be taken apart by people who have never wondered for a single second what it is like to be you.

I do not know how to protect my children from that. I am not sure it is possible. What I can do is write it down, with the names and the dates in it, so that when they ask me one day why the country extended its curiosity in one direction and not the other, and why a man was destroyed for noticing, there is a record. There is always a record, if somebody sits down and makes one.

The why has never mattered. I wrote that eleven days ago. The holdout knew it before I did.