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Law professor: Lone holdout in Lindsay Clancy trial is ‘getting negative attention he deserves’

Posted on September 19, 2026
By Dave Huber - Associate Editor
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Law Professor Wendy Murphy; Wendy Murphy/X

OPINION: She also claims the 11-1 jury decision mirrors public opinion

An adjunct professor at the private New England Law | Boston recently opined that the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial “is getting the negative attention he deserves.”

Writing in the Boston Herald, Wendy Murphy — “an impact litigator whose work in state and federal courts around the country has changed the law to improve protections for women’s and children’s constitutional rights” — further claims since the jury apparently voted 11-1 for a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict, it’s indicative of public opinion.

“So why does social media make it seem like the public divide is closer to 50-50?” Murphy asks. “The answer is money. An enormous amount of money is being spent elevating story lines that have nothing to do with how people really feel.”

Murphy laments how “social media influencers” have created “carefully selected us vs. them narratives,” and offers the hypothesis that insurance company PR firms also have a stake in churning up controversy, especially the company representing the mental health professionals being sued by Clancy’s family.

Invoking the novel “1984,” Murphy says PR firms “pay influencers and bot farms to spread [controversy]. Bot farms are especially dangerous because they manufacture completely fake people on platforms like X, TikTok and Facebook to make it look like hundreds of thousands of people feel a certain way even though the real number is exponentially smaller.”

She adds “a jury could easily award the Clancy family 500 million or more,” hence the incentive for negative PR towards Lindsay.

Murphy also mentions the pornography and sex trafficking industries (even though she admits they actually have nothing to do with this particular case), claiming they too benefit from the negative PR because they sell narratives that “women are just as violent as men.”

Aside from Murphy’s ridiculous and ethically dubious endorsement of “negative attention” towards the holdout juror, if jurors’ decisions mirrored public opinion, then the OJ Simpson jury was way off — to note but one example.

A Gallup/USA Today/CNN poll showed 56 percent disagreed with that jury’s verdict, while an LA Times poll had the figure at 50 percent (with 60 percent saying they doubted “whether justice had been served”).

In the Clancy case, a YouGov poll showed 46 percent believed the verdict should have been (guilty of) murder, while only 21 percent said not guilty by reason of insanity. (Thirty-three percent were “not sure.”)

A Rasmussen poll had similar numbers: 49 percent said guilty, 19 percent not guilty, and 32 unsure.

MORE: Law professors line up against New York’s new campus sexual-assault law

And did Murphy not see any of the interviews with jurors in the majority? One said “We knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women…” Another lamented that the one dissenting juror “had the hardest time getting over the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”

Imagine that — actually being concerned that a trio of small children had their brief lives brutally snuffed out by their own mother.

Similar to the many (majority) non-whites who thought the Simpson verdict was correct (one outspoken juror even claimed the jury’s decision was “payback” for Rodney King), perhaps the plurality of the public in the Clancy case are just plain sick and tired of the justice system allowing violent offenders to get away with, literally, murder.

Such also may explain the incredible ratios — and comments — Murphy and the Herald are enduring on X:

Should we be surprised by Murphy’s take? Years ago she suggested colleges should teach women that a defense against rapists is killing them. But knowing how universities define “rape” and “sexual assault,” just imagine how this could go … Duke lacrosse team anyone?)

She also filed a lawsuit in 2017 claiming the Obama administration’s previous non-legally binding Title IX framework was … legally binding.

What’s more, Murphy opined that if college students believed it was “offensive to free speech principles” to be required to attend campus sexual assault prevention workshops that they should transfer to a school that doesn’t accept federal funds (of which there are only two in the country).

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