Politics
DeSantis Offers Florida Asylum To Juror Who Voted To Acquit A Woman Who Strangled Her Kids
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced Friday that the state of Florida would offer asylum to a juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, a man with an alleged domestic violence history and an active restraining order against him, who served as the lone holdout preventing a guilty verdict in a case involving the deaths of three children.
The announcement came after a report surfaced revealing the juror's background. DeSantis looked at all of that information and decided the correct response was to make the man a protected class.
For those who missed the underlying case: Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts nurse and mother of three, strangled her children and then jumped from a window in January 2023. The trial ended in a hung jury after one man refused to convict. That man, it later emerged, had restraining orders filed against him. DeSantis concluded the real victim in this chain of events was the juror.
"A man objected to allowing a woman to kill her children and he's being persecuted for it," DeSantis said at a press conference, delivering the sentence with the careful confidence of someone who has genuinely stopped reading before the second paragraph of anything.
DeSantis did not explain what Florida asylum would entail procedurally, what it would protect the juror from, or whether it conferred any legal status whatsoever. He did use the word "persecution" four times in under ninety seconds, which is the rhetorical equivalent of a load-bearing column in a house made of napkins.
The governor's office declined to clarify whether any other jurors with restraining orders would be eligible for the program, or whether this was a targeted offer based on the specific combination of domestic violence allegations and a vote DeSantis personally approved of.
Massachusetts legal analysts noted that jurors are not normally subject to the jurisdiction of a Florida governor, that asylum is typically a concept applied between sovereign nations, and that none of this is how any of this works. These analysts were not invited to the press conference.
Clancy's defense at trial centered on postpartum psychosis, arguing she was not in control of her actions. Three children died. The jury was eleven to one for conviction. The one was the man DeSantis is now treating like a dissident who smuggled manuscripts out of a police state.
The juror himself has not responded publicly to the offer. It is not clear he has been contacted. It is possible Ron DeSantis announced a formal state policy of protection for a private citizen without first checking whether the citizen wanted it, which would be consistent with how most of the governor's major initiatives have proceeded.
Meanwhile, the Clancy case will likely be retried. The three children remain dead.
Florida has not yet announced an official flag for the asylum program, but sources say the design is being discussed.
The story we are making fun of: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/6085748-florida-offers-asylum-holdout-juror/