Jury deadlocks for the third time on Lindsay Clancy; Trump delivers a verdict anyway

…(cont) Then, same week, NBC has them ending a fifth day still deadlocked, telling the judge a second time. And this time, per CBS, the judge sends them back with what the record specifically calls a dynamite charge — that's a real name for a real instruction, apparently, not something I'm inventing standing here. Is that a different animal than "keep discussing," or the same instruction wearing a better name the second time around?

Third time, no agreement. Mistrial. CBS says the jurors told the judge for a third time they couldn't decide. Fox says the split was eleven to one. So eleven wanted one thing, one wanted the other, and that's what a mistrial looks like from the inside — is eleven-to-one the number that ends it, or is there a different number that would've kept them in the room a fourth time?

Here's the part I keep having to read twice. The same CBS piece that reports the mistrial calls this "the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, who killed her three young children" — no hedge, like it's settled. But the whole reason there were four days, five days, and a dynamite charge is that it wasn't settled — the jury was deadlocked precisely on whether she's criminally responsible for that. So which is it — is "who killed her three young children" a fact the wire can print flat, or is that the exact sentence twelve people came back three separate times unable to finish?

Because meanwhile — and I mean that sincerely, not as a figure of speech — the prosecutor whose actual job this is hasn't done anything yet. Timothy Cruz, per the Times, is still deciding whether to retry her, downgrade the charges, or drop the case. I looked. I couldn't find a decision anywhere in the piece.

And yet. A congressman from Texas goes on Fox and says he doesn't have "an ounce of sympathy" for her. GOP leaders, per Fox, are calling the whole proceeding a kangaroo court. And the President says she'll pay "the price" — like the amount's already been worked out, like somebody already knows what's owed.

So here's what I keep coming back to, standing in my driveway with the hood up on a car that hasn't started clean since June. The jury tried three separate times and came back with nothing. The prosecutor hasn't decided anything yet. Two men who are neither the jury nor the prosecutor already told you how it ends. Is that the order this is supposed to go in?

Excuse me — before you go, one more thing. The mistrial, the congressman's quote, the President's quote, and the prosecutor's undecided decision all carry today's date. So on the same day the jury's verdict count reads zero, two men who were never in that room delivered one anyway. Which one of those is the verdict — the one the jury didn't reach, or the one that got printed anyway?