Clancy jurors told to ignore outside expertise, describe using outside expertise to break holdout

…(cont) I wrote some things down this week, the way I do, and now of course I can't find where — hold on — here. On September 3rd, Judge William Sullivan read the jury in the Lindsay Clancy case what's called the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, after they told him for the second time they were deadlocked. CBS News called it "a last resort pushing the jurors to reach a verdict." The next day, Clancy's own lawyers asked the Massachusetts high court to make the judge boot the holdout juror, or at least question him. Why him and not the other eleven? Because, according to the foreperson's note, he wasn't following the judge's instructions on reasonable doubt.

Here's my word. Expertise. That's what the instructions are supposed to keep out of the room, isn't it — twelve people deciding a case on what got shown and said in that courtroom, and not on whatever any one of them already happened to know walking in? I wrote that down too, more or less, because it read like the kind of thing that shouldn't need writing down.

I've got a torque wrench in my garage with a manufacturer's spec sticker still stuck to the handle. Twenty-two years I've owned that wrench. How many times have I actually read the sticker instead of just going by feel — by what twenty-two years of turning bolts already taught me? Not many. Did I get the bolt right anyway? Probably. Is going by feel the same thing as being told to follow the spec and quietly not doing it? I ask myself that at the workbench more than I'd like to admit.

On the ninth, after the mistrial, some of the jurors sat for interviews. NBC 10 talked to several of the women who'd voted to acquit. One of them described — I've got it here — leaning on their own experience to try to bring the one holdout around. Their own experience. Not the exhibits. Not the testimony. What they already knew, walking in. So did the instructions say to leave that at the door? They did. Did they leave it at the door? By their own account, on camera, after the fact — they did not.

I closed the notebook. I was about ready to call it a night, finally, my wife half-asleep with the lamp still on because she knows me. That's when the fella two stools down at the corner store, buying his coffee same as me next morning, says, excuse me, before you go — did you catch the other quote, the one where a juror said most of them were able to get over it? Get over the three children, she meant. I told him I'd read that one too.

I'm sorry to circle back a third time tonight, I know I've been going in circles around this same word, but is that what they used on the last name on the list — their own experience — or is there a plainer word for it, the one I said at the start of the night and am apparently still stuck on: expertise?