Kenn Dowell. Cleveland-born, Glenville-raised. Never afraid to say what needs to be said.
If you have been following this case, you already know the verdict that never came. Eleven to one. Seven days. A mistrial on September 4 and a courthouse full of people who could not believe one man held.
So let me skip the recap and go where the story actually lives.
There were twelve people in that room. Eleven of them were white. One of them was not. The Black man was the holdout. www.realpower.tv
That is not my characterization. That is juror Paula Devlin, on the record, describing her own jury: he is a Black man, and he was the only person on that panel who was not white.
Now hold that and watch what has happened to him since.
What They Said About Him
The foreperson, Ronni Carlson, told the story of the moment she thought it was over. “He admitted he had reasonable doubt. I started filling out the forms, I was so excited.” Then he said the rest of it. “But I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Devlin’s assessment: “He really did not take anything that anybody said.” Her word for him was arrogant.
The defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, said the man had “whatever his agenda was” and that he “stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.”
Carlson sent a note to the judge saying a juror would not follow the court’s instructions. realpower.tv
Read that list again. Arrogant. An agenda. A thief of other people’s time. Won’t follow instructions.
I have heard those four things said about Black people in rooms my whole life, usually by people certain they were describing a personality and not a position.
Then They Went Looking
Here is where it stops being a disagreement and becomes something older.
NBC10 Boston went into his past and put his prior domestic violence allegations on television without naming him. The Boston Globe printed the allegations and added that he was being evicted. A blogger calling himself Turtleboy finished the job and published the man’s name and photograph.
Only then, after the name and the face were already out, did Judge William Sullivan indefinitely impound the jury list to protect juror privacy.
Be clear about that sequence. He committed no crime. He sat through seven weeks of trial, deliberated for seven days, and declined to put his name on a verdict he did not believe. For that, reporters pulled his court records, a blogger put his face on the internet, and a judge had to seal a jury list that should never have needed sealing. realpower.tv
Eleven people voted the other way. Not one of them got a background check run on them for it.
The Same Judge. The Other Mother.
Now here is the part that should stop you cold, because it happened in the same building, in front of the same man in the robe.
Latarsha Sanders is a Black woman from Brockton. She was tried before Judge Sullivan and convicted in December 2022 of killing her two sons. Her only defense was that she was not in her right mind. Her expert had read thousands of pages of records from two state psychiatric institutions documenting schizophrenia, paranoid delusions, and hallucinations. He was prepared to tell the jury she was grossly psychotic.
Sullivan let him say he had reviewed the records and found them significant. Nothing more. The jury never heard a single page of what was in them. She got two life sentences with no parole.
On August 6 of this year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw the whole conviction out. Justice Frank Gaziano, writing for a unanimous court, said keeping those records out was prejudicial error that impermissibly stripped her sole defense of the medical foundation that supported it. realpower.tv
In plain English: the judge buried the evidence that was her only chance, and it took her almost three years to get somebody to say so out loud.
When Lindsay Clancy came before the same judge, the medical evidence came in and kept coming. Hospital records. Discharge notes. A therapist’s own files. A dozen prescriptions. Two experts for the defense.
Same courtroom. Same judge. One mother’s mind was a matter for the record. The other mother’s mind was a matter the jury was not permitted to examine.
Nobody ran Judge Sullivan’s background. Nobody posted his photograph. No blogger went through his evictions.
What It Costs to Hold
I am not going to tell you the man was right on the law. That is a real argument, and honest people are having it. He acknowledged reasonable doubt and still would not return the verdict, and eleven people in that room believe that means he refused to follow the instruction he swore to follow. Maybe. He has not said a word publicly, so nobody actually knows what he was holding.
But understand what the choice in front of him was, because Black folks know this room.
He could have folded. One signature and eleven people tell the cameras he was reasonable and open-minded and a pleasure to serve with. Nobody pulls his records. He gets to be the good one.
Or he holds, and becomes the problem.
That is the whole arrangement, and it has never changed. Agree, and you are reasonable. Stand, and you are arrogant. Fold, and they will say you were fair. Hold, and they will go looking for a reason you were never fit to be in the room at all. realpower.tv
And do not let anybody sell you the idea that folding is the humble choice. Signing a verdict you do not believe is not humility. It is a sale. A Black man who says a white woman is not responsible when he does not believe it is running the identical play as a Black man who says a Black woman is guilty when he knows she is not. Same lie. Same room. Same reason, because everybody else already made up their mind and it is easier to be agreeable than to be alone.
He was alone for seven days, and he did not sell.
What Comes Next
There is a status hearing on September 29. District Attorney Timothy Cruz has to decide whether to retry Clancy, and separately whether to retry Latarsha Sanders now that her conviction is gone. Nothing is scheduled. Those two decisions, side by side, will tell you more about how mercy gets handed out in Plymouth County than any verdict has.
Watch them both. And when you hear somebody say that man cost those jurors seven weeks, ask them what the judge cost Latarsha Sanders.
We are not printing his name. It is already out there, and we are not adding to it. He never asked to be anybody’s example.
But I will say this to him, and I mean it plain: you stood on business in a room that had already voted, and you did it knowing exactly what it was going to cost you.
That used to be the whole definition of a citizen. Now it will get your photograph posted by a blogger.
Kudos to the brother who would not sign. www.realpower.tv
What would you have done in that room? Tell me below. I read every one.
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