When ’12 Angry Men’ becomes one angry man

“I hope that guy can sleep well at night.”

Those words from Kevin Reddington on the steps of the Plymouth, Massachusetts Courthouse were part of a diatribe against the “guy” who was reportedly the sole holdout in the Lindsay Clancy trial. The scene was a fitting end to a visceral trial, but it added a vindictive element that should prompt Judge William Sullivan to call out the seasoned defense attorney.

After declaring that the 11-1 mistrial was “no time to gloat,” Reddington bragged repeatedly about “crushing” District Attorney Tim Cruz, whom he also attacked. He insisted that, in the trial, no one said a single negative thing about his client as a mother — ignoring that little matter of the three young children whom she had strangled to death, one by one.

But it was his attack on the holdout juror that was a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency. Reddington knows it is very likely that the name of this juror (he has already been identified as one of only three males on the jury) will eventually be uncovered by Internet sleuths. He effectively put a target on the back of a juror who committed the unpardonable sin of not being convinced by his arguments.

The fact that this is one of the three male jurors only ramped up the rage. This case prompted a striking gender divide between men and women, with many women expressing sympathy for Clancy and anger at the system for failing her.

For Reddington and many viewers, the hung jury was less “Twelve Angry Men” and more like “One Angry Man.” Indeed, in addition to attacking the juror, women outside of the courthouse heckled Cruz as he tried to speak to the press, shouting that he “only cares about the three children. What about the Mom?”

Reddington followed up by saying that Cruz really did not care about the children (because he looked down to read their names). He also accused the holdout jurors of wasting the time of the jury, complaining “that guy stole seven weeks from those jurors.”

It was an ironic twist on the 1957 classic. In that movie, Juror number eight (Ford) was repeatedly attacked for “wasting time” and not yielding to the majority — until he ultimately convinced all of his peers.

Earlier in the day, Reddington had asked a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice for an emergency order to force Sullivan not to declare a mistrial, and instead to remove the holdout in favor of an alternate. It was an utterly meritless effort, but Reddington used the filing to further denounce the juror. He compared the juror’s refusal to vote for his client as akin to leaving a racist on a jury. In this case, he suggested that the “guy” was a virtual anti-disability version of “Bull” Connor or some deranged “ableist.”

The rising hatred toward this juror reflects how an act deemed noble in one context can be denounced as craven in another.

Take the 1957 classic movie. Viewers love to watch Henry Ford stand alone against his fellow jurors to raise reasonable doubt in favor of the young defendant. But in this version, the sole juror believed that his fellow jurors were ignoring the defendant’s culpability.

Imagine the movie’s outcome if Reddington’s approach had been accepted in 1957, where Ford could be pulled into court, questioned about his intransigence, and ultimately replaced with an alternate in order to flip the vote.

For all of the anger it has generated, the Clancy trial shows the best of our justice system. We have a system in which a single juror can stand against not only the rest of the jury, but against the world. The trial showed zealous counsel on both sides and a conscientious judge who ensured a fair trial despite the powerful emotions in society.

You can disagree with this juror and the outcome but still celebrate that our legal system comes down not to judges or lawyers, but to simple citizens doing justice in thousands of cases a year. It comes down to whether every juror can vote not for a popular choice, but for a moral one.

That is why some of us were so shocked by Reddington’s public attack on this one juror. This is not who we are supposed to be as officers of the court. We stand in the path of the mob, not leading it. In another great movie, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Gregory Peck captured that role from the novel most vividly as Atticus Finch, standing before a jail to stop a lynch mob.

Finch showed that the strength of any legal system is ultimately only as strong as each individual’s ability to stand alone. He tells his daughter Scout, “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “ Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution . “