Clancy defense seeks dismissal of murder charges after mistrial

By The Conservative Desk (/journals/conservative-desk)

“I didn’t have any doubts,” Michael P. Desronvil said after the jury that heard Lindsay Clancy’s murder case deadlocked without a verdict.

On Sept. 4, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in Plymouth Superior Court. The panel had sat through a trial lasting six to seven weeks and then deliberated more than seven days before reporting it could not reach a unanimous decision. The split was 11-1. Eleven jurors favored finding Clancy not criminally responsible. Desronvil alone sided with the prosecution’s position that she acted knowingly and deliberately.

Clancy strangled her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — on Jan. 24, 2023, at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She then attempted suicide, leaving her paralyzed. She appeared in court in a wheelchair. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, citing postpartum psychosis and overmedication. She had been released from a psychiatric hospital less than three weeks before the killings. Prosecutors argued throughout that she understood what she was doing when she used force that ended the children’s lives.

On Sept. 3, the day before the mistrial, the foreperson sent a note to Sullivan alleging that a juror had acknowledged doubt but refused to apply it. Sullivan questioned the jurors individually after the first note. After a second report, he gave only a general instruction reminder. He denied defense attorney Kevin Reddington’s motion to dismiss or replace the holdout juror and a further request to question the jurors again. The next day the jury said it still could not agree, and Sullivan ended the trial.

Reddington reacted outside the courthouse by telling reporters the other jurors were robbed. He has drawn a line between ordinary disagreement and what he says happened here. “I would defend that person’s right to be a holdout for a month. That’s what the system is about,” Reddington said. “But when the forelady indicated clearly and unequivocally in the jury question that this person had doubt, reasonable doubt, as we know now, and just refused to listen to the judge’s instruction on the law, that’s when I was upset, because that’s why I used the expressions and the terms I did. It just wasn’t right.”

Desronvil rejected the premise that he sat with doubt. “As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence presented,” he said. He added that he did not have any. Fellow juror Nick Dargie described a different picture of the room. “There was times he wouldn’t engage, like he’d be scrolling on his phone while people are talking to him, things like that, where he’s just not paying attention,” Dargie said. Massachusetts law prohibits juror cellphone use during deliberations.

In a motion filed Sept. 18 and made public Sept. 21, Reddington asked the court to investigate Desronvil. He requested phone records for calls and texts between 8 a.m. or 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on each day of deliberations. The filing also seeks inquiry into whether Desronvil answered truthfully on his juror questionnaire and during questioning by the judge the day before the mistrial, whether he ignored instructions, and whether he relied on outside information.

Desronvil’s attorney, Edward Paltzik, answered in blunt terms. “The Looney Tunes motion filed yesterday by Kevin ‘Shooter McGavin’ Reddington to investigate Michael is not just an attack on Michael for being the courageous lone holdout juror… Kevin Reddington’s disgusting motion to investigate Michael is worthy of nothing but universal condemnation,” Paltzik said. He framed the request as an attack on constitutional protections for jurors. On Fox News, criminal attorney Andrew Cherkasky slammed the probe as outrageous and argued that Supreme Court precedent points to a mistrial rather than a targeted investigation of a single juror who will not join the majority.

Separately, on Sept. 21, attorney Martin Weinberg filed a motion to dismiss the murder charges on double jeopardy grounds under the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Double jeopardy is the constitutional bar on the government trying a person twice for the same offense. Courts have long treated a hung jury as a classic case of manifest necessity — a genuine need that makes continuing the trial impossible — which permits a mistrial without forever barring a new prosecution. Weinberg’s motion argues there was no such necessity here because Sullivan, after the foreperson’s reports, should have investigated further or replaced the holdout instead of ending the trial and exposing Clancy to a second proceeding.

Reddington has stated the defense plan for the coming hearing in those terms. “It will be a motion to dismiss based on what’s called double jeopardy grounds, because there’s no … manifest necessity,” he said. “You have to have a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial for obvious reasons — the invested time that the jurors put into it, the court, the staff, the defendant, the prosecution, everybody.”

The defense argument, put in its own terms, is that Clancy was entitled to a jury that applied the court’s instructions on reasonable doubt, that the holdout refused that duty after acknowledging doubt, and that declaring a mistrial without a deeper inquiry left her open to a second prosecution the Constitution should forbid. Desronvil’s own account cuts against the claim that he sat on acknowledged doubt and simply refused the law. A juror who remains unpersuaded after full deliberation is not a defect in the system; it is the requirement of unanimity and proof beyond a reasonable doubt doing the work the Framers assigned it, whether the majority is leaning toward conviction or toward a finding of no criminal responsibility.

Fox News has tracked the fight under headlines that include “Clancy team demands holdout juror be investigated,” “Lindsay Clancy holdout juror’s lawyer torches ‘Looney Tunes motion’ to investigate him,” and “Lindsay Clancy defense seeks dismissal of charges.” Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz has not announced whether prosecutors will seek a retrial. Sullivan has not ruled on the dismissal motion or the request to investigate the holdout.

Three children are dead. One juror blocked the majority. The defense now asks the court both to scrutinize that juror and to bar any second trial. The next hearing is scheduled for Sept. 29 before Judge William Sullivan.