Lindsay Clancy’s attorney wants a judge to open a formal investigation into the lone Lindsay Clancy juror who refused to acquit her, accusing him of using his phone during deliberations and being untruthful with the court on more than one occasion.
In a motion filed Friday and made public Monday, attorney Kevin Reddington asked a Massachusetts court to question juror Michael Desronvil about his alleged cellphone use during deliberations, his answers on the questionnaire jurors filled out before the trial started, and what he told the judge when jurors were questioned a day before the trial ended. Reddington also asked the court to pull records of any calls or texts Desronvil made between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on each day the jury deliberated. Phone use during deliberations is against the rules in Massachusetts, and if Desronvil was on his phone while the jury was weighing the case, it could give Clancy’s team grounds to challenge how the trial ended.
The jury spent close to a week trying to reach a unanimous verdict before the judge declared a mistrial on September 4. Eleven of the 12 jurors were ready to find Clancy not criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children. Most of them believed she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis, a rare and severe mental health condition that can cause a new mother to lose touch with reality, when she strangled her kids.
Desronvil was the one juror who would not go along. He sided with prosecutors, who argued Clancy knew exactly what she was doing when she killed her children. He has not been accused of any wrongdoing connected to his jury service, but other jurors said he was inflexible and would not move off his position that Clancy was guilty. In a statement released through his lawyer last week, Desronvil said he “didn’t have any doubts.”
Clancy’s legal team isn’t stopping at the request for an investigation. In a separate motion filed Monday, another one of her attorneys, Martin Weinberg, asked the judge to dismiss the murder case entirely rather than order a new trial, arguing the mistrial should not have been declared in the first place. Weinberg argued the judge should have replaced Desronvil with an alternate juror once the jury’s foreperson complained that he was refusing to follow the law on reasonable doubt. “Contrary to the court’s stated believe at the time, it did have viable choices other than declaring a mistrial,” Weinberg wrote in the filing.
A spokesperson for Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz declined to comment on either motion. Prosecutors have not said whether they plan to retry Clancy if the case moves forward instead of being dismissed.
During the trial, jurors heard from psychologists and clinicians who had treated Clancy in the months leading up to the killings, as her mental health worsened following the birth of her youngest child. She had been released from a psychiatric hospital less than three weeks before she killed her three children. That timeline, and the medical testimony behind it, was central to why so many jurors leaned toward finding her not criminally responsible.
Clancy remains charged with murder and is being held in a psychiatric hospital while her case moves through the courts. What happens next, a new trial, a dismissal, or something else, now depends on how the judge rules on both motions, and on what an investigation into Desronvil’s conduct during deliberations turns up. The Lindsay Clancy juror at the center of the dispute has not responded publicly beyond the statement his attorney released last week, and neither the court nor prosecutors have said when a ruling on either motion is expected.
