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An attorney for the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial vowed overnight to fight a recent defense motion urging the judge to probe whether the holdout juror was honest with the court during jury selection and deliberations.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked Judge William Sullivan — the judge overseeing Clancy’s murder trial — to question the juror about his “truthfulness” during the jury selection process, as well as some of his actions during deliberations.
A lawyer representing the holdout juror, Michael Péguy Desronvil, described Reddington’s motion as “disgusting.”
“Kevin Reddington’s disgusting motion to investigate Michael is worthy of nothing but universal condemnation. This is certainly not the final word from us on this subject, but merely our first words,” wrote the attorney, Edward Andrew Paltzik.
The defense’s motion calling for questioning came as Reddington and another defense attorney, Martin Weinberg, filed a motion to dismiss the case against Clancy, a Massachusetts woman charged with killing her three young children.
The high-profile murder trial ended in a mistrial earlier this month after seven days of juror deadlock.
Several jurors who have spoken publicly since the trial said that deliberations yielded an 11-1 split in favor of not guilty by reason of insanity. They claimed the final juror would not change his position favoring conviction, despite what they described as expressions of reasonable doubt.
Juror Nick Dargie previously told News’ Aaron Katersky that Desronvil at times declined to engage with jurors during the deliberations and instead scrolled on his phone.
“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 at the time.
Following criticism from other jurors, the holdout juror came forward publicly last week to defend his actions.
“I didn’t have any doubts,” Michael Péguy Desronvil said in a statement to News shared by his attorney on Sept. 18. “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.”
Paltzik, Desronvil’s attorney, argued in his overnight statement that the effort to get the judge to question Desronvil is “a full-frontal attack on the U.S. Constitution” that could create a dangerous precedent of investigating and punishing holdout jurors.
“If we follow his destructive proposal to its logical conclusion, we’re going to have an endless cycle of prosecutors investigating holdouts who oppose ‘guilty’ and defense attorneys investigating holdouts who oppose ‘not guilty,'” he wrote on social media.
Legal analyst Terri Austin, who is not involved in the Clancy trial, told News Monday that Reddington’s motion has the potential to hinder future jury pools.
“Now we’re talking about the privacy of these individual jurors and the effect that’s going to have on jury pools out there,” Austin said. “Nobody’s going to want to sit on a jury if, in fact, you can take my phone and look at everything that I was texting, so I think it’s a problem.”
Last week, the judge in the case, Sullivan, ordered the extension of the impoundment order preventing the release of the full list of jurors’ names, citing “significant and divisive attention,” according to Boston affiliate WCVB.
Sullivan wrote in the order that “at least one juror” asked for the order to be extended indefinitely.
“There have been identifications of jurors and their personal information without their permission,” Sullivan wrote, according to WCVB.
News’ Tonya Simpson contributed to this report.
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