Attorneys for the lone holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy’s mistrial say they will file a bar complaint against defense lawyer Kevin Reddington for singling out their client after the deadlock.
Lawyers for Michael Desronvil say Kevin Reddington crossed a line when he asked a judge to investigate their client and then aired public comments about the jury. They intend to take the fight to disciplinary authorities.
Fox News reported that attorneys Tyler Cox and Edward Paltzik plan a bar complaint over Reddington’s treatment of Desronvil, the only man on the 12-person panel and the sole juror who wanted a guilty verdict in the strangling deaths of Clancy’s three children.
The case already ended in a mistrial. Now the aftermath is turning into a fight over how far a defense lawyer can go when one juror refuses to bend.
Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on Sept. 4 after the panel sent three impasse notes and said it was hopelessly deadlocked. Several panelists later described an 11-1 split, with 11 prepared to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity.
Desronvil, 48, was the holdout. His lawyers say he was convinced of guilt and did not have doubts. Reddington, 75, responded by asking the judge to look into whether Desronvil lied on his juror questionnaire and whether he used a cell phone during deliberations.
Plymouth County prosecutors separately asked Sullivan for a gag order. They accused Reddington of helping expose the holdout’s identity and of praising other jurors while attacking him. That motion is set to be argued at Clancy’s next hearing on Nov. 2. No retrial date has been set, and prosecutors have not said whether they will retry first-degree murder charges, seek lesser counts, offer a plea, or drop the case.
Cox took the dispute public in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. He did not speak evasively about the planned filing.
Cox told Hannity:
"We are going to file a bar complaint."
He rejected Reddington’s framing of the dispute as routine lawyering.
Cox said:
"[Reddington] said that all he’s done is file a motion. Well, even if you take that as true, which it obviously isn’t, the motion that he filed was unprecedented."
And he drew a bright line on how jurors should be treated after a verdict fails.
Cox said:
"You don’t attack jurors this way, you don’t single them out."
The New York Post reported the same plan by Desronvil’s attorneys after Reddington sought the investigation and made related comments about the jury.
At a Tuesday hearing in the Clancy matter, Reddington denied wrongdoing. He pushed back on the suggestion that he had hounded the holdout.
Reddington said in court:
"I’m tired of hearing about me persecuting people."
He did not immediately return requests for comment on the planned bar complaint. Prosecutors want the gag order precisely because of his public remarks about the jury and Desronvil. The defense motion and the gag request now sit alongside each other on the same docket path toward Nov. 2.
The underlying case remains as grim as it was on day one. On Jan. 24, 2023, at the family home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Clancy, then 36, was accused of strangling her three children, Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, with exercise bands.
The defense has said she suffered severe postpartum psychosis and heard a voice telling her to commit the slayings and take her own life. According to that account, she cut her wrists and neck, took pills, and jumped from a second-story window. She was left paralyzed. She faced first-degree murder charges in the trial that ended without a verdict.
None of that erases the basic pressure now facing the system. Eleven jurors were ready to excuse the killings on insanity grounds. One was not. The defense answer was to put that juror under a misconduct cloud and discuss him in public. His lawyers’ answer is a bar complaint.
Jurors are ordered to decide facts under oath. They are not supposed to become targets for investigation and media commentary because they refused to join an 11-vote bloc. Reddington had every right to defend Clancy hard in court. Filing a motion that names a single holdout and then talking about the jury outside court is a different choice, one prosecutors already say went too far, and one Desronvil’s lawyers say demands discipline.
Sullivan still controls the courtroom. He ended the first trial when the panel could not agree. He will hear the gag-order fight on Nov. 2. Whether a disciplinary body ever sustains a complaint against Reddington is a separate track. What is already clear is the sequence: a deadlocked jury, a defense motion aimed at the holdout, public comments that drew a prosecution gag request, and now a planned bar filing from the juror’s own counsel.
Parents who send their kids to bed alive expect the law to treat the killing of three children as the center of the case, not a referendum on the one juror who would not wave it away. When a defense lawyer’s post-mistrial focus shifts onto that juror, accountability has to run in both directions.
A justice system that leans on ordinary citizens to judge the worst crimes cannot shrug when those citizens get singled out for doing the job.
