Lindsay Clancy defense seeks evidentiary hearing on holdout juror, double-jeopardy claims

The attorney for Connecticut native Lindsay Clancy is asking a judge to hear evidence and witness testimony about the holdout juror’s conduct in her Massachusetts murder trial.

In a motion filed Wednesday, attorney Kevin Reddington said an evidentiary hearing is needed to examine the allegations against the juror, Michael P. Desronvil, and determine whether the judge overseeing Clancy’s case should have investigated him before declaring a mistrial last month.

Reddington wants Judge William Sullivan to hold the hearing Nov. 2, when attorneys are scheduled to argue several other post-trial motions, most notably the defense’s claim that retrying Clancy would violate her double-jeopardy rights.

If the judge won’t hear evidence that day, Reddington asks him to postpone the entire hearing until the defense can present evidence on all of the pending motions. Wednesday’s motion says Clancy plans to seek appellate review if the judge denies her double-jeopardy motion without an evidentiary hearing.

The filing was the latest effort by the defense to have the case dismissed. Last week, Sullivan rejected Clancy’s request for a required finding of not guilty. The denial came after Reddington argued during a Sept. 29 hearing that prosecutors had not presented enough evidence to prove that Clancy killed her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.

It was the fourth time the judge had denied such a request.

Clancy’s murder trial ended in an 11-1 deadlock Sept. 4, with Desronvil favoring a conviction. Several jurors have since accused him of not following the law on reasonable doubt. They also said he was not engaged in deliberations and sometimes scrolled on his phone.

Desronvil, however, has said he had no doubt Clancy was guilty.

Prosecutors have not said yet whether they plan to retry Clancy, who still faces first-degree murder charges in the 2023 deaths of her children. She was accused of strangling them with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s home in Duxbury, Mass., while her husband, Patrick Clancy, was out running errands.

Clancy remains confined at a state-run psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, as her lawyers seek to have her case thrown out on the grounds of double jeopardy.

Under the Fifth Amendment, defendants generally cannot be tried twice for the same alleged crime. A mistrial is one of the exceptions to that rule, but only when there is what is called “manifest necessity” to end the first trial without a verdict. The defense argues that standard wasn’t met because Sullivan had a “clear alternative.”

Specifically, it believes Sullivan should have conducted an inquiry into Desronvil, who the jury’s foreperson had accused in a note of refusing to follow the law.

The defense had asked Sullivan to unseal jury notes and transcripts of sidebar discussions from the final days of deliberations. According to the court, those materials since have been provided to attorneys, but the defense wants them introduced as evidence at the November hearing.

Sullivan also is expected to consider defense motions for an investigation into Desronvil and to provide the questionnaires that jurors filled out before the trial, as well as a prosecution motion to prevent attorneys in the case from speaking publicly.

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