When a Massachusetts jury deadlocked in Lindsay Clancy's murder trial, her defense team went hunting for someone to blame, and it zeroed in on the one juror who refused to find her not guilty.
Clancy’s lawyer argued that severe postpartum psychosis made her not guilty by reason of insanity for brutally murdering her three young children. Prosecutors told a different story. They pointed out how Clancy planned the killings in advance and even schemed to get her husband out of the house long enough to carry out the murders. One juror, Michael Desronvil, a hero in my book, refused to call that insanity. His vote deadlocked the jury, and Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial earlier this month.
Now Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, wants Desronvil investigated. His motion asks Sullivan to look into whether Desronvil gave inaccurate answers during jury selection and claims he used his cellphone during deliberations. Reddington also wants the judge to order Desronvil's phone carrier to hand over call and text records for every day of deliberations. He also wants Desronvil forced to surrender his phone to a "neutral examiner" who would dig through its data.
Think about the implications of this. A private citizen answers a jury summons, sits through a gut-wrenching trial about three dead children, votes his conscience, and his reward is not only being forced into hiding, but also having the defense lawyer demand access to his phone.
Reddington's case leans heavily on fellow juror Nick Dargie, who told ABC News in an interview that Desronvil ignored the other panelists and scrolled on his phone during deliberations. However, according to Desronvil, he was hardly the only one looking at a screen.
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Ray Marcel, host of the true-crime YouTube channel Fugitive TV, now serves as Desronvil's spokesperson. He sat down with NewsNation's Brian Entin to respond to the allegations.
"He said everybody had their phone on them. It wasn't like they took their phones away and locked them away," Marcel said.
Marcel claimed that other jurors were "posting on social media, allegedly... while deliberations [were] going on," though he refused to name them. He added that Desronvil told him "people were sitting back there on their phones you know that's how it was."
On his show, Marcel said Desronvil Googled "psychosis" to "make sure he has it right" and looked up "altruistic filicide," a term he had never encountered. Marcel argued that the paper jury instructions leave a "gray area" because they don't explicitly forbid jurors from looking up an unfamiliar word at home.
He went further in an X post Wednesday, alleging that the judge ordered jurors off their devices only after some had already used their phones to look up definitions during deliberations. "So the court already knows," Marcel wrote. He also accused jurors of posting on social media and discussing the case with friends, and he claimed one unnamed juror posted in a Karen Read Facebook group.
"If we're going to start looking at Michael's phone records, then let's be consistent: Let's look at EVERYONE'S phone records," Marcel wrote.
"Don't single out one juror. If Michael's communications are relevant, then the same standard should apply across the board," he added.
Massachusetts trial court rules let jurors keep their phones but bar them from using them during trial or deliberations. Judges have the power to confiscate phones before deliberations begin, and no evidence shows Sullivan did that here. If phone use tainted this jury, the problem reaches well past one man, and Reddington surely knows it.
So why target Desronvil alone? Because he's the juror who stood between Clancy and the verdict her defense (and a bunch of lunatic Karens) wanted. Reddington hasn't asked to comb through the phone records of the 11 jurors who sided with his client. He wants the one holdout's texts, calls, and data, and nobody else's. If Sullivan grants that request, the message to future jurors is unmistakable. Vote the wrong way, and your private life becomes evidence.