Lindsay Clancy holdout juror's lawyer torches 'Looney Tunes motion' to investigate him
Lindsay Clancy's defense team is calling for an investigation into the holdout juror who sought to find her guilty of murder in the strangling of her children and using his refusal to bow to peer pressure to ask a judge to dismiss her charges — prompting a blistering response from his lawyer.
"The 'Looney Tunes' motion filed yesterday by Kevin 'Shooter McGavin' Reddington to investigate Michael is not just an attack on Michael for being the courageous lone holdout juror," attorney Edward Paltzik wrote on X Tuesday morning, referring to the holdout, Michael Desronvil.
"Reddington's motion is actually a full-frontal attack on the U.S. Constitution," Paltzik warned. "Because if the new normal is that jurors are going to face brutal reprisals for disagreeing with a defense attorney, you can kiss the Sixth Amendment goodbye."
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He warned that if the judge grants defense demands for an investigation into his client it would undermine the American criminal justice system in the long run.
"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. "Pretty soon we'll end up with... a retrograde justice system that will look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy Feud: a cycle of carnage so malignant that its origins will fade in importance, replaced by the hopeless death spiral of the cycle itself."
Reddington, in a motion filed Friday, called for a "limited inquiry" into the holdout, for information about his background and potential criminal history, phone records, courthouse surveillance video and more.
Neither Paltzik nor Reddington immediately responded to requests for comment from Fox News Digital Tuesday morning.
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In a separate filing, another attorney for Clancy, Martin Weinberg, argued that Judge William Sullivan's decision to overrule a defense objection at trial should be grounds for dismissing the charges against the 36-year-old defendant on double jeopardy grounds. That motion also centered on the holdout juror and allegations that he ignored the judge's instructions and the law.
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"The jury twice informed the Court that one of its members was refusing to apply the Court's instructions regarding the fundamental concept of reasonable doubt," Weinberg wrote. "After the first such report, the Court asked each juror individually whether he or she was able to apply the law. Upon receiving the second report, the Court tempered its response even further, simply reminding all jurors as a group of their obligation to follow its instructions generally. The Court denied Ms. Clancy's explicit requests to go further."
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Weinberg's motion argued that Sullivan's decision to declare a mistrial before investigating the holdout is improper, alleging that the jury foreperson accused the holdout of making "statements acknowledging doubt but refus[ing] to apply it to the verdict as the law states."
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Paltzik has said he began representing Desronvil last week as the holdout faced mounting public pressure from his fellow jurors, Clancy's defense and her supporters among the public.
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Several other jurors have spoken publicly following Clancy's mistrial, which was declared on Sept. 4. Some, including the jury foreperson, have accused Desronvil of ignoring his own reasonable doubts about the prosecution's case, a claim he denied in his only public remarks.
"I didn't have any doubts," he said in a statement last week, first made to NewsNation. "As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence present."
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He said that based on the physical evidence, witness testimony and the prosecution's presentations, he "thought it was enough proof that she knew exactly what she was doing and planned."
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, admitted killing her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — but argued she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings. Prosecutors argued she planned the murders and understood that what she was doing was wrong.
Clancy is due back in court Sept. 29.