The six-week trial for Clancy, held in Plymouth Massachusetts, ended in a mistrial Sept. 3 after it exposed how the mother choked and killed her three children, ages 5, 3, and 8 months old, in the basement of their Massachusetts home.
What the public eventually learned from the jury room is that a single juror, a man, refused to bow to hours and days of pressure and pleas to vote with the 11 other jurors and acquit Clancy.
That juror has now been identified as Michael Desronvil, 48. Since the mistrial, he has hired an attorney and has acquired a spokesman, true crime YouTuber Ray Marcel, amid a media frenzy that dug up his own criminal record that includes domestic abuse against an ex-wife.
Clancy’s defense attorney, Kevin Reddington, is now asking Judge William Sullivan to review Desronvil’s phone records and his juror questionnaire, and to investigate if he paid attention during deliberations.
Desronvil has stated in interviews he had no doubts Clancy was sane when she killed her children. He has described a jury of “activists” who repeatedly cut him off when he kept describing the evidence from the case.
“Based on all the physical evidence, key witnesses, and what the prosecution presents, I thought it was enough proof that [Clancy] knew exactly what she was doing and planned,” Desronvil said in a statement to NewsNation.
One legitimate concern appears to be how Desronvil ended up on the 12-person jury with a criminal arrest in 2021 for allegedly attacking his then-wife. Those charges were dismissed, NBC Boston reported.
The jury questionnaire would presumably include a reference to criminal history.
What the defense attorney Reddington is doing is intimidating the holdout juror, which is an unprecedented legal maneuver, Jenna Ellis, a legal expert and AFR talk show host, told American Family News.
“Juror intimidation, really, is what it is,” Ellis advised. “This has gone beyond legitimate advocacy into an effort to punish the one juror because he refused to deliver the verdict that the defense wanted.”
If there is any inquiry or investigation of the Clancy jury, Ellis said it should focus on the female jurors who sympathized with Clancy and vilified the male juror who refused to budge.
“Juries are not called in order to be activists for a larger cause, and that's what clearly this became to some of these jurors,” Ellis said.
