Lindsay Clancy's defense team wants a judge to investigate the lone holdout juror who refused to acquit the Massachusetts mother of murdering her three children — raising questions about juror misconduct that could determine whether the case gets dismissed or retried.

The stakes are straightforward: if the court finds juror Michael Desronvil violated the rules during deliberations, it could bolster Clancy's bid to have the charges thrown out entirely. If the court finds nothing, Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz gets a cleaner path to retrying a case that already collapsed under a 11-1 split.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington filed a motion Friday, made public Monday, asking Judge William Sullivan to probe Desronvil on three fronts: his alleged cellphone use during deliberations, the truthfulness of his pre-trial questionnaire, and the candor of his answers when the judge questioned jurors a day before the trial ended. Phone use during deliberations is barred under Massachusetts court rules.

Fellow juror Nick Dargie, 25, told ABC News that Desronvil did not engage with other jurors and scrolled on his phone during deliberations. The New York Post reported that the motion also references Desronvil's alleged domestic violence history. Judges can require jurors to surrender phones before deliberations, but there is no indication Sullivan did so in this trial.

Reddington wants Sullivan to order Desronvil's cell carrier to hand over call and text detail records for each day of deliberations, require Desronvil to give his phone to a neutral examiner, and produce courthouse video of the jury-room corridor along with phone sign-in sheets. Sullivan has agreed to impound jury information and questionnaires but has not yet ruled on the motion.

Desronvil, a 48-year-old father, has not been accused of any wrongdoing. Through his lawyer Edward Paltzik, he released a statement last week saying he "didn't have any doubts" that Clancy knew what she was doing when she killed her children. Other jurors complained he was inflexible, and the jury foreperson told the judge that one juror was refusing to listen to the law on reasonable doubt.

The Guardian noted that the defense filed a second motion Monday asking the judge to dismiss the case outright rather than order a retrial, arguing the mistrial should never have been declared and that the judge should have replaced the holdout with an alternate.

Clancy strangled her children — Callan, 8 months, Cora, 5, and Dawson, 3 — on January 24, 2023, while her then-husband was out running errands. Eleven jurors were prepared to find her not guilty by reason of postpartum psychosis. The judge declared a mistrial on September 4 after the jury deadlocked. Clancy remains charged with three counts of first-degree murder and is held in a psychiatric hospital. Cruz is expected to announce September 29 whether he will retry the case.

Here is the tension: one juror standing his ground against eleven is exactly how the system is supposed to work — until that juror may have been texting during deliberations and may have lied his way onto the panel. The court's ruling won't just shape Clancy's fate. It will signal whether judicial scrutiny extends to the jurors themselves, or whether the system closes ranks when a verdict inconveniently falls apart.