Plymouth County prosecutors are weighing whether to retry Lindsay Clancy on first-degree murder charges after a mistrial declared when 11 of 12 jurors found her not criminally responsible — and the only holdout is now accused of lying on his juror questionnaire and receiving outside information during deliberations. For ordinary Americans, the message is clear: the state will burn your family down twice before it concedes reasonable doubt.
This case never should have reached a deadlocked jury. Clancy, a 36-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, strangled her three children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months — on Jan. 24, 2023. She then slit her own wrists and neck and downed prescription medication in an attempt to kill herself. The defense argued she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis, hallucinating a voice commanding her to kill. The evidence for that defense was overwhelming: in the four months before the killings, Clancy desperately sought help from a psychiatrist, two perinatal clinics, a suicide hotline on two occasions, and a five-day inpatient psychiatric stay. She was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications by five different providers — a pharmacological cocktail that defense attorney Kevin Reddington argued worsened her mental spiral.
Eleven jurors bought it. One didn't. That holdout, Michael P. Desronvil, reportedly expressed doubts about Clancy's guilt but refused to find her not guilty by reason of insanity because of the horrific nature of the crime — which is precisely the circumstance the insanity defense exists to address. Other jurors have come forward accusing Desronvil of misconduct. Reddington has requested an investigation into whether Desronvil lied on his juror questionnaire about a prior arrest and whether he received outside information on his cellphone during deliberations. Desronvil hired a lawyer, Edward Paltzik, who insists his client had
