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| Lindsay Clancy |
DUXBURY, MA — In a stunning defense of courtroom dignity, Judge William F. Sullivan on Monday interrupted proceedings to rebuke a lawyer for the shocking offense of uttering the name of the single juror who refused to pretend that a mother strangling her three small children was simply a very understandable case of the baby blues that could happen to anyone with a uterus and a bad day.
The other eleven jurors had already done the mature, compassionate thing and voted that the killings were not really killings in any meaningful moral or legal sense. One holdout ruined the vibes. That man has since been correctly identified as the real problem in the story.
Judge Sullivan stopped defense attorney Kevin Reddington while the lawyer discussed the holdout’s questionnaire answers and alleged conduct during deliberations in the trial that ended 11-1.
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Sullivan said.
Reddington replied, “No, you’re not gonna stop me,” the contemptuous lawyer said.
The judge stated there was “no need here in this courtroom to use that” juror’s name.
Reddington continued, saying the juror “got more face time than I do,” a reference to media interviews the holdout has given since the mistrial.
“But that’s not through any rulings I’ve made,” Sullivan answered.
Reddington added, “And his attorney from Houston is sitting in the back.” Sullivan replied, “Well that’s great, too,” and told him, “We don’t need this.”
Observers reported gasps in the gallery as Reddington used the juror’s name. Sources confirmed the same gallery had remained perfectly still and respectful when the topic was the actual strangulation of a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and an eight-month-old. Naming a living adult who declined to excuse it, however, was simply too much for some people to bear.
Reddington argued that the name was already widely known online and referenced claims involving the juror’s cellphone use and research into filicide during the trial period. Local experts agreed that looking up “filicide” on your phone is far more troubling than performing it.
The hearing concerned the defense effort to dismiss the charges on double-jeopardy grounds. Clancy faces three counts of first-degree murder for the January 2023 deaths of 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan in their Duxbury home. She has admitted the killings but pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In modern America this is widely considered the correct plea whenever the victims are small enough and the perpetrator is female enough.
Eleven jurors favored a finding of not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility due to postpartum mental health problems; the holdout, who has publicly identified himself as Michael Desronvil, did not. He has stated that he had no doubts and that the evidence showed Clancy knew what she was doing and planned the acts. Other jurors said he refused to apply the court’s instructions on reasonable doubt. Translation: he stubbornly insisted on noticing that three children were dead and that their mother was the one who made them that way.
Sullivan previously denied the defense request for a hearing to examine the juror’s questionnaire, prior domestic-violence matter and alleged phone use, ruling that information that surfaced after the mistrial could not be used to challenge the decision to declare one. Prosecutors also pushed for a gag order after Reddington told reporters he hoped the holdout could “sleep well at night.” The possibility that the man who voted against excusing triple child murder might sleep poorly was apparently the true injustice that needed addressing.
The judge took the dismissal motion and related matters under advisement. Prosecutors have not said whether they will seek a retrial. If they do, legal observers expect the next jury to be carefully screened for anyone who has ever been troubled by the concept of a parent killing their children.
The case centers on the deaths of three small children and the question of criminal responsibility for those deaths after Clancy admitted the acts. The single holdout juror’s refusal to join an insanity finding produced the mistrial after roughly 38 hours of deliberation. Postpartum mental illness is real, but a person can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible. Mental illness does not change that three children were killed in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never grow up. The children cannot speak in the courtroom. Dismissing the charges would leave the taking of their lives without a completed finding of criminal responsibility. This last point has been widely criticized as insufficiently focused on the mother’s emotional journey.
Pro-life writers have called that reaction a moral inversion: compassion for a mother who killed her children, with far less public focus on Cora, Dawson and Callan themselves. Some have even suggested, wildly, that the children being dead is the central fact of the story rather than a regrettable side effect of the mother’s distress.
Journalist Caitlin Flanagan wrote that “what began as admirable compassion for a woman who says she was driven by mental illness to commit the world’s greatest form of evil has turned into something strange: an almost exultant, fan-like celebration of Lindsay Clancy.”
Paul Batura of Focus on the Family argued that a culture already trained to treat a child’s death as secondary to a mother’s distress — first in abortion, then in cases like this one — struggles to say plainly that killing children is wrong even when the mother is ill. Postpartum mental illness is real, he wrote, but “an individual can be mentally ill and still criminally responsible.”
Abby Johnson, CEO and founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries, who herself experienced postpartum psychosis after the birth of one of her children, said the intense identification with Clancy reveals a deeper moral distortion long cultivated by abortion advocacy.
“I am not arguing that compassion for Lindsay is wrong…What concerns me is something different. We have become extraordinarily practiced at looking at a dead child and asking first what his or her mother was going through. And abortion taught us how to do that. For decades, the defense of abortion has depended on shifting the moral center of the story away from the human being who dies and toward the human being experiencing the crisis. The mother’s suffering becomes the justification. But suffering does not make killing good,” Johnson wrote.
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| The Clancy babies |
Johnson stressed that mental illness may affect legal culpability without changing the moral nature of the act.
“Mental illness may affect a person’s culpability for an act. It does not change the moral nature of the act itself,” she said. “Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. Their mother killed them.”
Johnson argued that culture has spent more than 50 years training itself to begin with a mother’s fear, financial stress, lack of support or depression until the child’s humanity nearly disappears—first in abortion and now in cases like this one.
“We can demand better postpartum mental-health care in their names. We can acknowledge that their mother may have been gravely ill. We can pray for Lindsay,” Johnson wrote. “None of that requires us to forget where the greatest irreversible harm occurred. Three children went to bed on January 24, 2023, in the home where they were supposed to be safest. They will never get to grow up.”
The courtroom, for its part, made clear that the real emergency was the unauthorized use of a holdout juror’s name. The three children, already dead and therefore unavailable for interviews, public statements, or fan clubs, remained unavailable for comment.
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