The holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial has broken his silence, saying eight fellow jurors behaved like “activists” who wanted her found not guilty from the first day of deliberations
He said that even as three young children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, lay at the center of the case due to their brutal murders, other jurors wanted to exonerate Clancy almost immediately.
Michael P. Desronvil, 48, of Bridgewater, Massachusetts spoke with Fugitive TV’s Ray Marcel after a mistrial was declared September 4.
Judge William Sullivan ended the trial after the jury of nine women and three men spent more than 38 hours deliberating and reported it could not reach a unanimous verdict. Notes given to the court indicated an 11-1 split.
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Clancy faces three counts of murder in the killings of her children.
Desronvil said he concluded she was guilty based on the evidence presented in court. He told Marcel he believed she was not insane at the time and knew what she was doing.
Marcel said Desronvil described the jury’s opening positions this way: from day one, eight jurors were going for not guilty, two were for guilty, and two had not made up their minds.
“He said that from day one, he said eight of them were going for Lindsay Clancy not guilty. That was on day one. Eight were going not guilty. Two were for guilty. And two didn’t know. They didn’t make up their mind,” Marcel recounted. “He said to him those eight felt like they were activists. … Every day they would vote. … The eight that felt that Lindsay was not guilty were trying to convince the other four, ‘Hey, Lindsay is not guilty.’”
Desronvil referred to those eight jurors as “activists” and said they wanted a “not guilty” result from the start. He said he and one other juror voted guilty, but the second juror “caved in at the last moment.”
For those who believe the law must answer for the taking of a child’s life, the account is stark. According to the holdout, a majority of the panel was already pushing to clear Clancy before the evidence had been fully weighed in the jury room. The three children would not have received justice had those jurors gotten their way in court.
Desronvil said the evidence showed their mother knew what she was doing.
Desronvil, whom Marcel described as well-spoken, kind and Catholic, said he believes he is being targeted because he is a Black Republican with conservative values and served with many Democratic voters. He has not appeared on camera. His name spread online after the mistrial. He has been doxxed; he said his life has been threatened and people have stalked his house.
He also addressed questions about his background.
“I did not lie on the questionnaire,” he told Fugitive TV, saying he disclosed a past arrest when selected.
A 2021 charge that he assaulted his then-wife was later dismissed. He said he has not been convicted in connection with those 2021 events and that some claims circulating about him were incomplete, partly true or false.
Supporters have called him a hero who “held his seat” rather than join a rush to exonerate a mother charged in the killings of her three children.
Clancy remains charged but prosecutors have not announced whether they will try the case again.
A hearing is scheduled for September 29.
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.
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.
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.”
Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot be allowed to become peripheral to their own story.
LifeNews Photo Credit: Fugitive TV.
