Kevin Reddington inadvertently revealed that the lone holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial is a man during a tense courtroom exchange with Judge William Sullivan on Thursday.
The disclosure slipped out when Clancy’s defense attorney repeatedly used the pronoun “he” while arguing that the juror was blocking a verdict on the seventh day of deliberations. The jury, composed of nine women and three men, had already told Sullivan it was deadlocked on both Tuesday and Wednesday, prompting the judge to issue a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction urging that a verdict is “preferable” before sending them back to continue.
Reddington pressed Sullivan to question the holdout juror individually and to replace him, claiming the panelist had personal issues interfering with his ability to deliberate fairly. “Clearly, we have a person who, under their oath, stood in front of you yesterday … under oath looked you in the eye and lied,” Reddington said in court. “That juror told you that he would be able to apply the law to the facts as you asked him.”
The defense attorney argued the juror had made statements “acknowledging doubt” but “refuses to apply the verdict” by the letter of the law. Reddington also asked Sullivan to deliver his instructions more forcefully to the panel. “I would ask that you not give [the jury] a soft inquiry. I would ask that you specifically direct their attention to proof beyond a reasonable doubt and re-instruct them forcefully,” he said.
Sullivan grew visibly frustrated with the request. “What do you want me to do? Get a brass band?” the judge fired back. “I read the instruction … the fact that I perhaps didn’t give it my full inflection, I’m sorry about that, I’m not an actor,” he continued.
Sullivan denied Reddington’s bid to have the holdout juror individually questioned, responding, “In this case here, I see no showing for a need for an inquiry for this particular juror,” He added that “the discharge of a deliberating juror is a sensitive undertaking, fraught with potential error.”
Prosecutors sided with the judge, pushing for no additional questioning and asking that the jury be allowed to resume deliberations. They argued the juror in question showed “no indication of lack of impartiality or bias or extraneous influence, and no indication of inability to deliberate.”
Clancy, 36, faces criminal responsibility for strangling her three children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — at their Duxbury, Massachusetts home on January 24, 2023. The case has drawn widespread national attention as the jury weighs whether she should be held criminally responsible for the killings.