This is absolutely beyond the pale and I don’t even know how this is legal, but what do I know?  I’m not a legal expert.

Somehow, Lindsey Clancy’s attorney has asked the Judge in the case to essentially launch an investigation in the lone holdout juror, seeking his phone records and allegedly resorting to what some have called all out character assassination.

Take a look:

More here:

This shouldn’t be legal, should it?

I was under the impression that this man did exactly what our country asks of jurors….he listened to everything and then stood by his strongly held convictions about what happened here and what the outcome should be.

For doing his job they are now asking to run him through the mud?

ADVERTISEMENT

And they’re asking for the Court’s help in doing it?

How is that legal?

Legal expert Jonathan Turley absolutely destroyed the attorney in this clip:

ABC News had more information:

Lawyers for Lindsay Clancy have asked a judge to investigate the conduct of the lone juror who wanted to convict the mother from Massachusetts of murder in the deaths of her three children.

In a motion filed Friday but made public Monday, Clancy’s lawyers asked the court to question the juror about his alleged use of a cellphone during deliberations, his truthfulness on a questionnaire that prospective jurors filled out before the trial began and his truthfulness when jurors were questioned by the judge a day before the trial ended.

The judge declared a mistrial Sept. 4 after the jury insisted it couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict, despite days of trying. Eleven of 12 jurors were ready to clear Clancy of criminal responsibility, with the majority feeling that she was in the grip of a rare condition called postpartum psychosis when she strangled her kids. But one juror, Michael Desronvil, sided with the prosecutors, who had argued that Clancy knew what she was doing.

Among other things, Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, asked the court to obtain a record of any calls or texts Desronvil made between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. on each day the jury deliberated. Phone use during deliberations is prohibited in the state.

Prosecutors have yet to say whether they plan on putting Clancy on trial again. She remains charged with murder and is in a psychiatric hospital until her case is resolved.

In another motion on Monday, Clancy’s lawyers asked the judge to take the unusual step of dismissing the criminal case, rather than putting on a new trial, on the grounds that a mistrial shouldn’t have been declared in the first place.

ADVERTISEMENT

They argued that the judge should have replaced the holdout juror with an alternate during the deliberations after a jury foreperson complained to the judge that one juror was refusing to listen to the law on reasonable doubt.

This is beyond wrong if you ask me!

Here’s more, from Fox News:

Judge William Sullivan previously overruled a defense motion to have the holdout juror dismissed and replaced with an alternate, saying he felt it was not appropriate for him to get involved in the deliberations.

“The jury twice informed the Court that one of its members was refusing to apply the Court’s instructions regarding the fundamental concept of reasonable doubt,” Weinberg wrote. “After the first such report, the Court asked each juror individually whether he or she was able to apply the law. Upon receiving the second report, the Court tempered its response even further, simply reminding all jurors as a group of their obligation to follow its instructions generally. The Court denied Ms. Clancy’s explicit requests to go further.”

Weinberg’s motion argued that Sullivan’s decision to declare a mistrial before investigating the holdout is improper, alleging that the jury foreperson accused the holdout of making “statements acknowledging doubt but refus[ing] to apply it to the verdict as the law states.”

“Ms. Clancy, like all criminal defendants, had a Constitutional right to have her fate decided by an impartial jury of her peers, faithfully applying the law as instructed rather than superimposing the juror’s own view of legal right and wrong, including the foundational principle that, absent proof beyond a reasonable doubt of her guilt, she must be acquitted,” he wrote. “The multiple reports of a juror violating this bedrock principle, therefore, required a judicial inquiry sufficient to ascertain whether her right to an impartial jury was being violated.”

Weinberg also argued that there was a legal basis for conducting a probe into the holdout before the mistrial was declared. However, Sullivan did not hold one.

On Friday, Clancy’s trial attorney Kevin Reddington called for an investigation into the holdout juror who wanted to find her guilty of murder charges in connection with the strangling deaths of her three young children.

ADVERTISEMENT

“[The other jurors] know that they were robbed — by one man — for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors that were so attentive, so beautiful, so wonderful and listened to this evidence,” he told reporters after leaving the courthouse following her mistrial.

Reddington is asking a Massachusetts judge to preserve juror records from all 12 panelists and six alternates, including their questionnaires, courthouse hallway surveillance video taken outside the deliberation room and sign-in sheets for the jurors’ cellphones.

Reddington is asking the court to conduct a “limited inquiry” into the holdout and for information on any potential background checks stemming from a February motion for access to prospective juror information filed by Plymouth County prosecutors.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

Join The Conversation. Leave a Comment.