Juror’s attorney calls the motion a ‘full-frontal attack on the US Consтιтution’ that threatens the Sixth Amendment
Lindsay Clancy’s defense team is calling for an investigation into the holdout juror who sought to find her guilty of murder in the strangling of her children and using his refusal to bow to peer pressure to ask a judge to dismiss her charges — prompting a blistering response from his lawyer.
“The ‘Looney Tunes’ motion filed yesterday by Kevin ‘Shooter McGavin’ Reddington to investigate Michael is not just an attack on Michael for being the courageous lone holdout juror,” attorney Edward Paltzik wrote on X Tuesday morning, referring to the holdout, Michael Desronvil.
“Reddington’s motion is actually a full-frontal attack on the U.S. Consтιтution,” Paltzik warned. “Because if the new normal is that jurors are going to face brutal reprisals for disagreeing with a defense attorney, you can kiss the Sixth Amendment goodbye.”
Michael P. Desronvil, the lone holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, which ended in a mistrial.
He warned that if the judge grants defense demands for an investigation into his client it would undermine the American criminal justice system in the long run.
The Looney Tunes motion filed yesterday by Kevin “Shooter McGavin” Reddington to investigate Michael is not just an attack on Michael for being the courageous lone holdout juror. Reddington’s motion is actually a full-frontal attack on the U.S. Consтιтution. Because if the new normal is that jurors are going to face brutal reprisals for disagreeing with a defense attorney, you can kiss the Sixth Amendment goodbye.
To anyone who thinks that Reddington’s motion is OK, just remember that the tables will inevitably turn. Imagine a similar trial sometime in the not too distant future where it is the reverse scenario: 11-1 in favor of guilty, with one holdout favoring not guilty by reason of insanity. I doubt you folks would be alright if the District Attorney then filed a motion to investigate that lone holdout standing in the way of a conviction.
That’s why this is actually not a partisan issue. Really, this is a “do we still want to have a Sixth Amendment” issue. If you are like me and believe steadfastly in the Consтιтution, it’s easy to see how, regardless of your party affiliation, this is an absolutely terrible path of ruin Reddington wants to take us down.
If we follow his destructive proposal to its logical conclusion, we’re going to have an endless cycle of prosecutors investigating holdouts who oppose “guilty” and defense attorneys investigating holdouts who oppose “not guilty.” Pretty soon we’ll end up with with a retrograde justice system that will look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy Feud: a cycle of carnage so malignant that its origins will fade in importance, replaced by the hopeless dєatᩚh spiral of the cycle itself.
Kevin Reddington’s disgusting motion to investigate Michael is worthy of nothing but universal condemnation. This is certainly not the final word from us on this subject, but merely our first words. It’s all going to backfire spectacularly on sore loser Reddington.
— Edward Andrew Paltzik, Attorney (@EdPaltzik) September 22, 2026
“If we follow his destructive proposal to its logical conclusion, we’re going to have an endless cycle of prosecutors investigating holdouts who oppose ‘guilty’ and defense attorneys investigating holdouts who oppose ‘not guilty,’” he wrote. “Pretty soon we’ll end up with… a retrograde justice system that will look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy Feud: a cycle of carnage so malignant that its origins will fade in importance, replaced by the hopeless dєatᩚh spiral of the cycle itself.”
Reddington, in a motion filed Friday, called for a “limited inquiry” into the holdout, for information about his background and potential criminal history, phone records, courthouse surveillance video and more.
Lindsay Clancy looks at jurors as Judge Sullivan asks them to start deliberations for a sixth day. The Lindsay Clancy jury resumes deliberations for a sixth day on Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026.
Neither Paltzik nor Reddington immediately responded to requests for comment from Fox News Digital Tuesday morning.
In a separate filing, another attorney for Clancy, Martin Weinberg, argued that Judge William Sullivan’s decision to overrule a defense objection at trial should be grounds for dismissing the charges against the 36-year-old defendant on double jeopardy grounds. That motion also centered on the holdout juror and allegations that he ignored the judge’s instructions and the law.
Callan, left, Dawson and Cora Clancy. The three children were killed at their Duxbury, Mᴀssachusetts, home in January 2023.
“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.”
Kevin J. Reddington addresses the media outside of Plymouth Superior Court, Plymouth, Mᴀss., on Thursday, September 3, 2026. His client, Lindsay Clancy, is on trial for the murder of her three children in 2023.
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.”
Paltzik has said he began representing Desronvil last week as the holdout faced mounting public pressure from his fellow jurors, Clancy’s defense and her supporters among the public.
Patrick Clancy exits Plymouth Superior Court, Plymouth, Mᴀss., on Monday, July 27, 2026. His ex-wife, Lindsay Clancy, is on trial for the murder of their three children.
Several other jurors have spoken publicly following Clancy’s mistrial, which was declared on Sept. 4. Some, including the jury foreperson, have accused Desronvil of ignoring his own reasonable doubts about the prosecution’s case, a claim he denied in his only public remarks.
GOT A TIP?
“I didn’t have any doubts,” he said in a statement last week, first made to NewsNation. “As I tried to explain different possible theories during deliberation, I kept getting cut off as if I had doubts based on the evidence present.”
Paula Devlin speaks with Fox News Digital about the Lindsay Clancy trial, Whitman, Mᴀssachusetts, Monday, September 14, 2026. Devlin was a juror in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy.
Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, admitted killing her children — Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months — but argued she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings. Prosecutors argued she planned the murders and understood that what she was doing was wrong.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
