09/05/2026
The Holdout Juror Did What the Law Asked.
In the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, one man saved the proceeding from becoming a sentiment parade. The lone holdout juror stood alone against eleven others and refused to surrender his judgment. That is not stubbornness. That is courage. He was honest when honesty cost him the goodwill of the room. He displayed what strength, honor, and justice look like when they are no longer theoretical.
A lesser person would have folded. He did not.
Eleven jurors appear to have been ready to acquit. On August 20 I wrote that jury nullification driven by compassion would be understandable human emotion, and that it would not be justice. This juror refused that bargain. He applied the test Massachusetts actually uses: whether Clancy retained substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her acts or to conform her conduct to the law. Illness is not that test. The afternoon of January 24, 2023, is. For that fidelity, he deserves public gratitude, not a target on his back.
Kevin Reddington then did something reckless and ugly. He stepped outside the courthouse and marked that juror for public contempt. He called him “one man” who, “for whatever his agenda was,” had “robbed” the other jurors and “stolen seven weeks.” He thanked the jury “minus one.” He accused the holdout of refusing the law and of lying under oath.
That was not advocacy. It was a public branding of a private citizen who had done his duty. In today’s assassination culture, those words are not a flourish. They are a hazard. Reddington knew the case was raw, watched, and emotionally charged. He named the holdout as the obstacle anyway. In my view, he also sent a message to the next panel: return the verdict he wants, or he will put your life in jeopardy the same way. If that juror is harmed because of what Reddington did today, the blame would, in my view, rest largely if not entirely with him.
Reddington’s sense of injury is grotesque. He howled about seven weeks. He has never spoken with anything close to that volume about the three lives his client took: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months.
Those children were strangled with exercise bands in a basement after she timed her husband’s absence. That is the crime. Seven weeks of trial are not. A lawyer who treats a holdout juror as a thief, and three murdered children as a secondary theme, has shown the public exactly whose losses move him.
Asked whether he would prefer a bench trial if he had the option on retrial, Reddington said no. In my view, that answer is telling. He knows the law is not on his side. A judge trained to apply it would be far less likely to give him the result he expects from a future jury — one that, by ordinary statistics, will not be made up of legal experts. He wants another panel he can work. He does not want a finder of fact who will simply enforce the standard.
The holdout juror already enforced it. Because he would not abandon the legal test, the Commonwealth still has a chance to seek a just verdict for the strangulation murders of those three children. That juror did the hard thing. Reddington did the cheap thing.
The difference is the entire case.
Credit: Joseph Fosco
