The mistrial did not end the fight over the man who caused it. It moved the fight onto paper. Kevin Reddington has asked Judge William Sullivan to do something courts almost never do after a hung jury in a case this raw: open a limited inquiry into the holdout, the juror the motion still calls Juror Doe, and to do it before the September 29 hearing hardens into a path toward a second trial. The ask is specific, and the specificity is the point. He wants call, text, and data records from the phone for the hours of deliberation, roughly 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning until 4:30 in the afternoon, on every day the panel was locked in from late August through September 4. He wants the device itself placed with a neutral examiner, looked at in a narrow way, and returned on a short clock. He wants the confidential questionnaires preserved, not only the holdout’s but those of the twelve who deliberated and the six alternates. He wants hallway video outside the room, cellphone sign-in sheets, jury notes, and the court’s written answers. He wants the statewide domestic-violence registry checked, probation material pulled, and prosecutors required to say whether they have had any matter since January 2021 in which this juror was a defendant, a complainant, or a subject.

The three questions he wants asked on the record are just as тιԍнт. Did the questionnaire and the sidebar answers during selection tell the truth. Did the sworn ᴀssurance on September 3, the promise to follow the legal instructions, hold. Was there a phone, or any outside information, inside a deliberation that was supposed to be sealed. Reddington has said the inquiry would not touch the substance of the deliberations themselves. That sentence is doing a lot of work. Mᴀssachusetts protects the jury room. A judge can look at whether a juror was qualified, whether a form was false, whether a device brought the outside world in. A judge is not supposed to reopen the argument about who was more persuasive. The defense’s theory is that those outer facts may already be enough to taint what happened. A fellow juror has said the holdout was on his phone during the talks. Old court files, widely reported since the mistrial, describe a 2021 domestic-violence prosecution that was dismissed, a later abuse-prevention order tied to a nephew, and eviction pressure while the trial was still going. Forms in this state ask about arrests, charges, lawsuits, and household criminal history. A willful lie can matter. An omission that would have changed whether someone sat at all can matter more.

Sullivan has already done one thing that makes the file harder to read from the outside. He extended an impoundment order over the jury list and the questionnaires, citing the significant and divisive attention the case has drawn, and he did it indefinitely, until the court says otherwise. The materials are not a public record under the order. Lawyers may still be able to reach them. The impoundment does not, by itself, kill the defense motion, and it does not stop jurors from speaking if they choose to. It does mean the public will not get to flip through the forms that the motion treats as the heart of the problem. Paltzik’s answer has not been a quiet procedural brief. He has called the demand a Looney Tunes attack on a citizen who did his duty, a disgusting ᴀssault on the right to a fair trial, and a precedent that would let any defense lawyer punish the juror who refused to go along. If reprisal becomes normal, he has said, the Sixth Amendment is the thing that leaves.

What September 29 can actually produce is narrower than the headlines suggest. Sullivan can preserve records. He can order a limited look at metadata rather than a rummage through a private life. He can decide that the allegations, even if unpleasant, do not justify putting a juror in a chair. He can also be asked, in a separate motion, to end the prosecution on double-jeopardy grounds and not send Clancy back to a second jury at all. A yes on the phone does not convict the holdout of anything. A no does not prove the room was clean. It decides only whether this ᴅᴇᴀᴅlock will be examined as a possible defect, or left as the ordinary failure of twelve people to agree. In a case where one vote already rewrote the outcome, that is not a small door to leave shut or to open.