This is an opinion piece.
Conservative media turned a juror into a hero in about 48 hours. Here’s what they knew about him when they did it: he blocked an acquittal, and he’s Black. That was the whole file. Everything else came later, and when it came, most of the people who’d built the statue decided it didn’t count.
Quick recap. On September 4, Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial in the case of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother charged in the 2023 deaths of her three kids. The jury had deliberated roughly 38 hours across seven days and came back 11-1. The eleven wanted to find her not criminally responsible. One juror wouldn’t go along.
Then a juror went on CBS Mornings and told Gayle King the holdout was the only Black man on the panel. That single detail is what lit the fuse.
The statue line
Ann Coulter posted it plainly: “I want every George Floyd statue replaced with a statue of this guy. True hero.”
That’s the argument in one sentence, and it spread fast. The Western Journal ran him as the man who “held out against the mob.” PJ Media, Townhall, LifeSite and American Greatness all picked it up. Gov. Ron DeSantis offered him “asylum” in Florida, writing that “a man objected to allowing a woman to kill her three young kids and get away with it, so NBC is trying to smear that juror, whose identity should be protected.” A GiveSendGo for him has pulled in more than $140,000.
The juror, later identified as Michael Desronvil, has since spoken publicly. He told NewsNation he “didn’t have any doubts,” that he kept getting cut off in deliberations, and that other jurors were behaving like “activists.” His attorney, Edward Paltzik, calls him an “American Hero and Champion of Justice” and has made a point of noting his client is a Christian and a Trump supporter.
What nobody checked first
On September 11, NBC10 Boston reported what a background check would have turned up.
In September 2021, Desronvil was charged out of Brockton District Court with assaulting his wife. A police report says his 13-year-old nephew called 911 and told police his uncle grabbed the woman by the throat and threw her into a dresser. The couple divorced. The criminal charge was later dismissed, and his ex-wife told NBC10 she hadn’t wanted to testify because she was afraid of losing custody of her daughter.
Last year, that same nephew took out a restraining order, saying Desronvil pushed him down and punched him in the face repeatedly. That order was still active while he sat on the Clancy jury.
Read that again. A restraining order alleging violence was in force while he weighed a case about a mother accused of killing her children, and the selection process didn’t catch it. Whatever you think of the verdict he wouldn’t give, that’s a real question about how Plymouth County seats juries.
The response from the people who’d just made him a hero wasn’t to weigh it. It was to call it a smear.
Why the George Floyd comparison falls apart
Set the politics aside for a second and look at the logic, because it doesn’t work.
George Floyd is a symbol of something that was done to him. Whatever anyone thinks about the murals and the statues, the thing being marked is a killing by a police officer, on video, that a jury found criminal. Desronvil is being offered as a symbol of something he did. Those aren’t the same kind of thing. You can’t swap one for the other any more than you can swap a car crash for a driving award.
And there’s the part that bothers us most. The whole trade only makes sense if you think Black Americans are handed a role model and told who to admire. Coulter’s line isn’t really about Desronvil. It’s about replacing one assigned Black figure with a better-behaved one. That treats millions of people as an audience waiting for casting instructions instead of citizens who can reach their own conclusions.
If his race is irrelevant to whether his vote was right, and it is, then it’s also irrelevant to whether he’s a hero. You don’t get it both ways.
Where the other side got it wrong too
Two things here are genuinely bad, and they weren’t done by Fox.
Naming him was wrong. Juror anonymity isn’t a technicality, it’s what lets ordinary people vote their conscience without needing a lawyer and a safe house afterward. Judge Sullivan impounded the jury list once Desronvil was identified online, which tells you the court saw the danger. He’s reportedly received death threats and is staying somewhere undisclosed. Nobody should have to do that for jury duty.
And a hung jury is not a scandal. It’s a designed outcome. One juror who won’t fold is the system working exactly the way unanimity requires. His fellow jurors are entitled to be frustrated, and one described him strangling water bottles with exercise bands during deliberations, which is his characterization and not a finding. None of it makes Desronvil a wrongdoer. He voted. That was his job.
The domestic violence reporting is different from the doxxing, though, and lumping them together is how the defense of him gets lazy. His name shouldn’t have come out. Once it did, an active restraining order during a murder trial is news. Both of those can be true.
The BeezLoop Take
Nobody in this story is being looked at. Desronvil is being used, and he’s being used by both sides. One camp needed a villain within hours of learning he existed, and went digging. The other needed a martyr on the same timeline, and refused to look at anything that arrived after the casting was done. The single fact that set all of it off, that he was the only Black juror, is the one fact that has nothing to do with whether he was right.
Here’s our position. The hero framing isn’t a compliment to him. It’s a use of him. You can tell because it survived contact with information that should have complicated it. Something you believe about a person that can’t be dented by new facts about that person was never really about him.
Where we’re less sure: he isn’t purely a victim of the attention anymore. He’s given interviews, hired a lawyer who talks about his politics, and accepted six figures from strangers. At some point a person who was made into a symbol against his will starts participating, and the rules for covering him change. We don’t know exactly where that line sits, and we don’t think anyone covering this has thought hard about it.
The open question
Clancy is heading toward a possible retrial, and she’s hired Karen Read’s attorney to try to get the case thrown out first. If it’s tried again, how do you seat twelve people in Massachusetts who haven’t already been told what the last holdout’s vote said about his character, his religion and his party?
That’s the cost of all this, and it lands on Clancy, on the prosecutors, and on the next twelve people who get that summons in the mail.
Sources: NBC10 Boston · NBC News · The Hill on DeSantis · NewsNation interview · Fox News · The Western Journal
