When a diagnosis becomes the difference between murder and ‘not responsible.’
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co. | The Clancy Case
Daishawn was three years old. Octavius was eleven months old. Both were found in a bathtub in a Bronx family shelter in 2022 with multiple stab wounds. This week, a judge decided their mother would face no punishment for it at all — not because a jury weighed the evidence and disagreed with the prosecution, but because a single judge accepted a psychiatric conclusion that both sides’ hired experts happened to agree on. No trial. No cross-examination of that conclusion in front of a jury of ordinary people. A bench ruling, and the case moves to whether she’s dangerous, not whether she’s accountable.
Two children are dead. The system’s answer, so far, is a diagnosis.
What Actually Happened in the Bronx
Dimone Fleming, then 22, killed her sons in 2022. She was charged with first-degree murder. On Monday, a Bronx judge found her not responsible “due to mental disease or defect,” after both the prosecution’s and the defense’s own psychiatric evaluators concluded she was in a state of psychosis at the time. Because neither side’s expert was willing to contest the other’s finding, the case never reached a jury — a judge simply ratified the agreement between two hired evaluators and closed the criminal case.
Fleming is still in custody while a new evaluation determines whether she’s currently dangerous, and she’s due back in court September 18. That’s not incarceration for what she did. It’s a holding pattern while the state decides what to do with her next.
Contrast that with Massachusetts, where a jury is still weighing the identical category of claim in Lindsay Clancy’s case — competing experts, real cross-examination, twelve ordinary people deciding whether “postpartum psychosis” actually excuses what happened to Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy. Whatever you think of that process, it is at least a contest. Fleming’s case wasn’t. It was a formality once both hired experts landed in the same place.
“Two children are dead. The system’s answer, so far, is a diagnosis.”
The Problem With “Both Experts Agreed”
Coverage of the Fleming ruling treats the fact that prosecution and defense evaluators reached the same conclusion as reassuring — proof the finding must be sound if even the state’s own expert signed off. It should trouble you instead. Forensic psychiatry is not a hard science with a single verifiable answer; it’s professional judgment, rendered by an expert retained by one side or the other, in a system where neither expert bears any personal cost for being wrong.
“When both experts converge on the outcome that clears a defendant of two counts of murder, that convergence deserves more scrutiny, not less.”
When both experts converge on the outcome that clears a defendant of two counts of murder, that convergence deserves more scrutiny, not less — because it means the one adversarial check built into the system, a jury actually weighing dueling conclusions against each other, never happened at all.
The Rule That Makes This Easier Than It Should Be
Here’s the part almost nobody covering either case has explained plainly: Massachusetts doesn’t just allow a mental-illness defense — it stacks the deck toward it. Once a defendant properly raises lack of criminal responsibility, the burden flips. The prosecution has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant was criminally responsible. Not the defendant proving she was sick. The state proving she wasn’t.
“Not the defendant proving she was sick. The state proving she wasn’t.”
New York runs it the other way — lack of criminal responsibility is an affirmative defense under Penal Law § 40.15, and the defendant has to prove it herself, by a preponderance of the evidence. That’s the harder bar, and it’s still the one that let Fleming walk away from a murder charge entirely.
If New York’s defendant-carries-the-burden standard was still enough to clear Fleming with no trial at all, ask what Massachusetts’s prosecution-carries-the-burden standard is actually capable of producing once a jury with the burden already stacked against the state gets its hands on Clancy’s case. The system didn’t build in extra scrutiny for claims this consequential. In Massachusetts, it built in less.
“The system didn’t build in extra scrutiny for claims this consequential. In Massachusetts, it built in less.”
Accountability Is Supposed to Mean Something
“A finding like Fleming’s isn’t accountability. It’s a diagnosis standing in for a verdict.”
Nobody is arguing severe postpartum psychiatric illness isn’t real, or that women suffering from it don’t deserve treatment. That’s not the same question as whether killing your children should end in “not responsible” with no trial, no jury, and a path that leads to a dangerousness review instead of a sentence. A finding like Fleming’s isn’t accountability. It’s a diagnosis standing in for a verdict — and the two children who died don’t get a different outcome because the person who killed them was sick when she did it.
Run this through the only test that actually matters here: would this system feel like justice to Daishawn and Octavius, if they could ask for it themselves? Two hired experts agreeing behind closed doors, a judge signing off, and a mother moving toward a hearing about her own risk level rather than her own culpability, is not what accountability is supposed to look like — for any parent, in any state, regardless of what drove them to it.
Sources: Reporting from ABC7 New York/WABC and ABC13 on the Fleming ruling; New York Penal Law § 40.15, obtained via the New York State Senate’s official legislation site and Justia; the Massachusetts standard under Commonwealth v. McHoul, 352 Mass. 544 (1967), as established in Part 1 of this series.
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