Dimone Fleming and the Importance of the Decision-Maker

Dimone Fleming, a Black mother, provides the closest factual comparison identified in this review.

Fleming killed her two sons, ages three and eleven months, at a Bronx family shelter in 2022. Reports described apocalyptic delusions and her belief that a spirit had entered her. In August 2026, a judge found her not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect. Psychiatrists retained by the prosecution and defense agreed that she had been grossly psychotic and out of touch with reality.

Fleming received a postpartum-psychosis disposition. A judge made that decision after the psychiatric experts reached the same conclusion about her mental condition. The case therefore did not require a jury to choose between competing psychiatric accounts or to decide whether Fleming’s behavior looked sufficiently like mental illness.

Fleming establishes what happened when a judge applied a legal standard to substantially uncontested psychiatric evidence. Clancy shows what happened when a jury confronted a contested claim about the legal effect of a mother’s mental illness.

A judicial determination cannot be treated as a jury determination. Who decides matters.