A Bronx judge has found Dimone Fleming not responsible for the deaths of her two young sons, ruling that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when the boys were killed at a family shelter in 2022.
Judge Audrey Stone handed down the ruling Monday in Bronx Criminal Court. Fleming, now 26, had confessed to killing 3 year old Daishawn Fleming and 11 month old Octavius Canada, whose bodies were found with multiple stab wounds in a bathtub at the Echo Place Family Shelter in Mount Hope in November 2022. She was 22 at the time and was charged with first degree murder.
The legal term the judge used is “not responsible by mental disease or defect.” It is what most people know as the insanity finding, and it means the court accepted that Fleming did the act but was so ill at the time that she could not understand what she was doing or that it was wrong. It is not an acquittal in the ordinary sense and it is not a finding that she is innocent.
It also does not mean Dimone Fleming is walking out of a courthouse. That is the piece getting lost as this story spreads. She has not been released. Court appointed psychiatrists will evaluate her again, and she is due back in court on September 18, when a judge will decide where she is held. If doctors conclude she is still mentally ill and still dangerous, she can be committed to a high security psychiatric hospital for a period that can be extended again and again. If they find she is ill but no longer a danger, she could be moved to a less restrictive facility. She could be hospitalized for years.
The case never went to a jury because there was nothing for a jury to fight about. Psychiatrists hired by the prosecution and psychiatrists hired by the defense reached the same conclusion independently. Dr. Eric Goldsmith, who evaluated her at the request of prosecutors, told the court she was hallucinating, believed the world was ending, and believed a spirit had entered her body. When both sides agree on the medical picture, the judge is left to accept it.
Postpartum psychosis is not postpartum depression. Depression after birth is common and involves sadness, exhaustion, and difficulty bonding. Psychosis is rare, striking roughly one or two mothers in every thousand births, and it is a break from reality. Women experiencing it hallucinate, hear voices, and hold delusions that feel completely true to them. Dr. Veerle Bergink, who directs the Women’s Health Center at Mount Sinai, said the risk of a mother in that state harming her children is very small, but that the outcomes draw enormous attention when it does happen. Doctors treat it as a psychiatric emergency because it comes on fast, often within days or weeks of delivery.
The warning signs were there before that November night. Fleming had been diagnosed with mental illness and treated in a hospital for a couple of months. She was prescribed psychiatric medication and stopped taking it. Her father, Dwane Fleming, told the Daily News in 2022 that his daughter was struggling and wanted treatment, and that the family was making arrangements for his sister to take the children while she got help. Octavius’ great aunt, Casey Canada, who had been looking after both boys, said Fleming had become convinced the children were devils and that she was afraid of them.
Columbus Canada, the boys’ father, sat in the courtroom for the ruling. He told the New York Times he has forgiven her, calling her a good person who loved kids.
Bronx Assistant District Attorney Tiffany Wichman said after the ruling that prosecuting mothers does not and cannot prevent these crimes from happening, but that public conversation might, and she said she hopes people keep talking about it. That statement is already being pulled in two directions online, read by critics as prosecutors declining to hold a mother accountable and by others as an honest admission of what a murder charge can and cannot fix.
The ruling landed in the same week that a Massachusetts jury has been deliberating in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the former labor and delivery nurse who strangled her three children and whose lawyers argued she was in postpartum psychosis and heavily medicated. That case has drawn wall to wall national coverage for years. Writers at ZORA and legal scholars looking at these cases have pointed out how differently Black mothers in postpartum crisis get covered, and the Fleming case, which unfolded in a city shelter, moved through the Bronx courts with a fraction of that attention.
There is movement on this question elsewhere too. Earlier this month the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court granted a new trial to Latarsha Sanders, convicted in 2022 of killing her two sons, after ruling that the trial judge should not have kept out psychiatric records documenting her history of postpartum psychosis.
Fleming returns to Bronx Criminal Court on September 18.
