The Why Has Never Mattered

By Earl O'Garro

I ordinarily write these pieces from home, early, before the day has made any claim on me. I am writing this one from my office in Connecticut, in the middle of a Thursday morning I had set aside for other work, because I stopped that work in order to sit down and read. I have been having a version of the same conversation for two weeks, with friends and with family, about a case in Massachusetts, and it has gone badly enough and often enough that I decided I owed the subject some research before I said another word out loud about it. So the morning went to reading instead. And what I keep coming back to is a photograph from the twentieth of August. Three hundred people, nearly all of them women, standing outside Plymouth Superior Court in pink shirts. The shirts said Believe. They said She Needed Help. They said Peace For Lindsay. What holds me is not the people in the photograph, who I take to be sincere, and who I do not think are owed my contempt. What holds me is the question of how they got there. Three hundred citizens do not assemble outside a county courthouse in matching shirts by spontaneous combustion. Somebody built the road they drove in on. That road was built by the American press, over a period of about three and a half years, out of a set of editorial decisions that were made one at a time and that nobody has ever been asked to defend as a whole.

So let me name the argument at the top of the page and spend the rest of the piece defending it. This country's press does not distribute human interiority according to what people have done. It distributes it according to who people are. It decides, case by case, which citizens get to have a mind that a reader is invited to enter and which citizens are simply the thing that happened, and that decision does not track conduct at all. It is not a mercy system. Monstrous behavior is no barrier to being humanized, and blameless behavior is no guarantee of it. The press runs a factory with two products coming off the same line, sympathy and outrage, and the sorting of raw material into one or the other is made upstream of anything the person actually did.

I am going to make that case using a set of American mothers, which means I am going to be writing about dead children, and I want to be plain before I go one sentence further. Cora Clancy was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months, and he held on for three days after the other two before he died as well. They were killed in their house in Duxbury on the twenty-fourth of January, 2023. Three children are dead. I care that three children are dead. Nothing in the rest of this piece is an argument that I do not, and any reader who arrives at that conclusion has decided in advance what kind of man is writing and is no longer reading the sentences.

And let me be equally plain about the illness, because it would be cheap to build an argument on the pretense that the why in this case is empty. It is not empty. There is a real thing there and I have done the reading and I can describe it. Postpartum psychosis is not the baby blues with the volume turned up. It is a rupture. It arrives fast, usually inside the first weeks, and it brings hallucination and delusion and a collapse of sleep so total that the mind begins to come apart from the inside. It appears in something like one or two births in a thousand. The clinicians who treat it will tell you that it is lethal and also that it is highly treatable, which is a pair of facts worth sitting inside, because together they mean the deaths it produces belong to the category of deaths that did not have to happen. And here is the detail that ought to embarrass the entire medical apparatus of this country: the American Psychiatric Association does not carry postpartum psychosis as a diagnosis of its own. The thing has a body count and no name. The woman in Duxbury was a labor and delivery nurse. She had spent nine years at Massachusetts General Hospital in the very room where this illness begins, holding other women through the hours when it begins. She knew the vocabulary and by every account she tried to use it about herself. She was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. She was prescribed, across a few months, a long column of drugs whose names her defense read into the record, sertraline and lorazepam and hydroxyzine and buspirone and trazodone and fluoxetine, and then on a single day in late November of 2022, three more. She was sleeping about three hours a night. She went into McLean Hospital on New Year's Day and came out five days later, and three weeks after that her children were dead. I can follow every inch of that. If you asked me whether a system failed that woman I would say obviously, visibly, in writing, with dates. My argument is not that the why is a fiction. My argument is about who gets one written for them.

Now watch how the road got built. Four days after the children died her husband posted a statement, and he wrote about each of the three of them, and then he wrote about his wife, and then he asked the public for something remarkable. He asked us to forgive her, as he had. That was the twenty-eighth of January, 2023, and it changed the temperature of the entire story overnight, because it handed every assignment editor in the country a frame. A fundraising page for the family drew donations reported in the seven figures. In the autumn of 2024 The New Yorker published a long profile of the husband in which he said that he had not been married to a monster but to someone who got sick, and that is a beautifully made sentence, and it did a portion of the defense's work eighteen months before the defense began. The recordings of that interview were later subpoenaed and the writer was drawn into the case, which tells you how much load the story had come to bear. By the time the trial opened this past July the machinery was fully assembled, and it ran on schedule. Slate published a first-person essay whose argument was, in effect, that could have been me. STAT wrote about it twice, once on the unfinished science and once on what the case is doing to the willingness of reproductive psychiatrists to take patients at all. NPR wrote about the gaps in diagnosis. CNN put maternal mental health in the spotlight. The PBS NewsHour ran a piece on a broken postpartum system. The Globe, Forbes, Psychiatric Times. CBS gave it a five-episode arc of 48 Hours. Court TV gave it something like twenty episodes. Somebody stood up a feed carrying gavel-to-gavel trial audio for any citizen who wanted to sit and listen to all of it, and citizens did. On Beacon Hill, legislators filed a bill that would require a perinatal mental health assessment inside forty-eight hours for any defendant charged within a year of giving birth, would divert her toward treatment instead of prosecution, would make postpartum illness a mitigating factor at sentencing, and would open retroactive review for women already serving time whose postpartum minds were never considered at all. The bill did not advance. Advocates intend to bring it back, and I hope they succeed, and I want that on the record too.

Every item in that paragraph is defensible on its own. That is exactly the point I am making. No individual editor did anything wrong. The Slate essay is honest, the STAT reporting is serious, the legislative push is humane, and the three hundred women in pink are not villains. What I am describing is not a conspiracy. It is a pipeline, and pipelines have intakes, and the question I cannot get past is what the intake is calibrated to detect.

Because on the twenty-fourth of August, 2026, ten days before those pink shirts became a national story and while the jury in Plymouth was still hearing evidence, a judge in Bronx Criminal Court found a woman named Dimone Fleming not responsible by reason of mental disease or defect for the deaths of her two sons. Daishawn was three years old. Octavius was eleven months. They were found in a bathtub in a family shelter in November of 2022, two months before Duxbury, with stab wounds in their necks. The psychiatrists retained by the prosecution and the psychiatrists retained by the defense arrived at the same conclusion. She had been grossly psychotic. She had been hallucinating. She believed the world was ending and that a spirit had entered her body. Because both sides agreed, there was no jury and there was no trial. The prosecution's own expert said it out loud. She had been found, in the period before the killings, naked and ranting and setting fires, and a relative asked afterward why, when they took her away, nobody had thought to check on the children. She was twenty-two years old and she was living in a shelter.

Read that again and notice that the law did its work. The Bronx did not deny that woman her why. Her own prosecutor's doctor handed it to her, which means this is not a story about a courtroom that could not be made to look at a poor young mother's mind. The courtroom looked. It is a story about what the country did with what the courtroom found, which was nothing. There was no rally. Nobody printed shirts. There is no long profile in a national magazine, no seven-figure fundraiser, no five-part documentary, no bill on any statehouse calendar with her name in the air behind it, no legislator quoting her file on the floor. The local ABC station covered it. And then the story was picked up, with real enthusiasm, by Breitbart and a rotating cast of aggregators, who ran it not as a tragedy of the maternal mental health system but as an outrage, an item, evidence that mothers are getting away with things. Same illness. Same defense. Same statutory standard, near enough. Same month. One woman became a movement and the other became content. Two products, one line.

And I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is that America withholds sympathy from Black and poor defendants, and the easy version is not quite right, and a piece that rests on it will come apart in the hands of any hostile reader. Consider what the country has done with white women it despises. Susan Smith drove her two little boys into John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina, in 1994, and then told this country, for nine days, that a Black man in a knit cap had taken them. Sit with the conduct in that sentence. She did not only kill her children. She reached into the country's oldest loaded story and fired it at every Black man within driving distance of her town, and for nine days law enforcement and the national press went looking for a man who did not exist while actual men were pulled in and looked at and asked to account for their evenings. That is dehumanizing behavior of a very specific and very deliberate kind, executed by a woman who understood precisely which lever she was pulling and how reliably it would work. And the country still read her diaries. It still excavated her marriage, her stepfather, her affairs, her psychiatric history, her childhood in Union. There are books. There are documentaries. There was a parole hearing in November of 2024, thirty years on, covered by every national outlet, at which the country once again went over the interior of Susan Smith. She was hated the entire time. She was also, the entire time, a person with a mind that the press considered it its business to investigate. Casey Anthony was hated, and her every psychological detail was chewed over for years. Darlie Routier is on death row in Texas and no one has lifted a finger for her, and her case is still argued in forensic detail by people who want to know what was in her head that night.

So the mechanism is not mercy. Hatred is not the disqualifier. The country is perfectly willing to loathe a white woman and still grant her an interior, a history, a sequence of events, a why that it considers itself obligated to go and dig up. It believes there is something in there to find. That is the asymmetry, and it is not about sympathy at all. It is about curiosity. Curiosity is the thing that has never been extended to us.

Set the row out and look at it. Andrea Yates drowned five children in Houston in 2001. Prosecutors asked for her death, the jury refused and gave her life, an appeals court threw the conviction out because a prosecution psychiatrist had testified to something untrue, and at the retrial in July of 2006 she was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state hospital rather than a prison. Twenty-five years on her lawyer is still giving interviews about her, the anniversary is still covered, and she is still discussed as this country's great cautionary tale about a mind nobody caught in time. Deanna Laney killed two of her sons with stones in Texas in 2003 and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Dena Schlosser cut the arms from her ten-month-old daughter in Texas in 2004, and her first jury hung, and her second found her not guilty by reason of insanity. Three women, three hospitals, three long public conversations about the interior weather of a mother. Now China Arnold, whose daughter Paris Talley was twenty-eight days old when she was put in a microwave in Dayton in 2005. Prosecutors announced they would seek her death. It took three trials, a mistrial and a reversal, before she was convicted of aggravated murder in 2011 and given life without the possibility of parole. Her name still functions in this country as a punchline and a horror, and I have never in twenty years encountered a single essay wondering what had happened inside her mind, and I have gone looking for one. Now Shaquan Duley, who smothered her two sons in an Orangeburg motel in August of 2010 and rolled her car into the Edisto River, after an argument with her own mother about whether she was caring for the boys properly. She pleaded guilty. She took thirty-five years. There was no bill, no rally, no reconstruction of her sleep or her prescriptions or her postpartum months. She simply went in, and she is scheduled to come out in 2045, and if you have opinions about her you formed them out of one wire story.

Now run the machine in the other direction, at the low end of the severity scale, where the conduct is not monstrous at all, because that is where the sorting shows itself most nakedly. Debra Harrell was working a shift at a McDonald's in North Augusta, South Carolina, in the summer of 2014, and she let her nine-year-old daughter play at the neighborhood park with a cell phone, because that is what a woman does when she has a shift and no childcare. She was arrested for felony child neglect. She spent seventeen days in a jail cell. She lost custody of her daughter and she lost her job. Nobody asked why. There was understood to be nothing there to wonder about. Her circumstances were not treated as a condition that had produced a decision, they were treated as the decision. Shanesha Taylor was homeless in Arizona that same year and left a two-year-old and a six-month-old in a car while she sat in a job interview, and was charged with felony child abuse, and took ten years of probation. The whole cause of her conduct was legible in a single sentence. She had no house and she needed work. That is a why. It is a better documented why than most of the ones the country has spent this summer assembling. It was available free of charge to anyone who cared to pick it up, and the country declined to pick it up. Seventeen days in a cell for a park, against seven figures and three boxes of letters for Duxbury. I am not putting those women into competition, because they are not in competition. They are in the same country, and the country is the point.

Now the medicine, because the sorting starts a long way upstream of any newsroom, and this is the part that should trouble a reader most. Black women in this country are screened for postpartum mood disorders less often than white women. Among the women who do screen positive, Black women are diagnosed less than half as often as white women who screened positive at the same level. When the diagnosis does come it comes later, and referral to therapy and prescription of medication are both less likely to follow. Which means the entire narrative now running at full volume around Duxbury, the narrative in which a mother was sick and the system did not catch her, is a plain description of the ordinary and unremarkable experience of Black motherhood in America, and it has never once produced three hundred people in matching shirts. The why is not merely withheld from us by editors. It is withheld from us clinically, at the appointment, in the chart. You cannot be excused by an illness that nobody has bothered to write down. The diagnosis that becomes a defense at trial is a document, and documents are issued by the same institutions that decided a long time ago whose pain requires investigating. And when the case does reach a jury, the pattern holds. Researchers put a defendant in front of mock jurors and changed only two variables, his race and his diagnosis. When the defendant was white, the diagnosis did not much matter. When the defendant was Black, jurors were significantly more likely to convict if his illness was schizophrenia rather than depression. Same facts, same plea. The psychosis that renders a white defendant sympathetic renders a Black one frightening, because in the American imagination psychosis and Blackness are already filed in the same drawer, and the drawer is labeled dangerous, and putting the two together does not produce compassion. It produces confirmation.

So when someone says out loud that if the woman in Duxbury had been Black then this movement would not have assembled, and the room calls that silly, I want to stay on that word, because the word is doing work. It was not called false. It was called silly, which is what we call a true thing we would rather not hold. And now we have something better than an opinion about it. We have a case running in parallel, ten days apart, in the same country, under the same defense, decided the same way, and one of them produced a bill and a magazine profile and three hundred shirts and the other produced a Breitbart item. You can reach your own conclusion about the variable. Mine is on the page. But the honest version of my argument does not require anyone to share it, because it requires only agreement on what the variable was not. It was not the illness. It was not the law. It was not the number of dead children.

What I object to, then, is not that this country found compassion for a woman in Duxbury. It is the sudden, national, bottomless appetite for truth and facts and evidence and context and nuance, appearing all at once, inside a press that has never once extended that appetite to a defendant who looked like me. Everyone became a clinician in a single news cycle. Everyone wanted the full picture before judgment. Everyone discovered a passion for the sequence of events. And I have been alive long enough to know where that passion travels and where it does not, and I have Dimone Fleming's name and the date of her ruling and the fact that most readers of this page had to learn both of them from me. The word for that is not bias, which is too soft, and it is not conspiracy, which is too grand. The word is manufacture. Outrage is manufactured and so is sympathy, and both are made to order from the same raw material, which is a dead child and a living defendant, and the only thing that determines which product comes off the line is the identity of the person the machine is pointed at.

As I write this on Thursday morning, the jury in Plymouth has told the judge twice that it cannot agree. Thirty hours in, they sent out a note saying they were still unable to reach a unanimous decision, and the judge gave them the charge Massachusetts gives a jury it does not want to lose, and they went back in at nine o'clock. By the time you read this there may be a verdict and there may be a mistrial, and I want to be clear that I am not writing about the verdict. The verdict is the law's business and the law can have it. I am writing about the road that three hundred people drove in on, and about the fact that no such road was ever graded toward a shelter in the Bronx.

I want to close, as I have been closing these pieces, with what I owe my children. Three children are dead in Duxbury. Two are dead in a shelter in the Bronx. Five are dead in Houston, two in a lake in Union, two in the Edisto River, one in a microwave in Dayton. And mine are alive, in a country that has already decided how much wondering their inner lives are worth, and the number is low. That is not an abstraction I read about. It is the calculation I run on an ordinary Tuesday when one of my children misses the bus and I have to work out how to get him to school, and getting him to school is not a logistics problem but a safety problem, because to a great many people his body does not matter and is not entitled to occupy certain places at certain hours. It is the calculation I ran earlier this week when he asked me to drive a friend home to Hartford, and I was tired in the way that is not really about sleep, and I got my keys anyway, because the alternative was a Latino child standing on a sidewalk while the light went out of the sky, waiting to be asked to account for himself, waiting to explain that he is a student, that he is fourteen, that he is going home. Explanations of that kind are not always accepted. Sometimes they are not even heard. The country that will not wonder about Dimone Fleming is the same country that will not wonder about that boy on the sidewalk, and it is the same country that will one day be asked to wonder about mine.

So what I owe them is not the performance of grief in the register this country finds acceptable, offered up in exchange for permission to describe the pattern. What I owe them is the description, written down plainly, with the names and the dates in it, so that when they are old enough to ask why the country wondered so hard about one mother and not at all about another, there is a document in the house that answers them.

Which is why I am going to stop here and close the laptop. I need to get home and care for my children, and I want to be in the house before the light goes. I have spent an entire morning reading about a country that decides in advance whose interior is worth entering, and about the specific children that decision has already been made against, and there is a limit to how long a man can sit with that and still be of any use at a desk. What I want now is the small domestic version of the thing this whole piece has been about. I want to sit in a room with my own children and ask them how the day went and listen to the answer as though the answer contains a person, which it does. That is the entire courtesy I have been describing all morning. It is not complicated. It does not require a magazine profile or a bill on Beacon Hill or three hundred people in matching shirts. It costs nothing at all. It is simply never extended to everyone.

The why has never mattered. It was never supposed to. It is not a question this country asks in order to learn something about a person. It is a courtesy it extends to the people it has already decided are people. My children are going to need that courtesy one day, from somebody who has not yet decided anything about them, and I would like it to exist by the time they do.

I intend to keep writing until it does.