Vernellia R. Randall, Reasonable Doubt Is Not Color-Blind: Black and White Experience in Maternal Mental Illness Cases, Racism.org (September 13, 2026).

 

vernelliarandall2015

 

 

Reasonable doubt is formally color-blind.  Reasonableness is not.

 


Experience Shapes Reasonable Doubt

Jurors are instructed to decide whether the government has proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They are not given a mechanical formula for determining when doubt is reasonable. They must decide which witnesses to believe, which explanations are plausible, whether official evidence can be trusted, and what a person suffering from severe mental illness might understand or intend.

Jurors make those decisions through experience. They do not enter the courtroom without a history. Black and white Americans have not experienced police power, health care, motherhood, mental illness, or the presumption of innocence in the same way. They may therefore hear the same evidence without seeing the same case.

The differing public reactions to the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, a Black man, made that divide visible. Much of white America saw overwhelming evidence and an irrational acquittal. Many Black Americans saw a prosecution that had presented significant evidence but had also relied on police officers and forensic practices that could not simply be presumed trustworthy. The trial occurred after generations of police abuse and only a few years after the videotaped beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of the officers who beat him.

The Simpson jury did not have to find that the police planted evidence. The prosecution had the burden of proving every element of the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. Problems with the collection, handling, testing, and presentation of physical evidence affected whether the prosecution had carried that burden. Detective Mark Fuhrman’s false testimony about his use of anti-Black racial slurs gave jurors an additional reason to question the credibility of a central police witness.

For many white Americans, the possibility that police officers would fabricate, contaminate, manipulate, or conceal misconduct seemed too remote to support reasonable doubt—particularly when the defendant was wealthy and famous. For many Black Americans, police misconduct was not a speculative possibility. It was part of their individual experience, their community’s experience, and the documented history of American law enforcement.

That difference did not give Black jurors a separate legal standard. It gave them knowledge that many white observers did not possess or did not consider relevant. White experience was treated as ordinary common sense. Black experience was treated as racial bias.

The Lindsay Clancy trial raises the same underlying problem from the opposite direction.

Clancy, a white Massachusetts mother, admitted killing her three children and attempting to kill herself. The medical experts recognized that she suffered from severe mental illness. The central dispute was whether that illness deprived her of criminal responsibility. The prosecution argued that her planning, communications, and efforts to get her husband out of the house demonstrated that she understood what she was doing and knew it was wrong.

According to the foreperson and other non-Black jurors interviewed after the mistrial, the jury divided eleven to one in favor of finding Clancy not criminally responsible. They also reported that the Black holdout acknowledged having reasonable doubt but would not vote for that verdict. Because jury deliberations are ordinarily private and the holdout has not publicly explained his position, those accounts remain one side of the deliberation.

The racial division nevertheless raises an important question: Could Black experience make a psychiatric explanation offered for a white mother appear less reasonable rather than more reasonable?

Black Americans have repeatedly seen Black women’s pain ignored, their psychiatric symptoms treated as hostility or irresponsibility, and their conduct punished rather than medicalized. A Black juror shaped by that history may not automatically accept a psychiatric explanation because physicians, relatives, lawyers, and the public find it persuasive. What appears to white observers as obvious compassion may appear to a Black observer as a form of grace that legal and medical institutions have not extended equally.

The Black juror’s reasoning remains unknown. Black experience nevertheless provides a context in which skepticism toward the treatment of Clancy is understandable. The public discussion has focused largely on why the Black juror did not see the case as the non-Black jurors did. It has paid far less attention to why the non-Black jurors found Clancy’s psychiatric defense so persuasive.

That is the problem with treating white experience as neutral. The Black juror’s race becomes an explanation that must be investigated. The racial experience of the non-Black jurors disappears from the analysis.

 


When Illness Becomes Guilt

Postpartum psychosis is not an independent criminal defense in the United States. A mother must satisfy the insanity or lack-of-criminal-responsibility standard of the jurisdiction in which she is prosecuted.

Those standards and burdens of proof differ by jurisdiction. Under Massachusetts law, once criminal responsibility is properly raised, the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not have a mental disease or defect or that the condition did not cause her to lack substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law.

In Massachusetts, a finding of not criminally responsible means that the Commonwealth failed to prove criminal responsibility beyond a reasonable doubt. In other jurisdictions, including California and Texas, insanity is an affirmative defense that the defendant must prove by a preponderance of the evidence. That difference in the allocation of proof can itself affect whether maternal mental illness results in acquittal or conviction.

A jury may believe that a mother was profoundly ill and still find that she failed to satisfy the applicable legal test. A finding of not criminally responsible does not deny that the mother killed her children or diminish the value of their lives. It determines that the legal requirements for imposing ordinary criminal responsibility were not satisfied.

Applying the legal standard requires jurors to decide what severe mental illness looks like, how a “real” victim behaves, and whether the defendant’s psychiatric explanation is credible. Those decisions are vulnerable to racialized beliefs about motherhood.

White motherhood is culturally associated with innocence, devotion, vulnerability, and private tragedy. Black motherhood has been shaped by slavery, coerced reproduction, forced family separation, myths about neglectful and welfare-dependent mothers, and continuing surveillance by hospitals, police, and child-protective agencies.

The question is not limited to whether an individual juror consciously dislikes Black women. The more difficult question is whether the image of a loving mother overtaken by mental illness attaches more readily to a white woman than to a Black woman.

Several cases involving Black mothers illustrate the problem.

 


Kenisha Berry and Postpartum Illness as Mitigation

Kenisha Berry, a Black Texas mother, was convicted of capital murder for the death of her infant son. The jury rejected a life sentence and sentenced her to death.

Evidence concerning postpartum depression and other mental-health problems was presented primarily during the punishment phase. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Berry’s conviction but reversed her death sentence because the evidence was legally insufficient to establish that she would pose a continuing danger to society. At resentencing, she received life imprisonment.

Berry’s case was not resolved through a successful postpartum-psychosis defense. Her maternal mental illness entered the legal process as mitigation after guilt had already been determined.

That distinction matters. When the system views a white mother through the lens of postpartum mental illness, the illness may become central to whether she should be held criminally responsible. When the system views a Black mother through the same lens, the illness may appear only after conviction, as one more fact to be weighed when deciding how severely she should be punished.

 


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.

 


LaShaun Harris and Two Different Judgments

The prosecution of LaShaun Harris, a Black mother, exposes the difference between jury judgment and judicial judgment even more sharply.

In 2005, Harris threw her three sons—ages six, two, and one—into San Francisco Bay. She had been hospitalized repeatedly, treated with antipsychotic medication, and diagnosed with schizophrenia. She reported that voices from God commanded her to sacrifice her children.

California separated the determination of guilt from the determination of sanity. During the guilt phase, a jury found Harris guilty of three counts of second-degree murder. Harris then waived a jury for the sanity phase. A judge found her not guilty by reason of insanity and committed her to a state hospital.

A jury first determined that Harris committed the acts with the mental state required for second-degree murder. A judge then determined that she had proved she was legally insane when she committed them. The decisions addressed different legal questions, but together they demonstrate how the law can recognize criminal intent and legal insanity in the same profoundly psychotic woman.

Harris was not diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. Her case nevertheless reveals how the identity of the decision-maker and the legal question presented can affect the meaning assigned to severe mental illness.

 


Latarsha Sanders and the Evidence the Jury Never Heard

Latarsha Sanders, a Black Massachusetts mother, was convicted of killing her two sons, ages eight and five. The sole disputed issue at trial was criminal responsibility. Evidence described delusions involving the Illuminati, human sacrifice, poisoning, and threats against her children.

A jury convicted Sanders of two counts of first-degree murder in 2022. She received two consecutive sentences of life without parole.

In August 2026, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court vacated the convictions and ordered a new trial. The court concluded that the exclusion of Sanders’s postoffense psychiatric records prejudicially impaired her criminal-responsibility defense. The excluded records documented hallucinations, paranoia, and schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses.

Sanders was not a postpartum-psychosis case. Her prosecution reveals something more fundamental about the production of reasonable doubt: psychiatric evidence cannot create reasonable doubt when the legal system prevents the jury from hearing it.

The absence of reasonable doubt in a jury’s verdict does not necessarily establish that the psychiatric evidence was weak. The absence may have been produced by evidentiary rulings that kept the strongest evidence away from the jury.

The same Superior Court judge presided over the Sanders and Clancy trials. In Sanders, the Supreme Judicial Court determined that evidence supporting a Black mother’s criminal-responsibility defense had been improperly withheld from the jury. In Clancy, extensive psychiatric evidence supporting a white mother’s defense was presented to the jury, and eleven jurors reportedly voted to find her not criminally responsible.

The institutional question does not depend on proving conscious discriminatory intent: Which mothers receive the full benefit of psychiatric evidence before a jury decides criminal responsibility?

 


White Mothers and the Recognition of Illness

Andrea Yates, a white mother, was initially convicted of capital murder after drowning her five children. Her conviction was reversed because a prosecution expert gave materially false testimony. At her second trial, a jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity.

Sheryl Massip, a white mother, was convicted by a jury after killing her infant son. The trial judge set aside the jury’s verdict and found her not guilty by reason of insanity.

Deanna Laney, a white mother, was found not guilty by reason of insanity after killing two of her children and seriously injuring a third.

These cases establish that maternal mental illness is filtered through different decision-makers, burdens of proof, evidentiary rules, cultural images, and institutional practices.

They also illustrate the recurring power of judicial intervention. Yates received an insanity verdict only after her first conviction was reversed and she was tried again. Massip received an insanity disposition after a judge rejected the jury’s guilty verdict. Fleming’s disposition was ordered by a judge on substantially uncontested psychiatric evidence. Harris was convicted during a jury guilt phase and then found legally insane during a judicial sanity phase.

Jury judgment and judicial judgment are not interchangeable.

 


The Black Press and the Accumulation of Experience

Most people do not read appellate opinions, trial transcripts, or psychiatric reports. They learn about these cases through newspapers, television, websites, social media, churches, community organizations, and conversations with other people.

The Black press has reported the treatment of Black defendants for generations. That press includes national publications, local newspapers, radio programs, digital outlets, and community-based reporting far more extensive than the limited group of sources usually treated as the national media.

Court opinions may omit a defendant’s race because race is not formally part of the legal issue before the court. News reports frequently identify it. The Black public therefore encounters these cases as part of an accumulating history: Black women whose illnesses were missed, whose symptoms were criminalized, whose defenses were restricted, and whose punishment came before treatment.

That history shapes what people consider believable.

A Black juror does not need to know the precise citation or procedural history of every case. Community knowledge does not operate like a law review footnote. People absorb patterns. They remember which defendants were described as sick, which were described as dangerous, which received treatment, and which received prison sentences.

The Black press helps preserve those patterns against the institutional tendency to treat every case as isolated. It supplies part of the cultural knowledge that a Black juror may bring into the jury room.

 


The Reasonable Person Has a Race

The legal system often speaks of reasonableness as though it were a culturally empty concept. It is not. A reasonable person’s judgment about police credibility, maternal behavior, psychiatric illness, danger, responsibility, and punishment comes from somewhere.

Race is not the only influence. Class, region, gender, religion, disability, education, and personal experience also shape judgment. But acknowledging those influences does not eliminate the influence of race. Nor does it justify allowing white experience to operate without a name while Black experience is singled out as bias.

The Clancy mistrial should not be reduced to the claim that one Black juror prevented justice. That framing assumes that the eleven non-Black jurors represented neutral reason and that the Black juror introduced race into an otherwise color-blind deliberation.

Race was already present. It was present in the cultural image of the white mother. It was present in the institutional recognition of her mental illness. It was present in the history Black communities carry concerning the treatment of Black mothers. It was present in the public willingness to examine the Black juror’s identity while leaving the racial experience of the non-Black jurors unnamed.

The question is not whether Black jurors should disregard the history they know. The question is why the legal system treats that history as a distortion while treating white experience as common sense.

Reasonable doubt is not simply a measurement of evidence. It is a judgment about what can be believed. Belief is shaped by experience. Until courts acknowledge that the reasonable person has a race, the law will continue to identify Black knowledge as bias while allowing white racial experience to define what is reasonable.

 


Sources

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 Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law.  This article is the sole intellectual and scholarly work of Vernellia Randall. ChatGPT was used only as a drafting aid comparable to a research or editing assistant. All concepts, analysis, legal reasoning, interpretations, and conclusions are entirely the author’s own, and the author assumes full responsibility for the content.