09/10/2026
Those three faces are the entire case. Cora, Dawson, and Callan were five years old, three years old, and a baby. Their mother ended their lives. No psychiatrist’s letter, no mitigation argument, and no jury-room lecture can rewrite what is visible in that photograph. Those children are why the harshest penalty exists.
A society that looks at that couch and still makes mitigation the centerpiece has already chosen where its sympathy lies. Experts can explain a troubled mind. They can describe circumstances, diagnoses, and suffering. But none of that can put those children back on that couch. The law must ultimately answer for the act itself—not endlessly reshape the offender’s story until the act begins to feel smaller than it was.
The death penalty represents the judgment that some crimes are beyond an ordinary term of years. Killing your own children is, in this view, that crime. Seek the maximum sentence. Stop asking the public to be delicate about a photograph whose meaning is already unmistakable.
The children were not a chapter in this case. They were the point. The verdict should remember that.