It was the sex stuff that made me want to puke.
I just finished watching today’s bond hearing for Deja Coleman, the 29-year-old Gwinnett County, Georgia, mother of three who accidentally left her 17-month-old son, Daniel, to die in a hot car outside the hospital where she worked as a nurse’s assistant. It happened on July 29. She thought she’d dropped him off at daycare, but hadn’t. He sweltered to death in his car seat.
I am by now all too familiar with these cases of “forgotten baby syndrome,” yet I still cannot fathom the bloodless cruelty with which so many of them are prosecuted. This is the third time I am writing here about Ms. Coleman. It is the bleakest such case I have covered.
At the time the accident occurred, Coleman was living with her three young sons in a shelter for abused women. She learned what she had done from police, while at work, and collapsed in anguish.
By all accounts — including those of the police — what happened to Daniel was an accident occasioned by sleep deprivation and stress. Friends describe Deja Coleman as a cheerful, upbeat person and a devoted mother. Her pastor, Jesse Hardy, said “she would run through a brick wall for those children.”
Nationally, almost half of forgotten-baby cases are judged to be accidents and are not even prosecuted; most of the rest result in charges carrying minimum jail time, or none at all. But Gwinnett County prosecutors charged Deja Coleman with second-degree murder, a crime carrying a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence.
Coleman has been living in jail ever since her arrest. Here is what has happened since I last wrote about her case:
Despite her lawyer’s pleas, Coleman was denied bond or any accommodation to allow her to attend her son’s funeral unguarded and in funeral attire. The funeral was publicly announced for 1 p.m., but when friends and family got there, bringing food and drink, hoping to see Coleman and offer their support, they learned they’d been hoodwinked. Deja had already been there, and left.
A court had ordered the visit, but hadn’t specified when. So — apparently trying to avoid publicity — prison deputies delivered her alone, at 6 a.m. She was in handcuffs and a green prison jumpsuit, and shuffled into the mortuary in ankle bracelets to say goodbye to her baby.
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Today was Coleman’s formal bond hearing. I watched it on streaming video.
Bond is sometimes unopposed by the state, when the defendant seems unlikely to flee or be a danger to others. Not today. Prosecutor Megan Matteucci wanted the prisoner to remain incarcerated indefinitely. She argued that Coleman —who is indigent, has no criminal record and solid roots in the community — might indeed skip town or cause harm. These were preposterous assertions, and Judge Tamela L. Adkins shot them down.
Then Matteucci argued that if Coleman were free she might try to intimidate potential trial witnesses, and that even if she were released on bond, she should not be allowed to see her four-year-old son. The prosecutor noted that Coleman’s six-year-old son is autistic and nonverbal, so he couldn’t be a witness. But the four-year-old could, Matteucci said.
This was even more preposterous. The whole reason Coleman was so desperate for bond was that she wanted to be with her sons and help them cope. Releasing her without the ability to see her child would be unbearably cruel, and pointless. The judge shot that down, too.
Matteucci tried one more thing.
She began: “I hate to be inappropriate and bring this up…”
She then argued that Deja remained a dangerous, distracted mother because she was always on the phone with … men. Five different men, maybe six. Even in calls from her jail cell, Matteucci said, she was having sexual conversations with men, “phone sex, and rough sex, she’s asking for in text messages, and …. “
“I object to that!”
This was Matthew Acuff, one of Coleman’s two defense attorneys. He asked what was the possible relevance of this to a bond hearing.
Indeed, said the judge. How is it relevant?
Matteucci began to shuffle papers and stammer. She started a sentence but didn’t finish it. Finally…
“She, uh, remains destructive in other ways and ….”
“All right, I am gonna sustain the objection,” the judge said dryly.
Coleman’s other attorney, Trinity Hundredmark, rose to speak:
“I’ll just say I understand this is the state’s opportunity, in front of the news, to try to assassinate our client’s character and try to paint her to be a horrible person. I totally get that.”
Yes. So do I. The whole thing was deeply revealing and deeply disgusting and deeply familiar.
Ten years ago, in a Georgia courtroom not far from this one, a father named Justin Ross Harris was convicted of murdering his young son by leaving him in a hot car. Harris was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, because the prosecutors persuaded the jury that he had done it deliberately. They did this by presenting evidence that Harris had been serially unfaithful to his wife, sexting multiple women on the very day his son died. The prosecution’s theory was that he was trying to get rid of the kid to start a new, carefree, licentious life.
The first part was true — he had been promiscuously unfaithful. The second part was not. Even Harris’s ex-wife, who said she now despised him because he had “destroyed my life,” testified that he loved his son deeply and unconditionally and could never have deliberately harmed him.
Justin Ross Harris was released from custody last year. His conviction was overturned because a court ruled that the sexual evidence had been irrelevant and wildly prejudicial.
Judge Adkins ruled. Deja Coleman was released late this afternoon on $5,000 bond. She is under house arrest, likely until her trial. She will have an ankle monitor. But she can be with her children.
More as this develops. I am not letting this one go.
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Today’s mercifully extraneous Gene Pool Gene Poll:
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Good. I am sorry to hit you with a second newsletter today. I felt compelled to write this one.
If you are not too tired:
Most people intuitively understand that accidental tragedies should not be treated as intentional crimes. But Georgia’s statutes* and prosecutorial culture do not share that intuition. The cruelty we're seeing in this case by the state is not a glitch — it’s the predictable output of a system designed to punish first and understand later. There's no public safety benefit to jailing a grieving mother with two young children at home. The public gains no deterrence (hot car and neglect tragedies are not rationally planned), no increased safety, no reduction in future harm. What the public does get is a prosecutor signaling "toughness," a political narrative of acountability and a symbolic punishment that satisfies outrage rather than justice. It’s punishment as performance.
*Georgia’s statutes allow child death cases to be treated as murder even without intent, under its “cruel or excessive conduct” legal framework. Most states do not have anything like this.
Just devastating what they are doing to this poor woman.