S01 Episode 3: The Sentence

Alicia never expected to wind up in a fertility clinic because she never thought she'd want to have children.

She grew up in Jamaica with a lot of responsibilities for her siblings.

So I am one of five, the second of said five, but I'm the first girl.

And in my culture, you are required to help your mommy out.

Like you don't have a say-so in it.

And so bottles were done by me laundry was done by me since i was nine years old and i hated every last part of it so i always told myself when i got older i didn't want kids and the sad part about that is i think the tongue is so

it's powerful so you gotta be very careful with what you say

what do you mean i think because of

I mean, having chills, because all my life I've said I didn't want kids, that I spoke that into existence.

Now, for a lot of people, that that that doesn't like, you know, it's not real to them.

For me, it is real.

Like, so that's what I mean when I say the tongue is powerful because I kept telling myself that I didn't want children.

And I feel whoever I pray to listen to me.

And then when I wanted children, I was in a position where my only way of having kids was via IVF.

Alicia was in her 20s when she decided she wanted to have children.

She was in a relationship then with the man who would become her husband, someone she met when she moved to to the US.

She tried to get pregnant and nothing was happening.

And eventually she learned that her fallopian tubes were blocked.

Did you, at that moment when you were like, you know, finding out that your tubes were blocked, that there was an issue with your tubes, is that the thought you had then?

Like I sort of spoke this into existence or I willed it.

Yes, definitely.

I told myself that.

I blamed myself.

And that's another thing too.

It's like I've always blamed myself after that.

On the morning of Donna's sentencing hearing, Alicia gets ready to watch from home.

She's going to watch on Zoom because she had thyroid surgery two days ago and she isn't up for leaving the house.

And before the hearing begins, I'm going to take a second to tell you about her because Alicia starts out sympathetic to Donna.

I felt that whatever it is that she was going through, you know, like it clotted her judgment and she

had a lapse in judgment.

And if, you know, like if she has a mental issue I feel like she deserves a second chance.

But during the hearing, Alicia will learn something about Donna that will test the limits of her compassion and change the way she thinks about Donna's culpability.

The patients are still reckoning with what the pain Donna inflicted has cost them.

Now a court will determine what it should cost her.

From Serial Productions and the New York Times, I'm Susan Burton, and this is The Retrievals.

This is episode three, The Sentence.

If you find yourself bewildered by this moment where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time, let me say I hear you.

I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of the Ezra Klein Show.

And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it.

There is going to be plenty to talk about.

You can find the Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.

After Alicia found out her tubes were blocked, she was referred to the Yale Clinic.

Her treatment there had barely started when it was interrupted by the pandemic.

The clinic closed down for a while for most procedures.

Her doctor invited her to join a Zoom support group of other patients, and she liked him so much that she said yes, even though that was the kind of thing she wouldn't usually say yes to.

She's not a joiner, and hardly anyone knew she was doing IVF.

That's part of why she asked me to call her Alicia, which is her middle name.

So when I was hesitant, like I said, because I'm very private when it comes to stuff like this, but then it was everybody who was going through stuff like this.

And the, you know, it, it was a little bit weird that I was the only black girl in it.

But then I'm in Connecticut.

So, you know, it's not like I'm in New York.

So there's more Caucasian people around than there is Black people.

So I wanted to see like the weeks going by to see if others would join who looked like me, but it never happened.

So, you know, I am very vocal.

So, I didn't want to be the vocal person in that group.

And then I found this girl who was way more vocal than me.

And I was like, yes, so this is, you know, I got comfortable.

So it was, yeah, that was it.

It was like, okay, like,

I don't want to talk to strangers about my life, but they're going through the same thing.

Who better to talk to than these people?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The clinic Zoom group didn't last long and early in the pandemic thing.

But But before it shut down, Alicia and a few others exchanged contact info so that they could keep meeting on their own.

The women grew close to one another.

They shared stories, tips, information, including information about the egg retrieval.

The ones who'd gone through it told the others, forget about what the clinic tells you.

This is going to hurt.

So in my head, I felt like that was how it was supposed to be.

Because even before I went to do my retrieval, they were prepping me and what I'm gonna feel and how I'm gonna feel.

You get what I'm saying?

So, in my head, all that pain and all of that was a part of the procedure.

Other patients experienced their treatments at Yale in isolation.

They went into the retrieval expecting to feel nothing and then felt excruciating pain.

This group of patients went in expecting it to be awful.

They normalized the pain for one another.

So, on the day of Alicia's retrieval, she wasn't surprised by what she felt.

Well, like I said, I wasn't sweating it because I was told by the girls in the group to be prepared for that.

Wow.

And so tell me about what you felt then.

Like

describe the pain to me.

Like pressure,

pressure, and

you're bleeding a little bit too.

So, you know, it's like, first of all, I don't know what cramps are.

I've never had them knock on wood.

So for me, I couldn't even tell you that that was cramping or anything like that because I never cramped prior.

Wow.

um

yeah i it is people always say that like i i have i have really i know it just had never occurred to me that it was possible to not have cramps i'm telling you i feel like my body just listened to me and was not in a position to be making kids i'm just i'm just assuming that's what it is

yeah

Her body didn't have cramps because her body wasn't meant to make babies and she had only herself to blame for that.

After Alicia had her egg retrieval, she reported her pain to her doctor.

So, he asked about my experience, how it was, and stuff like that.

My retrieval was done by him.

And I told him, like, you know, like, you know, it was how painful it was.

And, you know, I was expecting it because my girls got me prepared for it and stuff like that.

So, and I, like I said, I wasn't, I'm the type of person that I don't exaggerate.

So, I wasn't like, oh my God, I was dying.

Like, you know, so I just made it clear that it was very painful or whatever.

So we spoke on that.

And then

yeah.

What was his reaction?

I think he had a look on his face of concern.

I don't know what he did behind the scenes, but you would only be doing something if you have, if you're privy to the fact of what it is.

that we're going through.

If you have never been through it, you hear pain.

Pain can be anything.

You get what I'm saying?

I'm assuming you're going to expect it to be a little bit painful.

After that retrieval, Alicia had an embryo transfer and became pregnant.

But one morning she woke up and she was bleeding.

I knew she was no longer living, Alicia said.

I just felt it.

And ultrasound confirmed the worst.

Alicia was 17 weeks and five days pregnant.

At the hospital, they told her that she could have surgery or she could push.

I gave birth to my baby.

I chose to

bring her into this world so I could see her because she was dead inside me.

And I could have done surgery, but

the opportunity for me to see her was low.

So, because they

like they told me they could break her apart, try to get her.

And I said, No, I so to go through all of that, to go through all of that, all the shots, everything else, all of that, to end up not even being able to bring that child into this world is a lot.

To bring her into this world, but she's dead is a lot.

When Alicia got the letter from Yale, she put it aside.

It didn't totally kick in for her that she was a victim until a couple months later when she got a breaking news alert on her phone.

Yale nurse swapped fentanyl with saline.

Alicia didn't think she'd ever met Donna.

Did you, like, had you ever interacted with her at the clinic?

I don't think so.

Even if I did, I don't remember her.

Like, I am not the friendliest person.

So if I'm there on business, I'm doing business, and then I'm leaving.

The girls in the group were angry at Donna.

Alicia was too.

But what she felt was complicated.

She's a manager at a forensic hospital, a psychiatric hospital for patients who've been charged with crimes, but in some cases found not to be responsible for what they've done.

In her job there, she's worked with a lot of patients with addiction.

And she told me that she she saw Donna as a patient, saw her more that way than as her health care provider.

No, I was the only person supporting this lady because of the work that I do.

And I genuinely, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, like, I'm, I, I, I really and truly have my heart in the job that I do working with people with mental illness.

And, and, and, you know, an addiction isn't seen as that, but it, it, it is.

So, you know, I felt for her.

Now, on the morning of the hearing, Alicia stares into her screen, waiting for the proceedings to start.

In downtown New Haven, Leia arrives in the courtroom, still not sure what she wants, but knowing she needs to be here to witness this.

She sees Donna up front.

Her parents were there.

They sat, I think, in the third row.

I sat in the back row on the other side.

I sat on the prosecution side, and her parents were there, a friend was there.

I think that's about it for her.

The patients watching the hearing on Zoom see that the room is almost empty.

Donna and her lawyer are at a table up front.

Donna's wearing a peach-colored top and a black mask.

Many people on Zoom turn off their cameras, but some don't.

Donna's therapist is on there.

An aunt of Donna's from Long Island has logged on multiple times.

One of her squares shows her ceiling fan.

And then the hearing starts.

Please be seated, everyone, the judge says.

Diane, you need to put your volume down just a little.

Thanks.

No worries.

The judge is Judge Janet Hall, 72 years old, graduate of Mount Holyoke College, appointed to the bench in 1997 by President Bill Clinton, mother of three children, just like Donna.

Obviously, I have the obligation of imposing a sentence on you, Judge Hall says.

Basically, obviously, I've read a lot, but I haven't made a decision.

And she really hasn't.

What will happen over the course of the hearing is that she will decide in real time.

The judge will think out loud.

She will grapple with what she will characterize as an unusually difficult case.

The task before her is a narrow one to determine a sentence.

But in executing that task, she will engage some of the big questions at the heart of this story.

Donna's public defender stands.

Her name is Allison Near,

46 years old, mother of two daughters, married to a man who is a professor of ecology at Yale.

Neither she or the judge agreed to speak with me for the story.

Attorney Near says she's been in contact with Donna almost every day since they met in December, and that as she's tried to help Donna, quote, kind of unpack the events from June through October of 2020.

I've learned so much about her, and I've been moved and impressed by her insight into what went awry.

And then Attorney Nier begins to make her argument.

Again, this isn't a trial.

Donna has entered a guilty plea.

This is a sentencing hearing.

The thing being decided today is not Donna's guilt or innocence, just the terms of her sentence.

Donna faces a maximum sentence of just over five years in prison.

Attorney Nier is here to argue that down to as little as possible.

The thrust of her argument is Donna's, quote, extraordinary family circumstances.

That phrase has legal weight.

The judge is obligated to consider Donna's family circumstances.

Attorney Nier points out that if Donna is sent to prison, her ex-husband will almost certainly get custody.

The judge must consider whether this is a good or even safe outcome for Donna's children.

In advance of the hearing, the judge has reviewed many documents like the character reference letters from Donna's family and friends and the police reports that contain accounts of her ex-husband's behavior.

The judge has a lot of discretion to sentence below the guideline of five years if she decides that Donna's family situation warrants it.

Attorney Near finishes her opening remarks and calls a witness, a friend of Donna's, who says she fears for the safety of Donna's children if Donna's ex-husband gets custody and that Donna's children need her.

When the friend is done, the judge begins to wrestle with her first big question of the morning, one about trust.

The judge says, quote,

it is just...

it is a real serious offense.

It is such a breach of trust.

Her relationship with the patients, the numbers who were impacted, the level of pain I can only imagine.

I don't have a lot of familiarity with the procedure, but I've spoken to women who've gone through it.

It is physically and psychologically difficult to begin with.

Then you want to layer it on top that you do it without pain management.

It isn't just the pain, because that would diminish it.

It is the breach of trust.

What many of the victims spoke about in those letters, about the sense of the breach of trust.

I don't know.

I don't know if there's anything more you can say, Attorney Nier, but I can't let you sit down without asking.

Attorney Nier says that she and Donna have talked about this very thing a lot.

That Donna has really tried to get out what was going on in her head.

She mentions that Donna appreciated the letter from the victim who talked about addiction in the brain.

But the judge is asking a difficult question.

And, you know, I think Your Honor is right to guess I probably don't have an answer to that question,

except to say that she more than accepts responsibility.

From the judge's perspective, there's a lot that's hard to answer here.

Here is a person, Judge Hall says now, about whom I have how many letters and other things that tell me she's a wonderful person, a good citizen.

Clearly did something extremely bad, and she caused harm to people, right?

But how do you address that in a sentencing context when I'm also considering, as I'm required to, her history and characteristics, which bring in her family?

So there's no, as I said to you folks in a brief conference we had, there's no right, there's no answer here.

Forget about whether there's a good answer or a right answer.

The judge's style is not endearing her to Leia.

I don't know what to do.

I don't, how do I sentence?

Like, she had this whole thing.

It was like, kind of like a Seinfeld episode.

I don't know.

Should I don't know.

I don't know.

You know, I wrote a letter.

Many of the women wrote letters and the judge talked about how she had read all the letters and it was so hard.

It was so hard for her to decide.

And I remember as she was talking about that, I was like, oh.

But anyway, says the judge, we're just repeating ourselves, attorney near.

So you said your client wished to speak.

Yes, she does, Your Honor.

Donna stands.

Many people in my life have asked me various versions of the question, How did this happen?

says Donna.

Initially, I was unable to answer that question with true in-depth in-depth insight.

When I learned that my ex-husband had knowingly exposed my three minor children to his COVID illness that he would later suffer an extended near-death hospitalization from, it created a fear and level of anxiety in me where my children are concerned that reached a whole new level that I didn't know how to process or handle.

I've spent the greater part of seven years working within the legal DCF and family court system to protect my children.

I did all of this by the book and took pride in the same.

In June 2020, I hit a breaking point.

And to think that after all I have done to protect my children, that my actions have hurt them so severely is devastating and a consequence that I will live with for the rest of my life.

In the back of the courtroom, Leia listens intently.

Donna,

you know, I don't think she,

you know, it was all about how she had kind of like, oh, she needs to be with her children and she had failed her children.

I don't know that I heard a lot of like remorse.

But again, like, what could I have heard?

What could any of us have heard that made us, you know, would make us feel better?

Would an acknowledgement of the pain the patients felt have done it?

Because Donna leaves that out.

She doesn't say anything about pain at all.

And then Donna says something that surprises Leia.

Something that Leia and others are learning in this courtroom for the very first time.

Donna says, I am a former fertility patient myself, and that interest is what drove me to my interest in fertility nursing.

She's an IVF patient too?

Are you kidding me?

I mean, you could almost hear, there were people on Zoom.

I could almost feel like the bomb drop.

Like I could, I.

Everyone's on mute, but I'm telling you, like, it was like a moment where I was like, it was like an audible gasp, you know?

The fact that she was an IVF patient herself, I like, I had to

etch a sketch my head.

I was in a kind of profound shock.

It was literally like a punch to the face, a punch to the gut.

It took it to a different kind of.

A different kind of what, right?

This is exactly the question.

This levels it up, but how?

And on what scale?

Scale of emotional violence?

We started on breach of trust.

Now we are up to intimate betrayal.

In her letter to the judge, Donna writes that she went through multiple rounds of fertility treatment and that her history as an IVF patient makes what she did that much more devastating.

This is the moment things shift for Alicia.

When I heard that she went to IVF, I was like, there is no way, there's no way I can ever look at this lady the same way.

That's when I lost it.

Because I said to myself, there's no way me personally who have gone through this would even try to put any amount of other pain on a person who went through that.

And, you know, you went through IVF yourself.

How could you possibly do this to somebody else?

It was in that moment.

I couldn't look at her the same way I looked at my patients anymore.

Donna had known how hard it was to go through IVF.

Not just the physical pain of the retrieval.

She actually probably didn't know that pain at all.

She'd probably gotten some kind of anesthesia.

What was worse was that she knew the emotional pain.

She knew about the special vulnerability of being a fertility patient.

She knew this in the intimate way you can only know it if you go through it yourself.

And still, she had done this.

Like I said, I am not a people's person, so nothing anyone does surprises me because people are who they are.

So it just opened my eyes to say, even when somebody has been through the exact same thing as you, they can still turn around and be a monster towards you.

In the front of the courtroom, Donna apologizes to those she has hurt.

It was never my intention to harm anyone in any way.

And then she winds up.

Thank you very much, says the judge.

She addresses Donna's attorney.

I guess I have one question I will ask you, Attorney Near.

I believe that I think in her statement, although I'm having trouble finding it, eyeballing it, but I think you argue it in your brief about how,

and she just said it again, never intended to hurt anyone.

I struggle with that, wherever it is, when I read it.

I don't know,

I don't know how she wouldn't.

She didn't intend, I guess, in the sense she's an addict.

She's doing something she doesn't control.

Clearly, she knew the consequences of depriving a patient undergoing this procedure of painkiller.

Okay, another big question.

Intent.

Donna knew that her patients would suffer.

How do we deal with that?

Attorney Nier explains that Donna did not have malicious intent.

But she continues, this is not any kind of ignorance about what the outcome is going to be.

I guess I was separating it out from somebody who is setting out to harm others.

It is not an excuse.

It is not a justification.

I just think it is a fact.

Okay,

says the judge.

Attorney Near adds,

she continued to do this because she didn't think, because she didn't stop and try to reconcile the fact and impact of what she was doing in the moment.

Sidebar, for a moment, my own sidebar, my own reaction to Attorney Neer.

The idea that Donna didn't stop and think,

the way it plays out is more nuanced, isn't it?

Sometimes you do stop and think about the fact and impact, but your need is so great that you do it anyway.

Or sometimes you choose not to stop and think because you don't want to stop and think.

The whole point of your addiction is to not have to stop and think.

It is true that Donna had an opioid addiction.

It is also true that she made choices in that addiction.

Okay,

I'm done with my sidebar.

Back to the proceedings.

Judge Hull turns to the prosecution.

You've been very patient, she says to Assistant U.S.

Attorney Ray Miller.

He gets right to it.

I think there's another side to the story here, the U.S.

Attorney says.

I think the first thing we need to think about, the first question we need to ask, is why are we all here today?

Why are we here on Tuesday morning in federal court?

Well, I'll tell you why we're not here.

We're not here because the defendant decided to use drugs because of difficult family circumstances.

We're also not here, quite frankly, because she stole drugs.

We're here today because she knowingly, intentionally, repeatedly, replaced the drugs with saline and inflicted incredible physical and emotional suffering on the victims.

As she did with Attorney Near, the judge listens to Attorney Miller, and then she begins to speak.

She has another big question, one about institutional responsibility.

I have a question.

When narcotics are dispensed to patients, is it typical that one person is in charge and there's no other,

there's not a double check, somebody who also has access to look at?

Someone on the the Zoom chimes in, yes, great question, great question.

I'm sorry, says the judge.

Those of you on the Zoom are not allowed.

It's as if you're in the courtroom.

But anyway,

again, I don't wish to take away from her culpability.

I'm not in any way asking and saying it is somebody else's fault.

I'm just curious.

Yale's responsibility isn't the subject of this hearing, but this is the one moment it's alluded to.

Aside from this, the fact that there was an institutional failure here, a failure to prevent an employee from causing pain to patients for months on end, doesn't come up at all.

The U.S.

Attorney mainly talks about why he's recommending the guideline sentence for Donna, again, up to about five years.

The judge tells him that he's making an extremely compelling case.

But she's still got the same problem, which is essentially, Donna harmed patients, but if she goes to prison, there's harm to her kids.

Attorney Nier has put a lot of stuff in front of me that raises grave concerns, the judge says.

I don't hear the government telling me, judge, that's smoke and mirrors.

She's making it up.

It's not as bad as that.

I hold Attorney Near in the highest regard, Attorney Miller says.

I don't doubt the veracity of anything she says.

What I would urge the court to think about is that we're hearing one side of the story.

I'm not prepared to litigate the viability of the ex-husband as a parent.

I have no idea.

He might be terrible.

I have no idea.

He might have other counterpoints to what's being said.

You don't have that perspective.

So I think that you need to weigh that.

The judge is weighing that.

She notes multiple times during the hearing that there are gaps in what she knows.

But she's read, quote, enough to raise red flags for me.

It is in total tension, she notes, the degree of culpability and the degree of family circumstances that I need to consider.

The judge explains that Donna's family circumstances don't make her any less culpable, but that the court is, quote, reluctant to wreak extraordinary destruction on the family.

I don't know that the victims would appreciate it, the judge says.

The victims can probably appreciate the legal requirement.

That doesn't seem that hard to grasp.

What the victims don't appreciate is the painful irony that isn't being acknowledged here.

Donna's status as a mother protects her.

And motherhood is why a lot of them are here in the first place.

They wanted what she has.

I remember being like, why does she get to be a mom?

This was the irony.

Why does she get to be

a mom that we can feel compassionate about when she decided that that's something that she could withhold from other people who were trying to be mothers.

You're talking about the fact that, oh,

your family was falling apart.

We were trying to have a family.

You got to where it was, it could fall apart.

We weren't even there yet.

How dare you?

Alicia had that miscarriage at 17 weeks and five days.

She sees herself as having been a mother for all of that time.

As a mom for 17 weeks and five days, I would have been willing to die so my kid could live, she said.

The cruelty here is not just the pain of the procedure, but the chance that Donna had had to be a mother, to continue to be a mother.

And there's an essential incongruity,

which is that Donna says that as a mother, She wants nothing more than to keep her children safe.

But she made choices that endangered them.

The amount of fentanyl she was having and then returning to work, I just,

but then she also had to like go and pick up her kids and feed her kids.

And she had this whole narrative about, oh, I was protecting them from this evil, shitty father who didn't care about COVID.

And I thought, how did you take care of your kids?

What she was implying was she was doing everything in her power to be there for her children.

And in my head, you were doing the total opposite of everything you should be doing to be there for your kids.

To Alicia, there are a lot of things that just aren't adding up.

And these are the things that was annoying me.

Like they were making it seem as though the reason she was doing drugs is because of her husband was

being

too much or you know he was whatever the reasoning was to me it was just BS to me.

The story seems like BS to a bunch of patients.

She's divorced.

That doesn't sound very unusual to me, one of them said.

Another one put it this way.

For her to blame all of it on anxiety over a divorce with her husband and COVID, that doesn't make any sense.

But the story doesn't have to make sense to the patients.

They aren't the intended audience.

The purpose of the story is to keep Donna out of prison.

The story has been constructed for the person who will decide her fate.

The story is for the court, not for the victims.

The hearing is almost over, but first there is a victim who wishes to speak.

Good morning to you, and whenever you are ready to speak, please go ahead, says the judge.

The victim speaks directly to Donna.

You hurt me.

You hurt me on that day, and the pain was horrible.

It was excruciating, and it was awful.

For me specifically, what was really terrible was the psychological toll that Judge Hall has referenced, because I'm a physician, and I know exactly what fentanyl does.

And I've had the procedure before, the extraction.

And so I had fentanyl before.

So this time, at my second egg extraction, when they gave me the saline, I immediately said, Hey, this is saline.

You didn't give me any fentanyl at all.

And the nurse, I don't think it was you, actually.

The nurse looked at me and said, I already gave you 25 fentanyl.

I said, you need to give me another because that was saline.

She gave me another one and I said, uh-oh, that was saline also.

I said, I know exactly this was saline.

I can taste the saline in my mouth.

And it's not the feeling of fentanyl.

I push fentanyl every day, all the time.

I give moderate sedation every day.

This is not fentanyl.

And I had to look at the doctor and look at the nurse and say, oh my god, I'm about to undergo this procedure with no sedation.

And you know, I had to undergo it because otherwise I was going to ovulate and lose all of my eggs.

The victim says that after the procedure, she was in so much pain that she ended up going to the ER at the hospital where she herself was a trauma surgeon.

There, quote,

the nurse I had worked with the day before didn't even recognize me because I was in such terrible shape.

I was in such pain.

All I could do was moan.

I couldn't even communicate.

I was in that much pain, and she thought I was a drug addict.

She didn't even recognize me as her attending doctor that was working with her in the emergency department the day before when I was on call.

You know,

the victim says,

to me, you're the big winner here.

You weren't in pain.

You have three children.

Nobody's going to take anything.

You still have three kids.

At this infertility clinic, there's hundreds of women who would rather be where you are, rather have the three kids.

It's been a really difficult time.

And you kicked us while we were down.

That's all.

Donna's lawyer speaks.

I think it is appropriate for the victims to have the last word today, Your Honor.

If only that were the case, attorney near.

I'm afraid I have to have the last word.

Here it comes.

I'm still struggling, Judge Hall says.

The judge seems to be trying to pull everything together.

She reflects on the patient's suffering.

She tells Donna, quote, you work such pain on these women.

She reflects on all of the letters and Donna's support, on her confession, her rehabilitation,

her children.

The judge seems to have settled something for herself.

She is ready to rule.

As I reach my decision, I keep thinking of someone who was never my colleague, but for whom I had a lot of respect, Judge Emmett Clary, who sat in Hartford.

He sat in the days when no one with a white collar went to jail, but his philosophy was he was ahead of his time.

Everyone should have a taste.

If If you would please rise, I'm going to impose a sentence.

The judge sentences Donna to four weekends in prison, alternating weekends, because of her custody arrangement.

On Sundays, the marshal will make sure she gets out in time to pick up her kids.

Obviously, I know from the victim's point of view, this is too little.

the judge says.

And I'm sure they think I've made a mistake.

I don't know if I have myself or not.

I do not see it, she adds immediately.

The judge names some additional conditions, including a period of house arrest and three years of supervised release with mandatory substance use treatment and drug testing.

Anything further that the court should address?

The judge asks.

Not from the government, says Attorney Miller.

No, Your Honor, Donna's lawyer says.

All right, we'll stand in recess.

Thank you all very much.

Someone on Zoom unmutes.

Do the world a favor and go overdose, you disgusting drug addict.

Whereupon, the hearing adjourned at 12:47 p.m.

What do you make of the judge's decision to sentence her the way she did?

What do you make of the judge's sentence?

Yeah.

I think it was on fear.

Here's a kicker to a situation like this.

Unless you have been in a situation where you're going through infertility issues, you'll never understand it.

The judge had heard the victim's stories, but she hadn't experienced what they did.

In Alicia's view, a story is not enough to understand the pain of another.

I can tell you how I feel less than the average person because I cannot go to bed with my husband, make love with him, and make a child.

That wasn't my way.

So my only way was the way that I chose to do.

And even trying to do that, someone else decided to bring more pain to what I'm already feeling.

It's hard for somebody to see that unless the judge herself had gone through IVF.

And by that logic, the logic of identification, you wonder about the inverse.

The judge was a mother.

Donna was a mother.

Donna's attorney was also a mother.

Was motherhood the decisive alliance?

But Alicia thought there were probably other reasons for the sentence too.

Honestly, did I think it would be that little amount of time?

No, absolutely not.

But I wasn't surprised.

Why weren't you surprised?

Honestly, it's a lot of things that doesn't surprise me in this country a whole lot.

And,

you know, like she says, she would get to stay home and she would be there for her kids.

And every accommodation was made for this woman.

This woman caused so many pain to so many different people and she was accommodated.

In my mind, she was accommodated to the full extent.

Now, I don't believe that would have been everybody else, but for her, it worked out.

And when you look around in this country, nothing surprises me anymore, honestly.

Do you think that the fact that she's white had something to do with herself?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

If you're doing time for vote, for registering to vote, and someone can take that amount of medication for herself,

then that tells me something.

And everything is not about race, but a lot of things are.

A lot of things are.

The sentence invited questions about privilege.

It wasn't just that it was so light.

It was so convenient.

It was designed to fit Donna's needs.

It was bespoke sentencing tailored to fit her needs as a mother.

Donna got to say, oh, but I'm now rehabilitating and I want to be with my kids.

And the judge said, you know what?

Yeah, it's really, it's, you've had a really hard, this is really hard.

It sounds really hard.

I, let's make sure you can just go to prison the weekends where you don't have to see your kids, and then we'll let you out on time to go pick up your kids.

I mean, that's, is that whiteness in America?

I don't know.

What is that?

That,

and, and I, and I, and I thought the entire time, I was like, black women have had their children taken away

for a tenth of a centimeter of what Donna's done.

And she's now,

she's being protected because

she represented herself as an injurious mother and she's the last line of defense for her kids.

And that's okay, even though she's a drug addict who's putting other people's lives at risk.

Leia went into the hearing not knowing what she wanted.

She came in torn between her misgivings about the system and her outrage at Donna.

In a way, the sentence kept her in that place.

Katie, the addiction researcher, went into the hearing knowing what she believed, if not exactly what she wanted.

But seeing it all play out did not feel good.

I cried the whole time.

I mean, I found it really,

really sad all around.

Just the nurses' circumstances, the victims who testified,

so emotional, and all of us who experienced these horrible procedures and pregnancy losses, the poor system in place, the criminal justice system, the whole thing.

I remember.

And I remember, you know, despite my letter and my, you know,

my belief in substance use treatment, I was, I felt and still feel really deeply that many women were probably really hurt by the late sentence that she received.

I, you know, I remember texting a friend, like, something like it was complicated, but a good outcome, but complicated.

Angela, the patient who works as a public defender, learned about the sentence after the fact.

She chose not to attend the hearing.

At that point, I had a newborn son, and the thought

of

reliving it in those moments was too much for me.

Yeah.

What do you make of her sentence?

Kudos to her public defender.

Honestly.

When Angela learned of Donna's crime, she'd struggled to identify as a victim.

Now her dual identities were colliding again.

I think the worst conversation I had was a family member was like, well,

you know, What would you have liked to see happen?

And I honestly don't know.

And this family member asked me if i wanted her to have to go through an egg retrieval without pain medication if that would have been enough like

would you want her to suffer like you suffered and i

dead face that i would never want someone to go through what i went through i don't care if she's the reason why it happened I would never wish this on her.

Yeah.

And just having to then

explain how traumatic it was, but how I had to be okay with her, what I think is a light sentence.

You know, she got to do jail on the weekends

and go to a drug program.

But the defense attorney and me also kind of kicked into high gear and was like, well, you know, this is somebody who has a drug addiction and they need help and incarcerating them isn't going to help.

They need to be able to function in society

beyond this.

and she she obviously lost her nursing license so she can't do it again theoretically.

At the end of the hearing, the few people inside the courthouse stepped out into a sparkling spring afternoon.

Local news cameras followed Donna.

Her attorney put a protective hand on her back.

Donna held a sheaf of papers and averted her gaze as she left the scene.

Her case was over.

But for Angela and other patients, Donna was not the only one, or even the main one, who had something to explain.

Honestly,

my anger's not at her.

It probably should more be at her, but it's not because she's one person.

And she wasn't the nurse in my room.

So what were the rest of them doing?

In front of the courthouse is the New Haven Green.

On the other side of it, up a little hill, is Yale.

A long wall of stone towers along College Street.

The Yale Fertility Clinic is not, you know, a brand new setting.

It's not one doctor in a back alley.

This is an entire setup.

This is an entire institution that's behind it.

It's got this reputation.

How do they not see that this is happening?

Now the patients had Donna's story.

It may have been incomplete or unsatisfying, but it had been laid out.

There was another story the patients still didn't have.

They didn't have Yale's story.

What we know about what happened at the clinic.

That's in two weeks, July 27th, on the next episode of The Retrievals.

The Retrievals is produced by me and Laura Strachewski.

Laura edited the series with editing and producing help from Julie Snyder.

Additional editing by Katie Mingle and Ira Glass.

Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan and Caitlin Love.

Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang.

Original music by Kala Pallone and music mixing by Toma Poley.

Indeed Chubu is the supervising producer for Serial Productions.

At the New York Times, our standards editor Susan Wesley.

Legal Review by Dana Green.

Art Direction from Pablo Delcombe.

Producing help from Jeffrey Miranda, Kelly Doe, Renan Barelli, Desiree Iboquais, and Anisha Mani.

Sam Dolnick is the assistant managing editor.

Special thanks to Vincent Sutherland and Kylie Silver.

The Retrievals is a production of Serial Productions and the New York Times.