A woman serving two life sentences for murder in the killing of her sons in Massachusetts secured a new trial on Thursday, after her lawyers argued that the defense should have been able to introduce medical records documenting her mental illness.
Latarsha Sanders, 51, was convicted in 2022 in the same county where Lindsay Clancy, 35, is now standing trial for murder in the 2023 strangulation deaths of her three young children. The same judge, William F. Sullivan, is presiding, and the same district attorney, Timothy Cruz, is prosecuting the case.
Like Ms. Sanders, Ms. Clancy has pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer is arguing that she is not criminally responsible for her children’s deaths because she suffered from postpartum psychosis and hallucinated a voice that ordered her to kill them and herself.
Ms. Sanders had no diagnosis of mental illness before stabbing her children, ages 5 and 8, killing them at their Brockton home in 2018. But she had become obsessed with a secret society known as the Illuminati and feared that it was trying to kill her and her children, according to court records of the case.
After her sons’ bodies were discovered at her apartment, she initially told the police that her eldest son and his father had killed them and that she had tried to stop the attack. She later said the boys had been killed as part of a ritual undertaken to achieve “eternal life,” connected to the Illuminati.
A neuropsychologist who evaluated Ms. Sanders concluded she had been “grossly psychotic,” with schizophrenia and other disorders, at the time of the killings, and lacked the capacity “to appreciate the criminality of her conduct.”
But at her trial, Judge Sullivan ruled that details from Ms. Sanders’s medical records could not be cited by defense experts unless the prosecution first “opened the door” to such testimony. The medical records were not presented to the jury, which convicted her of two counts of first-degree murder.
A unanimous decision on Thursday from the state’s Supreme Judicial Court found that Judge Sullivan had improperly impeded Ms. Sanders’s insanity defense by excluding details of her psychiatric symptoms and diagnosis.
The ruling came on the eighth day of testimony in the trial of Ms. Clancy. Her case has revived a long-running debate about the legal system’s treatment of women who kill their children, 20 years after Andrea Yates, a Texas mother, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning deaths of her five children.
Ms. Yates had been convicted of murder at her first trial; that verdict was overturned on appeal. A retrial ended with a not-guilty verdict, which has since been seen as a milestone in public understanding of postpartum psychosis.
Robert F. Shaw Jr., the lawyer representing Ms. Sanders in her appeal, said in an interview on Thursday that her case involved “an extraordinary tragedy” and “a legal proceeding that was fundamentally unfair.”
Among the information withheld from the jury in her case, according to the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision, were descriptions of symptoms she exhibited in the months after the killings, including paranoid delusions, incoherent speech and bizarre behavior such as licking windows. She also told clinicians that she had experienced auditory hallucinations for years.
Ms. Sanders was convicted on Dec. 27, 2022, and sentenced to two mandatory life sentences without possibility of parole. Just 28 days later, on Jan. 24, 2023, Ms. Clancy fatally strangled her children in the basement of the family’s home in Duxbury, Mass., after her husband briefly left to pick up their takeout dinner.
Mr. Cruz, the district attorney, also charged Ms. Clancy with first-degree murder, arguing that the killings of her children were carefully planned, not the product of psychosis.
Ms. Clancy’s lawyer and others have criticized the charges as extreme, given her well-documented, monthslong and ultimately unsuccessful quest before her children’s deaths to find effective care for postpartum mental illness.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cruz said in a statement that the office was reviewing the court’s decision and would continue “to be a voice for victims of crime, like Marlon and La’Son Brito,” the children of Ms. Sanders.
Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston, said the ruling in the Sanders case could have an indirect effect on Ms. Clancy’s trial “by signaling that judges should err on the side of admitting, rather than excluding” evidence related to mental health.
Such cases are notoriously difficult, Mr. Shaw said, because mental illness is “abstract, complicated and foreign to jurors.”
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