Four years before the trial of Lindsay Clancy, lawyers for another Massachusetts woman who killed her children argued that she did so while in a state of psychosis. But her defense lawyers, unlike Ms. Clancy’s, were not allowed to present her mental health records to jurors.
The same judge, William F. Sullivan, presided over both trials in Plymouth County Superior Court. In the earlier case, he decided that defense lawyers could not introduce the medical records of the woman, Latarsha Sanders, into evidence unless prosecutors first “opened the door” to their inclusion. Prosecutors did not, and Ms. Sanders was found guilty of murder.
Last month, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the state’s highest court, overturned Ms. Sanders’s 2022 murder conviction on appeal and ordered that she be granted a new trial.
Ms. Sanders, 51, had not been diagnosed with mental illness before she stabbed her two young sons to death in 2018. But family members had been alarmed by changes in her behavior and beliefs, including paranoid fears that members of a secret society were trying to kill her and her children.
After her arrest, Ms. Sanders was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. An expert witness who examined her concluded that she had been “grossly psychotic” when she killed Marlon, 8, and La’Son, 5, at their home in Brockton, Mass.
The lawyer who represented Ms. Sanders in her appeal, Robert F. Shaw Jr., described her trial as “a fundamentally unfair legal proceeding” for “a mother who was suffering from profound mental illness and experiencing a psychotic state completely untethered from reality.”
The state’s highest court agreed in a unanimous decision last month, ruling that Judge Sullivan’s exclusion of records detailing Ms. Sanders’s mental health symptoms, diagnosis and treatment after the killings “impermissibly stripped” her defense “of the medical foundation that supported it.”
Ms. Sanders was convicted on Dec. 27, 2022, and received two mandatory life sentences without possibility of parole.
Just four weeks later, on Jan. 24, 2023, Ms. Clancy fatally strangled her children in Duxbury, Mass., after months of seeking effective treatment for her worsening mental illness.
If the district attorney decides to retry Ms. Sanders, her legal team will likely argue that she cannot be held criminally responsible because she was psychotic at the time of the killings.
If she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, she will be held at a secure psychiatric facility, with periodic reviews of whether she continues to pose a harm to herself or others.
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