Latarsha Sanders was convicted in December 2022 of killing her sons, Edson “Marlon” Brito, 8, and La’Son Brito, 5, at their Brockton home in 2018. She received two mandatory life sentences without parole.
According to NBC Boston, the jury never saw thousands of pages of medical records documenting Sanders’ mental illness after her arrest.
Sanders’ defense argued that she was not criminally responsible for the killings because she was experiencing a psychotic state.
Her appellate attorney, Robert F. Shaw Jr., called the trial “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 records included evidence of hallucinations and paranoia, and Sanders was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2018 following her arrest, The New York Times reported.
An expert who examined her concluded she was “grossly psychotic” when she killed her sons.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court unanimously overturned Sanders’ convictions in August, finding that Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan’s decision to exclude the records deprived her defense of medical evidence supporting its argument.
Sullivan also presided over Lindsay Clancy’s recent murder trial.
Both women faced first-degree murder charges from the same Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office, but while Sanders’ mental-health records were excluded, Clancy’s defense was allowed to present evidence about her alleged postpartum psychosis, according to NBC Boston.
Sanders was convicted just four weeks before Clancy killed her three children in January 2023. Clancy’s trial ended in a mistrial Friday (September 4) after jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict.
The Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office said it is reviewing the Sanders ruling and determining its next steps.
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