The high court’s decision will have immediate and broad consequences for others claiming insanity, and, specifically, Sanders.
Her lawyers will, at the very least, get a second chance to argue that her mental health was in such precipitous decline when she murdered her sons Marlon, 8, and La’son, 5, in 2018 that she should not be held criminally responsible for her actions.
If she’s successful in another trial, Sanders will be confined to a mental institution rather than prison.
Although the decision is tightly specific to the facts of Sanders’ trial, legal experts also say it sends a message that judges should be sure to give criminal defendants claiming insanity sufficient latitude to make their case to a jury.
“Trial judges are going to be more careful to be expansive” in allowing in evidence, said Rosanna Cavallaro, a Suffolk Law professor who teaches about criminal law and evidence. “Judges are going to take that to heart as they’re presiding over these very difficult cases.”
In the Clancy trial, her defense lawyer argues she was so deep in the throes of postpartum psychosis when she strangled her three children to death at their Duxbury home in 2023 that she too should not be held criminally responsible.
Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz’s office has charged Clancy with three counts of murder. Like Sanders, she has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Sullivan, the judge in both cases, has yet to decide in the Clancy trial what expert testimony jurors will be allowed to hear about her mental state.
In the Sanders case, Cruz’s office charged her with two counts of first-degree murder. Following a nine-day trial in 2022, a jury convicted her after four hours of deliberations.
But in its unanimous ruling overturning that verdict, the SJC said Sullivan was wrong to withhold from the jury details of Sanders’ psychiatric history from the four years she spent awaiting trial in prison and in a state psychiatric hospital.
“We hold that the exclusion of the defendant’s relevant medical records relating to the diagnoses or treatment of mental illness constituted prejudicial error, and as a result, the defendant is entitled to a new trial,” Justice Frank M. Gaziano wrote.
“There is no doubt the defendant committed these incomprehensible crimes,” he noted. “The sole issue before a Superior Court jury was whether she lacked criminal responsibility.”
The decision vacates the conviction and it now falls to Cruz’s office to decide whether to prosecute Sanders again.
In a statement Thursday following the decision, a Cruz spokesperson said, “It is our duty as a prosecutors’ office to be a voice for victims of crime, like Marlon and La’Son Brito, and we will continue to do so in their memory. We are currently reviewing the opinion of the Supreme Judicial Court, and determining our next steps going forward.”
After Sanders was convicted, she was sentenced to two life terms in prison without parole for each of the killings, a mandatory sentence, and another 9 to 10 years for lying to police during her videotaped interrogation, during which she was incoherent and struggled to stay awake.
Robert L. Shaw Jr., Sanders’ appellate attorney, welcomed the ruling.
“This case arose from an unimaginable tragedy that caused immeasurable loss and pain for many people, including Latarsha Sanders,” he said in a statement. “It also involved a fundamentally unfair legal proceeding — one that resulted in a sentence of life in prison for a mother who was suffering from profound mental illness and experiencing a psychotic state completely untethered from reality.”
Shaw called the decision a “testament to the safeguards built into our judicial system and to the fundamental principle that, no matter how grave the accusations, a conviction must be the product of a fair proceeding. We look forward to the opportunity for a new and fair trial.”
Her family said Sanders’ mental health had been declining for years. In interviews for a Globe series published last year, they described her worsening paranoia and her preoccupation with conspiracy theories. She stopped taking care of herself and would spend hours in a room with darkened windows.
Sanders did not seek treatment for the symptoms before the killings, and her family in interviews said they did not at the time appreciate the severity of her illness.
For four years while awaiting trial, Sanders was treated for mental illness at MCI-Framingham. When her symptoms worsened, she was committed to the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital, a state psychiatric facility. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorder.
During those years, medical professionals generated thousands of pages of reports documenting paranoid, bizarre behavior as well as periods of lucidity, the ruling stated.
According to the SJC, the jury did not see 12 such entries that were medically significant; these detailed how Sanders was diagnosed with severe mental illnesses, exhibited paranoid or bizarre behavior by licking windows, staring at walls, and saying her soul was being sold to the devil, and reported having auditory hallucinations since the birth of her first child.
In her opening statement and closing argument, Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Amanda Fowle told jurors that Sanders was “evil,” was playing the “crazy card,” and had crafted her “lies” based on episodes from the NBC television series “Law and Order: SVU.”
Fowle argued the absence of records of Sanders seeking treatment for her mental illness before the killings meant she was not mentally ill at all.
“There is no evidence that anybody in 2018 . . . was so concerned about her mental status that they were concerned about those little boys,” Fowle told jurors, according to a trial transcript. “Because the reality is, there wasn’t anything significantly wrong with her mental status when she killed those boys.”
The SJC said Sullivan undermined Sanders’ entire defense strategy when he concluded that prison and hospital records would not help the jury assess her mental status at the time of the killings, the central issue of the entire trial and her sole defense.
“Based on our comprehensive review of the medical records, however, we have no difficulty concluding that the exculpatory MCI-Framingham and WRCH [Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital] records far exceed those that called into question the defendant’s mental illness,” Gaziano wrote. “We hold that the exclusion of the MCI-Framingham and WRCH medical records . . . impermissibly stripped the sole defense ‘of the medical foundation that supported it.’ ”
In Sanders’ case, the SJC also found fault with the prosecution’s assertions about the “Law and Order” show and how Fowle framed that information during her closing argument.
When police searched Sanders’ Brockton home after the killings, a “Law and Order: SVU” episode was playing on a television. Fowle suggested without evidence the TV show had given Sanders the idea to “come up with, not the hallucinations, not the delusions, but the lies,” she told the jury.
The SJC said that while prosecutors are allowed some latitude in how they characterize evidence in their closing, Fowle went too far.
“The portions of the prosecutor’s argument relating to the television program were impermissible,” the ruling stated. “There was no evidence to suggest that the defendant watched episodes of the television program involving child murder and voodoo rituals or copied the plot lines.”
Yvonne Abraham of the Globe staff contributed.
John R. Ellement can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @JREbosglobe. Sean Cotter can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @cotterreporter.
