TYLER, Texas — The fate of a devoutly religious woman who stoned her two young sons to death last year because she believed God commanded it is now in a jury's hands.

The jury — eight men and four women who live in this conservative, Bible-belt county of 83,000 southeast of Dallas — must decide if Deanna Laney is guilty of capital murder or not guilty by reason of insanity for killing the boys and causing seriously bodily injury to a third son. Laney told psychiatrists that her then 14-month-old son Aaron, who remains nearly blind and brain-injured, just "wouldn't die" and she feared that she had "done wrong" by him.

Laney, 39, faces a mandatory life sentence and would not be eligible for parole until she has served 40 years if convicted. If jurors accept her defense that a severe mental illness prevented her from distinguishing right from wrong, Laney would likely be confined to a forensic psychiatric facility for an unspecified period of treatment.

Laney told psychiatrists in videotaped interviews the jury viewed that she believed she and Andrea Yates, the Houston mother serving a life sentence for drowning her five children in 2001, were chosen by God to be the sole witnesses to the end of the world.

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Prosecutor Matt Bingham

In closing arguments delivered Saturday morning, lawyers for the prosecution and defense agreed there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Laney killed sons Joshua, 8, and Luke, 6, by crushing their skulls with 14- and 10-pound rocks, respectively. They disagreed, however, on the issue of whether the defense had met its burden of proving that Laney was legally insane and therefore not criminally responsible for the brutal killings under state law.

"Whatever decision you make, it is the right decision because you made it," Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham told jurors. "Sanity is not a medical term. It is a legal term and should be decided by a legal body."

Bingham pointed to efforts by Laney to keep her husband from finding out about the killings because she feared he would intervene as evidence that she knew her actions were wrong. The elected prosecutor stopped short, however, of asking jurors to return guilty verdicts.

He likened Laney to a foreign terrorist who straps a suicide bomb to his body because he believes an attack on an enemy is God's will and will get him into heaven.

"Does that exempt him from man's law? Is he insane?" Bingham asked.

Although a court-appointed psychiatrist testified that Laney was "crazy" when she attacked her children, three other experts — two for the defense, one for the prosecution — agreed that Laney's sanity was a jury question. All four concluded that she suffered from a severe mental disease that preventing her from knowing her conduct was wrong, which is the legal standard in Texas.

Bingham said he did not shrink from his own expert's conclusions because they merely amounted to an opinion, which doesn't count when it comes to guilt or innocence. He asked jurors not to substitute the opinions of others for their own common sense after listening to all the evidence over five days.

"If you just took the word of the experts, you know what you wouldn't need?" Bingham asked rhetorically. "The 12 of you."

Lead defense attorney F.R. "Buck" Files offered the jury the analogy of a sick person who went to four doctors and all four agreed they had cancer. The person could feel pretty certain that they actually had cancer and would not need to consult even more doctors for a diagnosis, he reasoned.

"One psychiatrist, two psychiatrists, three psychiatrists, four psychiatrists, and they mentioned a fifth ... Sometimes you have to say enough is enough," Files said.

Another defense lawyer, LaJuanda Lacy, suggested that jurors ask themselves why prosecutors would hire a psychiatrist if they deemed his opinion irrelevant. She said that Bingham would have argued strenuously that the expert's opinion mattered if the expert had concluded Laney was sane, which wasn't the case.

Tonda Curry, a third defense lawyer, noted that the defense stipulated that Laney killed her children and did not try to "waste time" by challenging the overwhelming evidence supporting the murder charge.

"The state's burden on these issues have been met. The question that is left is why?" Curry said. "She was insane. There is no other answer she didn't know her conduct was wrong."

Curry reminded jurors of the 911 tape they heard when the trial opened Monday. Laney dialed the emergency number at 12:52 a.m. and announced that she had just "killed my boys." Asked why, she told the operator that it was just something she had to do.

"The voice is so calm it's almost eerie," Curry said. "Remember that voice, because it is not the voice of someone who knows she did something wrong."

Laney wept openly as Bingham described the killings. He did not show the jury the very disturbing autopsy photos they saw earlier in the week.

He displayed a large portrait of the three boys, all with wide smiles on their face. Bingham reminded jurors about testimony that Luke was still alive when Laney dragged him behind a swing and left him to die while she went back inside the house for Joshua, who struggled.

During his closing argument, Files left the photograph of the boys up on an easel. He said it is one of the strongest exhibits he could show jurors to prove that Laney was insane.

He said the psychiatrists and police failed to find even "one single, logical, rational reason why Dee Laney would have taken the lives of those three boys."

"The evidence of insanity in this case is not just that of a feather on a scale. It is overwhelming," Files said.

Jurors got the case at 11:40. They deliberated about two and a half hours before sending out a note requesting that the tape of the 911 call be sent into the jury room.