PLYMOUTH, Mass. (Court TV) — A mother convicted of brutally killing her two young sons will get a new trial after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the jury never saw evidence related to her mental illness.
In a unanimous ruling issued on Thursday, the state’s highest court stated that Latarsha Sanders, 51, was entitled to a new trial, writing in its opinion, “[W]e 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.”
Sanders was found guilty of first-degree murder in 2022 in connection with the deaths of two of her sons, 8-year-old Edson “Marlon” Brito and 5-year-old La’son Brito.
Latarsha Sanders in court around the time of her 2022 trial (WBTS).
According to the facts outlined in the opinion, Sanders had no documented history of mental illness before the boys were found dead. But in the days leading up to their deaths, her family members said that her appearance and behavior “changed.” Sanders was “disheveled,” and she said, “she needed to protect Marlon and La’son from their grandmother and her older sister Shalea because she feared that they would poison the children.”
On Feb. 5, 2018, emergency personnel were called to Sanders’ home in Brockton, Massachusetts, while she was having a medical episode, during which she would “scream, flail her arms, kick her legs, and throw herself back and forth” while claiming that someone named “Akeem” and his father were going to kill her.
After Sanders was taken to the hospital, police found her two boys dead upstairs. The two boys were found tucked into their beds, dead, and stabbed more than 100 times. La’son was wearing a Spider-Man bathrobe and had a broken candle shoved down his throat. When police interviewed Sanders after the grisly discovery, she eventually told them that “stabbing her children would make the Illuminati ‘happy.'”
During jailhouse phone calls, Sanders’ family said she “mentioned her plan to write a book and repeatedly described herself as evil.”
Following Sanders’ arrest, a doctor said Sanders was “grossly psychotic” when she killed her sons and diagnosed her with “schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders.” However, the judge in her first trial ruled that none of her medical records, amounting to “thousands of pages,” could be presented as evidence because they were all generated after the alleged crime, “an irrelevant time frame.”
The Massachusetts Supreme Court disagreed. After their ruling, Sanders’ attorney Robert Shaw told local NBC affiliate WBTS, “The enormous pain and loss caused by this tragedy know no measure. Latarsha Sanders was a loving mother who suffered from profound mental illness and was consumed by a psychotic state, completely untethered from reality, when her children were killed.”
Sanders’ case has drawn comparisons to the trial of Lindsay Clancy, which is underway in the same courthouse where Sanders’ new trial could take place. Clancy is accused of strangling her three young children to death; the defense claims the mother was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of her children’s deaths, making her not criminally responsible.
