The Supreme Judicial Court overturned the murder convictions for a Brockton mother who was found guilty of killing her two children in 2018.
The judge who oversaw that case, William Sullivan, is currently presiding over the triple murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mom who killed her three children then tried to kill herself in 2023.
The SJC wrote that it was ordering a new trial for Latarsha Sanders because Sullivan did not allow her defense to admit the defendant’s post-arrest medical records.
Sanders was arrested in 2018 after her two sons, Edson, 8, and La’Son, 5, were found brutally stabbed to death in her Brockton apartment.
“The victims were found in separate bedrooms, swaddled in sheets and blankets, having suffered multiple, horrific knife wounds,” the SJC ruling stated.
Like the Clancy case, there wasn’t a question that Sanders killed her kids; the only issue was whether she was criminally responsible for their deaths. Clancy is claiming that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings, while Sanders claimed she’d been in a psychosis more generally.
A jury convicted Sanders of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to the mandatory life without parole sentence.
But on appeal, Sanders’ defense in that trial was impeded by Sullivan’s decision to exclude her medical records from evidence.
The excluded medical records included information about Sanders “licking windows and staring at walls,” claiming that someone was trying to poison her, and “hyper religiosity” after she was arrested.
She had also reported, while in custody, that after the birth of her first child, she’d experienced hallucinations and delusions that worsened over time.
The SJC said that the exculpatory evidence that would have helped her case in those records exceeded the evidence of moments of lucidity also included.
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“By all accounts, [Sanders] was a loving, caring, and affectionate mother,” the SJC ruling started. She didn’t have any history of violence and witnesses testified that she always put her kids first.
Although she didn’t have a documented history of mental health issues, Sanders had developed an obsession with the Illuminati and watched videos of the “24 hours a day” in the lead-up to the killings.
Sanders at first blamed the deaths on her ex, then later claimed that she’d killed the children to please the Illuminati.
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