The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has thrown out the murder conviction of a Brockton mother found guilty of stabbing her two young sons to death in 2018, ruling that jurors were never allowed to see seven volumes of her psychiatric records that could have supported her insanity defense. Latarsha Sanders is now entitled to a new trial, the court ruled, after finding that the exclusion of her mental health history amounted to prejudicial error that denied her a fair trial.
Writing for the court on Thursday, Justice Frank M. Gaziano stated plainly that there is no doubt Sanders committed the killings, framing the case as a question of criminal responsibility rather than guilt. “There is no doubt the defendant committed these incomprehensible crimes. The sole issue before a superior court jury was whether she lacked criminal responsibility,” Gaziano wrote, according to The Boston Globe. The justice added that “the exclusion of relevant medical records relating to diagnoses or treatment of mental illness constituted prejudicial error,” pointing squarely at Superior Court Judge William F. Sullivan's decision to limit how much of Sanders' psychiatric history reached the jury.
Sanders was convicted in December 2022 of first-degree murder in the deaths of her sons, 8-year-old Edson “Marlon” Brito and 5-year-old La'son Brito, who were found fatally stabbed inside their Brockton apartment in February 2018 after Sanders herself asked a neighbor to call 911 over what she described as a personal medical issue, according to FOX 4 News. A Plymouth Superior Court jury convicted her after a nine-day trial and just four hours of deliberation, and she received two mandatory life sentences for first-degree murder.
A Defense Built on a Diagnosis Jurors Never Fully Heard
At trial, defense expert Dr. Thomas Deters, a clinical neuropsychologist, testified that Sanders was in a severe psychotic state when she killed her sons, according to a report from NBC10 Boston. Sanders had argued she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity, pointing to what the Globe described as a precipitous decline in her mental health in the period leading up to the killings.
Notably absent from that trial was testimony from Dr. Stacey Fiore, a court-appointed forensic psychologist who evaluated Sanders after her arrest and diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia. Fiore concluded it was “highly likely” Sanders was symptomatic during the stabbings, but Plymouth County prosecutors chose not to call her as a witness, per the same Globe account. During oral arguments before the SJC in March, appellate attorney Robert F. Shaw Jr. argued that the trial judge's wholesale exclusion of Sanders' clinical records prevented jurors from hearing foundational evidence supporting her insanity claim, according to footage from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Prosecutors Argued the Insanity Claim Was a Cover Story
Assistant District Attorney Amanda Fowle told the original 2022 jury a different story, arguing that Sanders killed her sons for money and fame rather than out of mental illness. Fowle pointed to a notebook entry Sanders had written 16 months before the killings, which prosecutors used to accuse her of playing “the crazy card,” the Globe reported.
Under Massachusetts law, once a defendant introduces evidence of mental incapacity, the burden shifts to prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant was criminally responsible at the time of the crime, a standard rooted in the Commonwealth v. McHoul precedent. That burden now looms over Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz's office as it weighs whether to retry Sanders with the previously excluded psychiatric records in play. Cruz's office has prosecuted seven cases involving an insanity defense in the past, with judges finding defendants not criminally responsible in only two of them.
Case Echoes Broader Debate Over Maternal Mental Health
Sanders' case has repeatedly been compared throughout 2026 by legal commentators and Massachusetts news outlets to that of Lindsay Clancy, whose own Plymouth County murder trial has fueled statewide debate over how the justice system handles mothers alleging severe psychiatric breaks, as noted by MassLive. That parallel underscores the stakes of the coming retrial decision, which will unfold amid heightened public scrutiny of postpartum psychosis, maternal mental health crises, and how courts weigh criminal accountability against documented psychiatric illness.
For now, the SJC's ruling sends the case back toward Plymouth County, where prosecutors must decide whether to retry Sanders with the full scope of her psychiatric history available to a jury for the first time. The court's decision does not disturb the established facts of what happened to Marlon and La'son Brito in 2018 — only whether the woman responsible for their deaths was, in the eyes of the law, criminally responsible at the time.
