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Judge William Sullivan, who drew national attention earlier this month after declaring a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy murder case, also presided over another closely watched child-killing trial that a retired Massachusetts judge says would look dramatically different if retried.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court last month vacated the murder convictions of Brockton mother Latarsha Sanders, ruling jurors were improperly prevented from seeing psychiatric records central to her insanity defense and ordering a new trial.
“They ordered a new trial which will fundamentally change the way the case is going to be tried,” retired Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Jack Lu told Fox News Digital.
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Sullivan, who presided over Sanders’ 2022 trial and later sentenced her to two concurrent life terms without parole, has returned to the national spotlight following the closely watched Clancy trial, which ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked over whether Clancy was criminally responsible for killing her three children. Like Sanders, Clancy admitted killing her children but argued she lacked criminal responsibility because of mental illness.
“There is no doubt the defendant committed these incomprehensible crimes,” Justice David Gaziano wrote for the unanimous court in Sanders’ case. “The sole issue before a Superior Court jury was whether she lacked criminal responsibility.”
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The justices concluded Sanders was entitled to a new trial because jurors never saw medical records documenting diagnoses and treatment of mental illness that were relevant to the only issue disputed at trial: whether she lacked criminal responsibility.
Lu said the ruling does far more than simply order another trial.
“Thousands of pages of mental health records will be admitted … and the jury’s gonna get it all,” he said.
Lu cautioned against judging Sullivan’s decision with the benefit of hindsight.
“The trial judge did an excellent job … but now I’m a great Monday morning quarterback just like everybody else,” Lu said, explaining that the evidentiary issue was unusually difficult before the SJC clarified the law.
Sanders admitted killing her sons, 8-year-old Edson “Marlon” Brito and 5-year-old La’Son Brito, but argued she was legally insane at the time of the attacks.
Her attorneys contended she was suffering from severe mental illness and psychosis, while prosecutors argued she appreciated the wrongfulness of her actions despite bizarre statements she made before and after the killings.
According to evidence summarized by the Supreme Judicial Court, Sanders had become consumed by conspiracy theories involving the Illuminati and expressed fears about voodoo before the killings.
After the deaths, investigators said she gave police multiple conflicting accounts before eventually telling detectives the stabbings were part of a “ritual” tied to voodoo and the Illuminati.
At trial, Sanders’ defense called a clinical neuropsychologist who testified she was “grossly psychotic” at the time of the killings and suffered from a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder.
The expert based that opinion in part on thousands of pages of psychiatric treatment records from prison and a state psychiatric hospital.
Those are the records Lu said a future jury would likely hear if prosecutors pursue another trial.
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The Supreme Judicial Court said that was an error, concluding the excluded records documented repeated observations of paranoia, hallucinations, delusional thinking and schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses that formed the medical foundation of Sanders’ defense.
Read the court’s ruling:
“We hold that the exclusion of the MCI-Framingham and WRCH medical records documenting the defendant’s post-arrest diagnoses or treatment of mental illness … impermissibly stripped the sole defense ‘of the medical foundation that supported it,'” the court wrote. “The defendant is entitled to a new trial.”
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Lu said the opinion should not be interpreted as a determination that Sanders was legally insane or wrongly convicted. Instead, he described it as the resolution of a difficult evidentiary question that changes what evidence jurors would be permitted to consider if the case is retried.
During oral arguments before the Supreme Judicial Court, Sanders’ attorney, Robert Shaw, argued the trial judge’s exclusion of medical evidence deprived his client of “a meaningful opportunity to present a complete defense,” FOX 25 in Boston reported.
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Assistant Plymouth County District Attorney Melissa Johnson countered that Sanders showed no documented psychotic behavior for months after the killings and that the records were properly excluded, the station reported.
The justices also addressed two issues that would likely shape any future trial.
First, they said prosecutors could refer to Sanders describing herself as “evil” because the statements were relevant to whether she appreciated the moral wrongfulness of her actions, so long as the argument remained tied to that legal issue rather than serving as a personal attack.
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However, the court found prosecutors improperly suggested Sanders may have borrowed elements of her story from episodes of “Law & Order: SVU,” ruling there was no evidence supporting that theory.
The ruling vacates Sanders’ convictions and sends the case back to Plymouth Superior Court for a new trial.
An overturned conviction does not clear Sanders of the charges, Lu said.
“It just means you have to do it all over again,” he said.
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Fox News Digital has reached out to Sullivan, Sanders’ attorney and the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office for comment.
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