A mother who bashed her sons' heads with heavy rocks, killing two of them, was so delusional she thought the Lord told her to do it, her attorney said in opening statements at her murder trial in Tyler, Texas, on Monday.
"Does she follow what she believes to be God's will or does she turn her back on her God?" defence attorney FR 'Buck' Files Jr asked the jury of eight men and four women.
Deanna Laney, a 39-year-old housewife, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to charges of murdering eight-year-old Joshua and six-year-old Luke and causing serious injury to Aaron, 14 months old at the time. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.
The deeply religious east Texas woman who home-schooled her children in the tiny town of New Chapel Hill, 160km south-east of Dallas, wept uncontrollably and shook her head, at times burying her face in a tissue, as she listened to testimony and prosecutors showed gruesome photographs of her slain children.
Her husband, who has supported her, sat a few rows behind with friends and family.
Prosecutors contend Laney knew right from wrong when she killed her children last Mother's Day weekend, despite opinions from two psychiatric experts for the defence, two for the prosecution and one for the judge - all of whom said Laney was legally insane.
"The issue of sanity is tried in the court, not the hospitals," District Attorney Matt Bingham told the jury.
Prosecutors played a tape of an emergency call in which Laney, in her high, dainty voice, calmly told a dispatcher after midnight on May 10: "I just killed my boys."
She also described the colour of her house and directed authorities to her home.
Later in the tape, she appeared to doubt whether she should have beaten the baby, saying, "I don't think I did right by Aaron." She later said, "I don't think I was supposed to kill him."
In his opening statement, the district attorney told the jury: "The evidence will show you that the last thing Josh and Luke Laney ever saw was their mom with a rock over their heads."
Bingham said Laney attacked the baby first, hammering his head with a two kilogram rock she had hidden under his crib.
When he began crying, Laney's husband, Keith, woke up and found his wife standing over the baby. "Everything's okay," she told him.
He assumed his wife was changing a nappy and went back to bed. Laney then struck the baby again and, after hearing a gurgling from the blood in Aaron's throat, she covered him with a pillow and left the room, Bingham said.
"Aaron Laney will never be the same," said Bingham, adding that the boy's vision had been impaired and he would never live independently.
With Aaron's blood on her pyjamas, Laney then woke up Luke, led him outside the family's rural brick home and asked him to put his head on a large rock, the prosecutor said.
Laney smashed the six-year-old's skull with a large landscaping rock. Then she went to get her oldest child, Joshua. He, too, obeyed his mother and put his head against a large rock in the yard. His mother bashed his skull with a seven kilogram rock. - Sapa-AP