On Thursday, November 4, Sarra Gilbert, who was convicted of murdering her mother, Mari, in 2016, was denied her appeal by Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, Third Judicial Department.

On July 23, 2016, Gilbert invited her mother over to her Warren Street residence, then stabbed her 227 times with a 15-inch knife, bludgeoned her with a fire extinguisher and sprayed the fire extinguisher foam into her mother’s mouth. She also stripped her mother of her clothing because they reportedly gave her power. During trial, Gilbert’s legal team attempted to argue that she lacked criminal responsibility by reason of mental disease or defect, which the jury rejected. Gilbert was then sentenced to 25 years to life.

The appeal focused on whether the jury could, based on the evidence presented, reasonably reject the “mental disease or defect” defense. According to court documents, Gilbert’s defense team claimed that the jury “improperly rejected her affirmative defense and, therefore, the verdict is legally insufficient and against the weight of the evidence.” They say Gilbert lacked the capacity to know what she was doing was wrong.

Evidence of mental illness was stark. Gilbert had a history of claiming to hear voices. In fact, police who arrived at the scene of the murder witnessed Gilbert thinking the ping of a dying fire alarm battery was voices speaking to her. She had sought mental health treatment prior to the murder as well. The defense had submitted evidence of mental health diagnoses of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, as well as hospitalization records leading up to the crime.

Months prior to the attack against her mother, Gilbert drowned a puppy in front of her son because she reportedly believed the puppy was rapper Eminem and wanted to “hurt her.” She then allegedly threatened her son to stay quiet. That incident resulted in her losing custody of her son to her mother. Gilbert thought that her mother’s motivations were monetary in nature. She also thought her mother had been poisoning her and was “evil” and a “bad God” who needed to be killed.

Police body cam footage presented to the jury showed her both admitting to killing her mother and also questioning whether her mother was dead. Court documents also described a time when Gilbert, whose sister Shannan is believed to have been a victim of the Gilgo Beach serial killer, questioned her sister’s death and testified that she at one point believed she had switched bodies with Shannan.

Defense witness Alexander Bardey, a forensic psychologist, said Gilbert harbored "two sets of delusions” —that she wrote several songs that famous musicians stole from her and that she is “God, or God-like" and is "[c]hosen by God to bring people to heaven, and fight the devil.”

Bardey also said that Gilbert was supposed to receive psychiatric medication injections at the beginning of each month, but that she was not given her medication in July 2016 and her "psychosis progressed," which included hallucinations of green lights, “cars on the wall,” that her rug was “soaked in urine,” and that it was raining from the ceiling.

The prosecution included expert testimony from psychiatrist Sandra Antoniak, who noted that Gilbert had mental health disorders and also used drugs, though no drugs were found in her system upon her arrest. Antoniak said Gilbert blamed her mother for the charges brought against her for drowning the puppy, and that her mother was the source of her delusions, including hearing voices. Antoniak also told the court that she agreed that Gilbert suffered from a mental illness at the time of the killing, but ultimately concluded that she "did not lack the substantial capacity to tell the nature and consequences of her actions or that such conduct... [was] wrong."

In its rejection of Gilbert’s appeal, the court said, “We have no doubt that [Gilbert] suffers from a debilitating mental illness that blurs the lines of fiction and reality, and we are certainly sympathetic to the difficult life circumstances she has endured. The proof, however, reasonably supports the jury's finding that, at the time of the killing, [Gilbert] had the substantial capacity to know and appreciate both the nature and consequences of her conduct and that such conduct was wrong. Although [Gilbert] oscillated between telling the responding police officers that she had killed the victim and maintaining that the victim was not in fact deceased, she testified at trial that her objective was to kill the victim when she stabbed her. Moreover, Antoniak recalled [Gilbert] informing her that she initially stabbed the victim in the chest because she knew it was the most lethal place to inflict a wound. This evidence supports a finding that defendant possessed the substantial capacity to know and appreciate the nature and consequences of her actions.”

“Independent evidence also supports the proposition that defendant possessed more than a surface understanding that her conduct was wrong, including that she hid in the bathroom when police initially arrived at the scene, requested that her family be moved away, stated to detectives that she felt bad about her actions, agreed with detectives that stabbing the victim would still have been wrong even if the voices had ceased thereafter…”