At roughly 11:30 pm on May 9, 2003, Laney woke and took Joshua, 8, to the yard of her home in New Chapel Hill, Texas, where she lifted a large rock over her head and brought it down against his skull, fatally wounding him.
At some point afterward, she attempted to kill her youngest son, 14-month-old Aaron, in his crib with a stone.
[1] Five mental health experts were consulted in Laney's case: two each by the prosecution and defense, and one by the judge.
All of them arrived at the conclusion that she had psychotic delusions which made her unable to know right from wrong at the time of the killings.
However, she is subject to a list of conditions, including that she have no unsupervised contact with minors and that she submit to regular drug tests to ensure that she takes required medication.