A New York nanny has been found guilty of stabbing to death two children in her care at their home in Manhattan.
A jury unanimously rejected the insanity defense of Yoselyn Ortega, 55, whose lawyer said she hallucinated a devil's order "to kill the children and herself" when she killed six-year-old Lucia Krim, nicknamed Lulu, and her two-year-old brother Leo and left their bodies in a bath.
The killings in October 2012 were discovered when the children's mother, Marina Krim, returned to the family's Upper West Side apartment to find them dead and Ortega standing over them with apparent self-inflicted stab wounds.
Ms Krim had come home with her other daughter - three-year-old Nessie - after Ortega failed to show up at Lulu's dance class.
Ortega was charged with two counts each of first- and second-degree murder, punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison.
"We hope now that this verdict will give the Krim family an opportunity to heal, to find some closure and to move on in their lives," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance told reporters following the verdict.
Insanity defenses rarely succeed in New York, where proving mental illness is not enough to find a defendant not responsible for a crime.
Defence attorneys must demonstrate that the suspect could not understand the consequences of his or her actions.
Only six people were cleared of criminal charges due to insanity out of 5,111 murder cases tried between 2007 and 2016 in New York, according to Janine Kava, spokeswoman for the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
During the trial at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Ortega's lawyers argued she was too psychotic to comprehend what she was doing.
Defence lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg said Ortega suffered from "chronic mental illness" - she said Ortega had heard voices since she was 16 years old and suffered from depressive disorders, psychotic thinking and hallucinations that had gone untreated.
But prosecutors argued that Ortega harbored deep resentment against Marina Krim and that the killings were premeditated.
They said the evidence showed she had thought through her actions and thus understood the consequences.
Ortega's attack was prompted by her anger at being asked to work too hard, prosecutors said.
She had brought her 17-year-old son from the Dominican Republic and enrolled him in a private school, but was overwhelmed by financial concerns, they said.
