Sydney Powell, 23, of Akron, was sentenced to life in prison for killing her mother by stabbing her repeatedly and beating her with a cast-iron skillet three years ago.
Summit County Court of Common Pleas Judge Kelly McLaughlin handed down the sentence Thursday. Powell, who was 19 years old at the time of the killing in March 2020, will be eligible for parole after serving 15 years in prison.
The defense argued Powell should have been found not guilty by reason of insanity, but the jury saw it differently and found her guilty last week of two counts of murder, one count of felonious assault and one count of tampering with evidence.
Brian LoPrinzi, the chief of the Summit County Criminal Division, said that the defendant had been kicked out of college and lied about it. After her mother found out, things turned violent.
"And that's when she ran, got the first thing she could find — was probably the skillet — and hit her mom in the back of the head, and when she didn't die, she went and got a knife and stabbed her 30 times," LoPrinzi said.
Brenda Powell was a longtime child-life specialist at Akron Children's Hospital Showers Family Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Disorders.
"She was, by all accounts, a wonderful woman," LoPrinzi said of Brenda Powell.
Sydney Powell's attorney, Don Malarcik, strongly believes she should have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and said that she considered her mother her best friend.
"This was a brutal, brutal attack, and that brutality speaks to the insanity of this incident," Malarcik said.
When asked then why Powell killed her mother, her attorney said, "She did it because she has a serious mental disease, schizophrenia, and that serious mental disease, as our doctor says, put her in a psychotic break."
Jeff Laybourne, the attorney representing the rest of the family, including the defendant's father, said the family didn't want her to go to trial for murder.
"Victim's under Marsy's Law are afforded all sorts of protection and comfort and their wishes are known, so long as they're bloodthirsty. If they want a different outcome than what the prosecutors want, then they're cast aside," Laybourne said.
But prosecutors said they also must consider the community's wishes, and while the case is extremely tragic, in the end, they believe there was justice for Brenda Powell.
"The law does not require us to succumb to the wishes of the victim's family," LoPrinzi said. "The defendants' families often don't want us to prosecute their loved ones. That's not unusual at all."
Powell's attorney plans to file with the Court of Appeals within 30 days, and one of the major issues will be challenging the way insanity defenses are written in Ohio.
