Thread: Second Trial Yields Different Verdict for Yates

Jul 27, 6:51 AM EDT

Jury Finds Yates Not Guilty in Drownings

By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer



Second Trial Yields Different Verdict for Yates


HOUSTON (AP) -- After being acquitted by reason of insanity in her children's bathtub drowning deaths, Andrea Yates won't spend her life in prison - but she will be committed to a state mental hospital.

One day after her acquittal, Yates will learn Thursday where she will be held until she is no longer deemed a threat. It will likely be North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, a maximum-security state facility, said her lead attorney, George Parnham.

Yates' ex-husband, Russell Yates, called the verdict "a miracle."

"This means a woman who we perceive to be also a victim in all this, just like our children are, is going to get a better quality of life for herself for the balance of her life," Yates said outside the courthouse.




Four years ago, another jury convicted Yates of the 2001 murders, but an appeals court overturned the conviction last year because of erroneous testimony from a prosecution witness.

Yates' attorneys said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and, in a delusional state, believed Satan was inside her and was trying to save the children from hell by drowning 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah.

"It's this simple: This lady never did anything, anything wrong in her whole life," defense attorney Wendell Odom said. "She's mentally ill. She wakes up one morning. She drowns her five kids. Come on - we all know she's insane, and it's a shame that it took us this long to finally get the right verdict."

Prosecutors had maintained that although Yates was mentally ill, she failed to meet the state's definition of insanity: being so severely mentally ill that she did not know her actions were wrong.

"I'm very disappointed," prosecutor Kaylynn Williford said. "For five years, we've tried to seek justice for these children."

Yates "made a decision that what she did was right," said prosecutor Joe Owmby. "That is an untenable position."

It will be difficult for Yates to be released. Getting released, or transferred to a lower-security hospital, requires a complicated and comprehensive evaluation process. Experts say it can take decades before psychiatrists decide that a patient is healthy enough to be released, and even then a judge can reject those findings.

The jury, split evenly between men and women, deliberated for about 13 hours over three days. The jurors, in accordance with state law, had not been told what would happen to Yates with a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict.

Jury foreman Todd Frank, 33, a marketing manager, said the group had "some emotional difficulty" reaching its unanimous verdict. Frank said it would have been easier if they had the option of a "guilty but insane" verdict.

Prosecutors had sought Yates' execution in the first trial but could not in the second because the first jury had rejected a death sentence.

That could help explain the different verdict in the retrial, said Charles P. Ewing, a law and psychiatry professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Juries considering execution tend to be more harsh, he said.

Yates did not testify. Her lawyers presented much of the same evidence as in the first trial, including half a dozen psychiatrists who testified that Yates didn't know the drownings were wrong.

Yates' 2002 conviction was overturned after Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist, told the first jury that before the drownings, NBC ran a "Law & Order" episode about a woman who was acquitted by reason of insanity after drowning her children. It was later learned that no such episode existed.

Yates was charged in this case with three of the children's deaths. Owmby said Wednesday he would recommend to Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal that he not pursue prosecuting Yates on the remaining two deaths.

Parnham said that if Yates had not been convicted the first time, Texas could have seen a backlash against mentally ill people instead of greater understanding.

"There would have been a massive protest to change the law and get rid of the insanity defense because (they thought) that woman didn't deserve to be acquitted," Parnham said. "But it worked just the opposite, and it took five years of doing, but people are talking and changes are taking place as we speak."

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Sadly, for our country, children seem to be an expendable commodity! Esp. so if they are your own children. If this woman had drowned 5 of the neighbors children, you think she would have gotten this verdict? If this woman had been really psychotic, she would not have called 911 and calmly told them what she had done. She most probably would have been playing with her own excrement or whatever, until her husband came home and found her. You don't turn it on and off that way, crazy one minute, sane the next moment. Its to bad the jury did not feel the fear and terror these older children went through, esp the oldest who tried so hard to get away from her, hiding, trying to get out the window, fighting her for all he was worth, I cannot fathom that kind of terror of watching your mother, calmly holding each struggling child down under the water, one after the other, knowing your turn was coming soon, and come it did and now they are all gone, 5 little children and we are left with the horror of knowing that someday this woman may be free again to have more children, and who's to say they won't meet the same fate their sisters and brothers faced.Why is it that our society is so lenient on those that hurt and kill our innocent little children? Why is it that we cannot fathom that some mothers who destroy their own children are just bad? Lots of men , way to many of them kill their children, how many of them get off with this kind of sentence?Please, I am not knocking on mothers, I just don't understand why we feel they must be"insane" to do something like this, it simply is not true. Mrs Yates was examined by a psychiatrist 2 days before she killed her children, he thought her getting better, not psychotic at all, having happy thoughts he wrote, so I guess she was sane one minute and psychotic the next? This was premeditated down to filling of the tub with water, to the locking all the doors and windows so no one could get in to save the children from her, and none of the little ones could get out. Her mother-in-law stated once when she was there, Andrea, filled the tub almost full for no reason, someone asked her if she was thinking at that time of killing the children in the tub and she said yes, but she didnt at that time. I think she thought about this for a very long time until she acted on her thoughts, she planned it plain and simple. Many women rushed to her defense when this happened, saying " I had postpartum blues to, I had these kind of thoughts myself", maybe so they didnt act on them though big difference. We have all had thoughts of murder at one time or another I suppose , yet we didnt follow through with those thoughts. Right after Andrea Yates drowned her children, there was another horrific death in tx, another mother, decided to stone her children to death with rocks, she to got away with murder on the grounds of insanity simply because our society refuses to believe that any mother could be so evil or bad as to kill her own children. I hope that Andrea spends her life locked up in a mental hospital, I have my doubts though, government funding for Psychiatric therapy is at an all time low, lots of insane people out on the streets because there are no funds to keep them in a safe environment, no I think after a few years, she will be deemed to be cured and allowed to go her way, possibly to do this again! I hope that Jesus, took all five of these little children in his arms and wiped their tears away and stripped from their minds the knowledge that their own mother took their lives in such a brutal way.

All the trials in the world will never bring her children back.

There are all kinds of things about this story that don't sit right with me.

No, trials won't bring her kids back. Doesn't mean society has and/or should show sympathy/compassion for their murderer.

That's as far as I can go on this or I'll just rant on and on. Nitty knows how me and my hubby feel about things like this.

LadyDrake, always on the side of the kids!