Andrea Yates Not Guilty By Reason Of Insanity - Andrea Yates reacts Wednesday at hearing the verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.A jury on Wednesday found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity of drowning her five children in a bathtub five years ago.
The verdict, reached after nearly 13 hours of deliberation over three days in Houston, means Yates will be committed to a state mental facility in Texas until she is deemed to be no longer a threat. Yates showed no immediate response as the verdict was read and the jurors polled individually. The 42-year-old defendant then hugged one of her attorneys, George Parnham, who had argued she suffered from postpartum psychosis at the time of the drownings on June 20, 2001.
Her former husband and father of the victims, Russell Yates, who has since remarried, exclaimed, “Oh, wow!” and became teary, Court TV reported.
“We’re happy,” Russell Yates told reporters outside the courthouse. “To me, this is really about Andrea’s quality of life for the balance of her life. Is she going to spend her time in a prison cell with barely adequate medical treatment and no interaction with other people and family members or is she going to spend time in a hospital and get good medical treatment and have hope of a possibly somewhat normal life later?”
Andrea Yates’ mental illness predated the killings. She had been on anti-psychotic medication and attempted suicide before killing Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months.
In 2002 a jury rejected Yates’ insanity defense and sentenced her to life in prison for the deaths of three of the five children.
But a state appeals court overturned the convictions because an expert witness for the state, a psychiatrist, testified incorrectly that the television series “Law and Order” had shown an episode about a woman suffering from postpartum depression who drowned her children.
Russell Yates said the prosecution failed to understand “that Andrea was ordinarily a loving mother who fell to this disease and did an unthinkable act.”
He added, “Yes, Andrea took the lives of our children. That’s the truth. But also, yes, she was insane. Yes, she was psychotic on that day. That’s the whole truth.”
He said the state “never attempted to get to the whole truth.”
He said he was proud of the jury for reaching its finding in Harris County, Texas — “the death-penalty capital of the world.”
Russell Yates rejected criticism that he should have known his wife was a danger to their children.
“We took her to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist failed us,” he said.
1 year ago
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