Inmate: Yates Told Me to Fake Mental Illness to Beat Rap

Fox News ^ | Friday, February 24, 2006 | Associated Press

[kyperman]

Andrea Yates once advised a fellow inmate that she could escape prosecution by pretending to be mentally ill and persuading a psychiatrist she suffered from serious disorders, according to court documents filed Thursday by prosecutors.

[kyperman]

It was bad enough if she was insane, but if she was faking...it's beyond even trying to describe with words. I just keep thinking what those kids must have felt and thought..geez makes me ill.

[johnny7]

You let this one out... and she'll go for an even dozen.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

Mark Twain

[dennisw]

I could care less what her state of mind was. Once you kill five children you gotta go. She's a demon

[Mr. Brightside]

Yeah. I never understood the insanity defense.

People are guilty of a LESSER punishment if they are "insane" killers?

I think I would rather live next to someone who killed because of anger, revenge or money than some insane murderer.

[Phil Connors]

Once you kill five children you gotta go. She's a demon>>

Unless you pay an abortionist to do it, in which case you get lifetime tenure as a wymmin's studies department at an Ivy League college, and appear on talk shows on the Oxygen network, talking about how courageous you are and how you overcame diver... I mean adversity.

[Cboldt]

Yeah. I never understood the insanity defense.

It's meant for people who literally can't tell right from wrong. They are taken off the street and put in an asylum, which might be construed as "getting off," but they aren't on the street.

Hinkley's (guy who shot President Reagan) success in asserting the defense caused a MAJOR revision to the law surrounding the insanity defense.

[Grut]

Fellow-inmate hearsay testimony isn't too reliable.

[Mila]

From everything that I've read about Andrea Yates and what a devoted mother she was, and considering her many documented postpartum psychiatric problems before the murders, I truly believe her to have been mentally ill at the time of her arrest. As to what has happened with her mental health since then, I can't say.

[AntiGuv]

It doesn't matter whether she was mentally. Millions of people are mentally ill, and that includes a high proportion of murderers. What matters is if she knew right from wrong, and I think she did (from what I've read of the case). She just decided to do the wrong, anyhow.

[AntiGuv]

Doesn't matter whether she was mentally ill! Sheesh..

[PzLdr]

Legally, they're "not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect" [at least in New York]. So, although they're institutionalized in a hospital, they haven't been convicted of the crime they were charged with. They've been acquitted. That's why, after someone has been "cured", they're released.

If they're not cured [again in NY], they can be held for 2/3 of the max of what their criminal sentence would have been if they were convicted. Then they have to be released or civilly committed - usually by family members.

[Just mythoughts]

Unfortunately the first prosecution did not stick to the facts of the case, as though those facts were not enough.

I do not have the ability to judge whether she was/is pure evil or if she was/is mental or if she went to the dark-side, does not change the fact that she took the lives of her children.

She has demonstrated that she can and did murder and seems to me she has some innocent souls waiting for her arrival to determine her state of mind.

[muggs]

Yeah, and we all know that an inmate would never lie.

[joebuck]

I'm glad this came out. This admission pretty much kills any chances of successfully arguing insanity during her coming go around with the Courts again. It is a devestating admission to make, pretty much the same as saying "I'm faking" in the eyes of the Court or jury.

[Halls]

Well, I know a very serious mentally ill gal and she has threatened to murder her mom and dad of whom take care of her as she can't take care of herself. Thankfully her mental illness is improving and she is constant care. But if she had ever done the horrible act I have no doubt in my mind it was murder. Mentally ill people know right from wrong. I have had post partum depression myself and had thoughts of harming my children at that time. It was horrible and I got help!! But if I would have hurt them I would have been responsible for it. Mentally ill people know what is right even when they are sick!

[JudgemAll]

postpartum horse hookie. After 5 murdered kids, it sounds to me like another "distressed woman" social agenda for abortion after birth. The burden of proof needs to be on the plea itself here. Psychiatry too easily cuts both ways, where normal people are either considered ill until proven "innocent", or others selectively get a cop out from true insane crimes because they appear healed and outwardly normal when it is known they fake normalness.

America has become a nation of lawyer & doctor associated in conartistry with criminals for big bucks.

[Condor51]

I knew what you meant :-)

[WV Mountain Mama]

I guess that's why whe was able to perfectly execute her children in the approx. 30 minute window when her husband left and before her mother in law came. Yeah, sounds crazy, crazy like a fox.

If I posted my real feelings, I'm sure it would get deleted.

[muggs]

Inmates are subject to the same feelings the rest of us have. I would imagine that many of the inmates hate Yates. I'm not sure I would consider the testimony of another inmate as creditable.