Posted on 07/07/2006 6:26:30 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
(AP) HOUSTON A psychiatrist testified Friday that she warned Andrea Yates not to have any more children after she tried to commit suicide twice within months of having her fourth child in 1999.
"I could pretty much predict that Mrs. Yates would have another episode of psychosis," Dr. Eileen Starbranch told jurors in Yates' second murder retrial.
Starbranch said Yates suffered from postpartum psychosis, which she said causes a mother to have delusions and lose touch with reality, making it much more severe than postpartum depression.
Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub in June 2001, 6 months after the birth of her fifth child, Mary. She is being tried again because an appeals court overturned her 2002 murder conviction based on erroneous testimony that might have influenced the jury. She has again pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.
Yates' attorneys have never disputed she killed the youngsters but say she didn't know that the drownings were wrong.
Prosecutors say Yates may be mentally ill but does not meet the state's definition of insanity.
They say Yates planned to drown the children when she was alone with them, after her husband went to work and before her mother-in-law arrived. Then Yates called 911 and later told a detective she killed them because she was a bad mother and wanted to be punished, according to witnesses.
Along with Mary, Yates drowned 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah.
Starbranch said she treated Yates after she tried to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills in June 1999.
About a month later, Starbranch said, Yates' then-husband, Rusty, told her that Yates had held a knife to her own throat the previous day.
Starbranch said Yates had a bald spot on her head from scratching it, had not been taking her antipsychotic medication, had filthy hair and could not function. Starbranch said she sent the couple immediately to a mental hospital so Andrea Yates could be admitted.
Under cross-examination, Starbranch acknowledged that the words "filthy" and "catatonic" were not in her notes and said that Yates' nervousness and anxiety may have been a sign that she simply did not want to be at a psychiatrist's office. But Starbranch maintained that Yates was psychotic and not lethargic or exhausted from caring for four young children.
Over the next two weeks or so while hospitalized, Yates steadily improved while on antipsychotic drugs, Starbranch said.
But then in March 2001, Rusty Yates called Starbranch's office trying to make an appointment, saying his wife was getting worse since having the couple's fifth child in November, Starbranch testified.
"I knew that was a very ominous sign ... that lives were at stake, so I asked that she be brought in immediately," Starbranch said.
The couple never showed up, but Starbranch later learned that Yates was admitted to another mental hospital, the psychiatrist testified.
Yates, being tried in only three of the children's deaths, will be sentenced to life in prison if convicted. After the first jury rejected execution, prosecutors could not seek the death penalty again because they found no new evidence.
I suppose you have compassion for Jeffrey Dahmer and other serial killers too? After all they claimed insanity at their trials too.
Really? Why haven't I read news accounts of them?
No.
I have been consistently against the death penalty all my adult life.
Rusty Yates did not help this woman by continuously impregnating her. If he needed sex, he should have used birth control. When he was interviewed on tv, he appeared to be intelligent and well-groomed. Didn't he notice his wife had "filthy hair" and was acting like a mental patient? The murder was shocking. This woman can never be let out. It's too bad the husband was such a self-obsessed jerk. (IMO)
Sure its all the mans fault we all know that.
I noticed the hair the first time I saw her, so I think it's a safe bet she had not been bathing either. Apparently her husband was blind to the obvious.
He should be arrested and tried as an accomplist.
Perhaps, one day when we have the technology to specifically identify most diseases in the brain that will change.
Probably not. There are a lot of people running around with heads full of bad wiring. It's just much simpler to attribute their actions to broad terms as "evil" than to believe we're just machinery.
I am neither.
I have heard every concievable argument pro and con. I don't discuss or debate my position here, but I don't hesitate to state it either.
Pro death penalty members are in the huge majority here and I respect their opinions, whether they respect mine or not.
They're much harder to prosecute. Louise Woodward is but one example.
No, we already have card readers and psychics to fill in that void. If we worried about the study of the brain devolving into such nonsense we'd never make any progress.
I think we'll discover that the mind is more than just machinery.
A few years ago one of my states forensic experts was caught faking evidence. No one was ever put in jail or in a nut house on the word of a psychic or a card reader. Scientists are powerful ,so they need to be more careful than psychics or card readers.
Well at least you have been consitantly wrong your entire life.
I do pity them. However, their mother killed them because of her illness rather than out of malice, so I feel pity for her too.
Yet kill them she did. One after the other. She is evil and should be put down. She will never be right in the head again.
An accomplice? WRONG.
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