ACTING!!!
Posted on 07/26/2006 9:35:01 AM PDT by cajunman
HOUSTON -- Jurors reached a verdict in Andrea Yates' murder retrial Wednesday morning. The jury's decision will be announced at about 11:25 a.m. KPRC and Click2Houston will air the verdict live.
After deliberating nearly 11 hours, jurors returned for a third day Wednesday to determine if she was legally insane when she drowned her five children in the bathtub.
Before court ended Tuesday, the jury of six men and six women asked to review the state's definition of insanity: that someone, because of a severe mental illness, does not know a crime he is committing is wrong.
State District Judge Belinda Hill said jurors, who were sequestered for the second night, , could see the definition Wednesday morning.
Jurors have already deliberated longer than the nearly four hours it took a first jury, which convicted her in 2002. That conviction was overturned on appeal last year.
Yates, 42, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. She is charged in only three of the deaths, which is common in cases involving multiple slayings.
As court was to end Tuesday, jurors asked for one more hour to deliberate. But then the panel immediately passed another note rescinding that request. Hill quoted the note, which read, "We need some sleep," prompting laughs from those in the courtroom.
The jury earlier asked to review the videotape of Yates' July 2001 evaluation by Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist who testified for the defense that she did not know killing the children was wrong because she was trying to save them from hell.
Resnick told jurors that Yates was delusional and believed 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah would grow up to be criminals because she had ruined them.
Jurors later asked to review Yates' November 2001 videotaped evaluation by Dr. Park Dietz, the state's expert witness whose testimony led an appeals court to overturn Yates' 2002 capital murder conviction last year.
Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist, testified in her first trial that an episode of the television series "Law & Order" depicted a woman who was acquitted by reason of insanity after drowning her children. But no such episode existed. The judge barred attorneys in this trial from mentioning that issue.
On Tuesday, after jurors asked for the trial transcript involving defense attorney George Parnham's questioning of Dietz about the definition of obsessions, the judge brought the jury back into the courtroom.
The court reporter then read the brief transcript, in which Dietz said Yates "believed that Satan was at least present. She felt or sensed the presence." Dietz had testified that Yates' thoughts about harming her children were an obsession and a symptom of severe depression -- not psychosis.
Earlier Tuesday, jurors reviewed the slide presentation of the state's key expert witness, Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist who evaluated Yates in May. He testified that she did not kill her children to save them from hell as she claims, but because she was overwhelmed and felt inadequate as a mother.
Welner told jurors that although Yates was psychotic on the day of the June 2001 drownings, he found 60 examples of how she knew it was wrong to kill them.
If Yates is found innocent by reason of insanity, she will be committed to a state mental hospital, with periodic hearings before a judge to determine whether she should be released -- although by law, jurors are not allowed to be told that.
Yates will be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of capital murder.
A capital murder conviction in Texas carries either life in prison or the death penalty. Prosecutors could not seek death this time because the first trial's jurors sentenced her to life in prison, and authorities found no new evidence
First, the "facts in this case" are what were introduced into evidence by the Lawyers? Is that what you think the "facts" are? Her past problems of mental midgetry, and blaming her husband, and post-partum depression, etc., etc., which is the way everyone today tries to analyze and explain away deviant behavior (i.e., bad marriage, bad childhood, bad environment, bad parents, etc., etc.) is why anyone with more than two brain cells can understand that Andrea Yates is the PERPETRATOR, and not a VICTIM.
She will be set free as soon as some "expert psychiatrist" blesses her as being "no danger to society", and she will search one of those Liberal-types out....they're as easy to find as the "expert witnesses" who come up with their laundry list of excuses as to why she should be found "insane".
No doubt she is sick, as was Manson, Gacey, and every other murderer who came down the 'pike.
But, being societal misfits and irresponsible doesn't entitle one to violate the LAW, which is exactly what Yates did: she murdered 3 people, and now every sympathetic politically-correct victimhood supporter is out there trying to rationalize it away....
Sorry, the fact (which you omit) is that she murdered her children, she did it in a planned way, and she now is exonerated by reason of "she's not right upstairs".
Get a grip.
Did you think about murdering your child?!? If you did, then you had/have a much bigger problem than depression!
You either have the capacity in you to murder someone or you don't. It's that simple.
I have suffered from severe clinical depression, too. Yes, I had could not function normally and I acted irrationally and my life fell apart before my eyes, but I never intentionally tried to harm anyone because I did not have that capability in me to begin with.
If she had accidently killed a child, for example, by putting them in the bathtub and leaving them, then this would be a whole nother discussion, but she planned out their deaths. She held a child down under the water until they died right in front of her eyes and then she reached for another child and did the same thing again.
Wow. Not that I can make you hate any more than you already do, but she murdered her 5 children, not 3 children as you stated. Perhaps you are confusing her with someone else? Yes, anyone who murders others and especially anyone who murders children is indeed insane. However, the only hope for these children were the sane people in their life who could have saved them. Their mother was crazy and should not have been responsible for their lives.
Please cease harassing me with your insults, I've had quite enough. I am no longer interested in anything you have to say.
Don't worry, that won't happen.
Don't worry, that won't happen.
No hospital official wants to take flack from the public for letting Andrea out. Not only that, in her case, she really IS sick, and none of those doctors knows the cure. She won't see free air any time soon - I don't think ever. It's too politically sensitive to the officials doing the freeing. They don't like criticism and scrutiny. I doubt she will even be freed if she DOES get well, which is unlikely anyway.
I want to come live in your universe.
...unfortunately you have not studied psychological disorders not have any experience in that realm.... if you did, you'd find that severe....and I mean severe psychosis is a terrible terrible thing.....you can know something may be wrong...but so compelled to commit that act that it is impossible for you to do otherwise....read some of the posts from some experts here.....
Definitely! babies are seen by many as an inconvenience. It goes against human nature to want to harm your child. Those are the times we are living in.
So your statement that she'll never get out is fluff and nothing based upon the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure which is the controlling authority?....
Quite possible.
It is also quite possible that she is insane, based on biological factors.
I simply don't know.
I said the "facts as presented in the case by the lawyers", and you failed to recognize the FACT that she was on trial for only THREE of the childrens' deaths. Yes, there were 5 dead, but the "facts" you so preciously are concerned with are that she was found "not guilty by reason of insanity" of THREE murders.
Now, as far as her being releases as "cured" in a matter a few years, no question........
.....yes....she most likely will not recover from this type of psychosis...and yes...I have a graduate degree in Psychology....she most likely will die with it....and never get out....in these types of cases the brains chemistry and neurological functioning has been severely rewired and will need drug intervention to retard the chemical and electrical imbalance that torments this woman
ACTING!!!
There is a very clear distinction; the Commandment referred to murder. Conversely, there was an unequivocal requirement that murderers were to be executed as a necessary function of the government.
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