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
Right.
(that made me chuckle, but I feel weird putting a "lol" on this thread)
Question - if she had no understanding of what she was doing, why did she call the police?
Very sad
Hate to admit it, but you are right.
That and our constitution prevent our society doing anything BEFORE the tragedy. Crazy people and sexual child molesters have constitutional rights.
I have relatives with "mental illness", including one who's schizophrenic.
"Innocent by insanity" shouldn't even be an option. If you committed the crime, you're guilty. "Guilty but insane" I can understand, but you still should lock them away for life with no chance of release.
This woman could be released later. :-0
There's no doubt in my mind that some demonic spirit was present at the time, since this kind of evil is well outside the order of natural evils. I hope that doesn't make me "insane."
The fact that Yates was behaving irrationally doesn't preclude the possibility that she was behaving with malice. Evil is irrational by nature, but not all irrational acts are evil, such as a person's mistaken belief that he is the King of England.
Apparently, the jury believed that her acts fell into this latter category (irrational but not evil), but this seems to me to be impossible, since a mother's natural disposition is to care for her children. An evil force outside of the normal course of nature is a necessary to cause such a profoundly evil and disordered act.
Regardless of the jury decision, I'll be happy as long as she is confined to prison for life. I skimmed the article, and didn't see any reference to her sentence.
You don't KNOW that she "truly believed" anything, and I don't care WHAT she "truly believed", she KNEW it was wrong, she planned it, then she called the cops.
"She was/is more than PPD"
Psychotic Post Partum Depression. I researched it a bit when this tragedy first came to our attention. I was MOST interested, based on my personal, scary experience. I wanted to understand. My experience was 23 years ago, long before I had the resources of the internet at my disposal. I might mention that I have three children. I suffered not a whisper of PPD with my daughter or my younger son, just with my middle child. A bewildering illness.
What I experienced was considered "severe", but NOWHERE the magnitude of what she suffered with. Combine this extreme PPD with other mental illness, and anyone tuned into her SHOULD have heard the ticking of the time bomb, waiting to explode.
Of course she, herself, is responsible for what happened. Five beautiful, precious lives were senselessly lost. I should never have happened. My personal desire would be for lifetime incarceration for her. She took five lives, afterall. I just want her imprisoned where she can actually get mental health care.
I will be watching the news for the rest of my life, hoping NOT to read a blurb on some back page that she has been released as "cured". Mental illness as severe as I have read she suffers from, is usually a lifetime thing.
pattyjo
sw
Gradual changes are harder to spot, it's the old turn the heat up on the frog slowly thing. Think of it like aging, slowly but surely you get more aches and pains and less physically capable but until something big happens you don't really notice. The problem with insanity compared to aging is part of going nuts inhibits your ability to notice at all, your entire concept of the world filters through your brain, if there's something wrong with your brain how can you know your filtered view is way off.
You are suprised that a guy who had all his children murdered by his wife just a few years ago is still acting a bit strange?
I dunno, I'd be more creeped out if someone who had gone through that still isn't showing signs of it affecting them. For goodness sake, he's lost everything he had and everything to live for.
This is a civil suit waiting to happen. Most likely, depending on the doctor's records it will be solved before trial. The presenting issue will be whether the doctor took state of the art steps to insure his patient had the necessary care and whether the family and the patient were aware of these and cooperated to the same
Further, a hospital can make a reasonable effort to find a different place for a non-paying patient, but, again, they are not off the hook either.
I must say most physicians and hospital personnel are unaware of their true, legal and moral responsibility; hence, they are often sued for dereliction of duty or "abandonment" depending on state statutes.
She should be punished, I just don't know how as a society we deal with the these cases. I don't have the answers, I just think that this truly was a woman who was sick, and shouldn't be treated the same as Susan Smith.
The main part of the Andrea Yates story is that people do do go doctors and pay them for working on cases that they just do not understand. People are misdiagnosed and their illnesses are misunderstood.
Shall we blame Andrea Yates for being sick, or shall we blame doctors who did not serve their patient well?
Shall we blame a husband for not understanding the depth of the mental illness of of his wife?
Shall we blame society for closing the mental hospitals and making mental health care not readily available to all, giving the mentally ill a pill, and expecting them no longer to be sick, yet leaving them in the very same enviroment?
Yeah, absolves him of blame, doesn't it.
Have we ever heard him blame himself for any part of this? Did he bemoan the fact that he ignored the doctors' views? I never heard of it.
The guy is a weirdo. Any normal father would be totally destroyed that he did not see the signs and protect his children, but we don't see any of that remorse in Ol' Rusty.
Post #79 has more info. She could possibly be released at some point:
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.
According to this at least since 1581 or so.
I believe it is insane to murder people and cut up their bodies into pieces, which is what the islamic terrorists do all the time. Maybe they should just be institutionalized and have counseling.
Interesting, but I read that to mean the court has the final say so as to when she is elgible to be released upon a finding of mental competency at some later date and not by some board hearing.. Maybe I'm reading it wrong.
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