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
Thanks.....I wrote to your regular email....and understand your problem...pls though....pls be careful with diagnosing others...give them info by all means...and I am not all that familiar with teh Vestibular part though I know that any myoclonic condition is basically like mini seizures of motor neurons...but you are always aware unlike a normal seizure......it is a fairly rare condition as most people can adopt to their sensory environment......but there can be a host of etiologic reasons for one's symptoms...
Luke 21 meet Luke 8 v26-36.
I am careful. But I have seen too many persons done this way. I had a cousin done this way all he had was Inner Ear problems and the doctors prescribed the SSRI's. An old timer retired doctor diagnosed his problem finally by asking about his medical history including the childhood tubes in his ears and his tour of Nam where hearing was damaged. The doctors aren't trying to pin point cause they are only treating text book symptoms and thats's wreaking havoc on persons.
I'll tell you the truth I was given Paxil and it blocked my bladder. That is what I meant Dysreflexia. It is a condition more associated with spinal cord patients. It can be deadly in fact it is deadly unless the cause is eliminated within minutes in many cases. I doubt 1 in 10,000 patients know that it can block their bladder and this applies only to males BTW. The doctor who gave it to me didn't know it would do that. I thought it was part of what ever was wrong with me. See the danger? Patient education is everything.
The person I gave advice too on a thread in the e-mail we exchanged was correct also. I said get to an E.R. ASAP. I'm not diagnosing them I'm telling them of some common mis-diagnoses among the G.A.D. and ADD ADHD disorders. How else can the epidemics be explained :>} The conditions have been among us but not the technology to trigger the disorders? In that respect Levinson 25 year ago was closer to the truth than many in the mental healh field today.
I'm jealous....I'm still waiting for the line up for BayFest in October....rumor is that he's going to be here...Bo Bice was last year....
Most of the jury foreman's comments on GMA this morning focused on the "knowing right from wrong" stipulation in the Texas penal code for legal definitions of sanity/insanity.
Unfortunately, he didn't go into the remarks he made yesterday, which to me were a lot more valuable to the public - when he said 5 of them argued about the wording, wanting it to be "Guilty but Insane," as I posted yesterday.
And of course, two out of the three morning news programs I tuned in to this morning announced it the same way as our local Houston news did: "Not Guilty." Period. Grrr. Some went as far as saying she was "acquitted" and she was "found innocent."
This is just so wrong, so wrong. The justice system's "cred" is hanging by a thread these days, anyway, so to have this piled on top just makes me sick.
I did like some people's interpretation that terrorists could use the same defense that got Andrea "acquitted" and also get the same outcome.
She believed that what she was doing was right and based it on her skewed belief system, just as the Muslim terrorists say they do. In her delusions, which unfortunately were often Bible-centered (a point that just about everybody wants to sidestep, for a variety of reasons), she truly believed that killing her children would put them on the expressway to heaven.
She *knew* that in the physical world, the secular world, this was a crime, but she believed that in the spiritual realm, where she *thought* she was living in her isolation, with the devil as her boss, their deaths would be the ultimate sacrifice, saving the children from hell or purgatory or a life of problems or tragedies.
Come to think of it, I remember another mother of a murdered child saying this - that her young daughter would never have to suffer from cancer or many other problems of earthly living. That mother never said a word about missed graduations or proms or weddings or grandbabies - only the negative things that the child was "saved" from.
Somehow, somewhere, certain personality types fixate on those ideas. When they have a goal in mind like that, which they are convinced is "pure" and will somehow please God - not the devil - give them enough opportunity and means and they will follow through with it, or die trying.
However, the only time Andrea has shown an inclination to harm herself was last year (or was it early this year?) when she began really getting glimpses of reality back, after years of treatment at the prison mental hospital in Rusk. They rushed her to a hospital in Galveston and have since kept her wrapped up in cotton batting to prevent another psychotic break.
Yeesh, nobody cares if the rest of us go a little nuts over everyday life, but our taxes go to keep "poor little Andrea Pia" from flipping out yet again - even though she's not where she could hurt anyone else or even herself.
I'm not happy with this verdict and I had not heard that Rosenthal had made his decision already not to ever prosecute for the other two children. Last night he was undecided. I was hanging my hopes on that and intended to send some prayers that direction. *sigh*
Well, just looked up Andrea's bout of suicidal ideation that was made public. In my post, I said I thought it was last year or early this year - ha ha on me.
She stopped eating and lost 20 pounds and they had to put her in the hospital in Galveston. It was exactly 2 years ago last week, in July 2004. *time flies but I'm not having fun*
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/insanity/1.html
... which gives statistics as to just how rarely this defense works.
Thanks, I have read it before. Will discuss another time when I'm not so rushed as right now.
I never said I loved the murderer.
I think there is a reasonable chance that she was insane.
You have a need to avenge inside yourself that I just don't have.
Wasn't bringing God into the picture. He may forgive murder, but there is still a debt to be paid. The karmic seeds planted by such an action will come to fruition in either this life or the next.
I wonder, are insane people destined to be lost? How can they avoid karmic debt?
I thought this was Buddhist hell.
You are right. I feel the need to avenge the taking of five innocent lives by the one person who ought to have given her own life to protect theirs.
Of course the woman is to blame but insane people do not have adequately functioning brains. Some people have bad hearts, bad stomachs - others have brains that malfunction.
In a case with the mentally defective, the sane people around her - like a husband - have to be the ones to pick up the slack and protect the children - not increase the onslaught on the ill one.
So, since he chose to ignore the dangers, chose to ignore the doctors and continue with his view of his rights and desires - he is at fault for NOT protecting the children in her care.
First of all, you know nothing about this situation other than what you read in the papers so you are in no position to judge the actions of the father who could not have known his wife would drown all their children. You can't read his mind. So to blame him with the benefit of hindsight is shallow reasoning.
Probably all murderers have inadequate brain functions to some extent or they wouldn't kill innocent people. Andrea rationalized she was helping her children by killing them. We have liberal people almost as warped in how they reason and they are not considered legally insane.
Since we can't read their minds how are we as a society to deal with murderers? The only rational way is to execute murderers and let God sort it all out.
Well, get the laws changed then.
Seems you are really super protective of the husband. Wonder why he is to have no blame, wonder why the one committing the murders is the only one who had the responsibility for those children.
Guess if a woman has a heart attack, you would expect her to still clean, care for the children and cook.
Do you say there are no mental problems in society? If so, why are the deranged in institutions? Why aren't they in the work force earning their way? If the brain can have no damage then put them all to work, let them all take care of their families, let them run the country.
Afterall, there are no disfunctioning brains, they are just using that as an excuse.
Yates being pronounced not guilty represents a flaw in judicial logic, IMHO. There should be in our system of justice the possibility of finding an accused "guilty, but not culpable by reason of insanity."
Incidentally, I belive criminal law draws a distinction between "not guilty" and "innocent." This was brought out, as I recall, in the instance of OJ, who was found "not guilty" but not "innocent," and presumably to this very day continues his search for the "real killer." (I suspect he shaves without using a mirror).
Perhaps a real lawyer would care to comment on this.
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