BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Dude that ain't right...
This is a very in-neresting thread, and my opinions of Yates and Yates have wished and washed a couple times back and forth while I've been sitting here reading it instead of doing work...
Most folks are calling for hubby's head on a platter, him being the spawn of Satan and whatnot... I don't think the man was self-purposely malicious; I think he was misguided (with horribly tragic consequences...) Many folks are also saying Andrea had an obligation to get out of what she couldn't deal with-- easy for people to say who haven't lived with the sort of mentality the Yates subscribed to. Everyone lives in his own birdcage and theirs was fairly different from mainstream, to say the least-- folks say "well why didn't she do this? why didn't she do that?" First she was f-ed in the head, and second it probably genuinely never occurred to her.
I'm speculating that even taking his wife to seek professional psychiatric help was a hard step for Yates, since many of the more conservative religious see mental illness as a spiritual, not physical, incapacitation-- a serious character flaw, perhaps even attributable to demon possession.
Unfortunate case all around. I don't think it really much matters, except as a social/legal statement, whether Andrea Yates is put to death or not because she is already dead inside, as somebody else said above... As far as punishing Mr. Yates, I speculate that he probably passed into his own private living hell a long time ago.