In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children and horrified the nation. At trial, she pled insanity but was found guilty despite the enormous amount of accumulated evidence that she was in fact legally insane. Consider this excerpt from an article on the Yates case:
“Yates should have been an easy case for the insanity defense. She had a long, documented history of schizophrenia and postpartum depression. She had attempted suicide twice, and only weeks before she had been held in a mental hospital. Shortly before the murders, her doctor had taken her off her medication. She soon began to experience delusional communications from God telling her to kill the children to protect them. Her treating doctor at the time described her as “one of the sickest patients I’ve ever seen.”
The senseless horror of the killings strongly supported a claim of insanity. Even in our collective anger following the murders, many people knew instinctively that this mother was seriously ill. But Texas has an insanity standard shaped more by political than clinical realities. Under that standard, even Yates was found to be sane, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
(Sic) However, (she did get) another chance. (At appeal), the state’s highest court threw out her conviction and sent the case back for a new trial because of overzealous prosecutors and false testimony by the prosecution’s key expert witness, Newport Beach, Calif., psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz. This time, it is to be hoped that the trial will focus the nation’s attention on the insanity defense and how states such as Texas routinely ignore clear mental illness in their eagerness to extract popular justice.” (Turley, 2008)
At Yate’s retrial, she was found not guilty be reason of insanity. So then, in the Yates case the insanity defense failed at first, but after her successful appeal and retrial, the insanity defense DID work, and she was found legally insane at the time of the crimes.
What was different the second time around? How has the Yates decision effected the application of the insanity defense nationwide?*****
