Twelve jurors delivered an awful verdict Tuesday in finding Andrea Yates guilty of capital murder.
They had little choice.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed that Yates, who drowned her five children in the family bathtub last June, had a history of severe mental illness that worsened after the birth of each child. She tried twice to commit suicide. After the two attempts, she threatened it again. She was hospitalized several times. Her husband inexplicably agreed to let her stop taking antipsychotic medication. Her psychiatrist threatened to commit her involuntarily. Yates consistently expressed fear of hurting someone.
In Texas, though, that’s no excuse.
Apparently, you have to be so off-the-charts mentally ill that you fail to recognize right from wrong. You must talk gibberish to lamp posts. You must receive messages from Jupiter through your fillings. You must flail about wildly and act like a caricature from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
That’s the insidious thing, though, about schizophrenia: Those who suffer from it may be highly intelligent and may know right from wrong. They may be able to function, even plan. The problem is in controlling their actions.
That is the second tragedy this case has brought to light: How little we understand mental illness. If we don’t see the disability the way we see wheelchairs, we tend to doubt it.
Andrea Yates knew she was violating state law. But in a mind contorted by psychosis, she thought she was following a higher one–God’s.
Yates stated after the murders she thought she was saving her children from hell and damnation because she believed she had been overtaken by Satan. If she killed little Mary, John, Luke, Paul and Noah, they would go to heaven.
Sentencing begins Thursday. One hopes the jury now will be better positioned to acknowledge the role mental illness played in this tragedy–at least better than Texas law, which no longer allows defendants to be declared not guilty by reason of insanity because they are unable to conform their conduct to the law.
Jurors will decide whether Yates should get death by lethal injection or life in prison with possibility of parole after 40 years. If they are not unanimous on the former, she will receive the latter.
One factor the jury will consider is whether Yates has any prior criminal record. She does not.
Another is whether she poses a future danger to society. Unless she has more children, she probably does not.
They also will consider mitigating factors that diminish Yates’ culpability for her crime. Even the prosecution believes she has at least one–severe mental illness.
The impulse to avenge the horrific deaths of five innocent young children is understandable. But there are cases, and this is one of them, where it is simply wrong. There will be no justice, no deterrence and no satisfaction in sentencing Andrea Yates to death.
