People hospitalized for insanity after committing terrible crimes are sometimes let go. Remember John Hinckley, Jr?
Also if you think you can teach me something about religion Guinastasia feel free to open a new thread. Come to think of it, I bet religion had something to do with the murders of her children. What were their names again? Perhaps it even had something to do with her reading in the bible about god ordering a man to kill his own son as a test of his faith.
Unless your broken arm killed five children, you have nothing to worry about. 
Perhaps, but it’s a fine line. Some psychopaths are so skilled at manipulating people, they’re able to convince any random shrink that they suffer from psychosis…or that they’re normal, or whatever. And some psychotic people are so out of control, so possessed by demons, that they’re perceived by others as being capable of control, but instead they choose to act like assholes. How can anyone tell the difference?
I don’t have empathy for Andrea Yates, mostly because I’m a guy and have never suffered from PPD, so it’s impossible for me to get inside her mind and understand why she would actually kill her own children. Perhaps, if she kept a blog (like some heinous criminals these days do) I’d be able to comprehend her motivations. However, that doesn’t matter. Everything boils down to cause & effect, action & consequences. Her actions broke the social contract, and as a result she needs to be put out to pasture…not as punishment, not for justice, not even to protect society. That’s just the way it is.
Frankly, I see no use in keeping Yates alive – even if she responds to treatment, and comes to terms with who she is and what she did, what’s the point? She’ll never be allowed back into society again, she’s too famous. And I question the whole moral system that considers life in prison (or mental hospital, same difference) as more “humane” than the death penalty. Most people, I presume, would eagerly choose death over life in a box.
Dude, have you been eating stupid food, or what?
You apparently don’t know anything about insanity whatsoever, or about the insanity plead in a courtcase.
The insanity plead isn’t used a lot, and hardly ever gets accepted.
“Being crazy” normally doesn’t get you out of jail.
A person suffering from the psychological damage that this lady was, is only a danger to herself and her children.
That is something completely different from a sociopathic killer.
It’s not a fine line at all. They’re two distinctly different and unrelated clinical phenomena. It’s not a spectrum of “crazy” where psychopaths are a “little bit crazy” and psychotics are “a lot crazy.” Psychopaths are not mentally ill at all in that it is not a condition which interferes with the subject’s perception of reality. It’s also not a diagnosis which meets the legal definition of “insanity” required for a defense against criminal charges. Psychosis arises from severe neurological disorders which prevent the subject from being able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy or delusion. Psychotics have no ability to interact with reality in a normal way because they don’t know what is real and what isn’t. Some psychosis can be caused by genetic factors (schizophrenia) or sometimes by other factors (drugs, brain trauma, brain tumors) but the bottom line is that they are operating with a defective brain chemistry which does not allow them to make rational choices. They operate according to what they think is real, not what is real.
Can mere psychopaths attempt to fool people into thinking they have a condition which causes psychosis? Sure, they can try, but their odds of fooling a psychiatrist are pretty low. Psychotic conditions are not just diagnosed by talking to to the subject but also by neurological testing, brain scans an a battery of other clinical criteria which control for deception. Psychosis is a symptom of a physiological disorder and physiological disorders can be tested for without regard to the self-reports or “acting” by the subject. Most of them wouldn’t know the right things to say or do anyway.
She wasn’t just diagnosed with PPD but also with Post-Partum PSYCHOSIS which is a totally different ball game. It means that, through no choice or fault of her own, she was no longer able to accurately perceive reality. Just because you don’t understand it is not a reason to dismiss it as quackery.
A social contract requires that each individual who signs it be able to to comprehend it and have some choice about following it.
Hinckley has not been released.
Strike 2.
We had a chance to rectify the error made in the first trial. Didn’t happen.
She should have gotten the needle.
Indeed I do. Apparently you don’t, because Hinckley’s still in custody.
:rolleyes:
Ol’ Rusty needs a bullet IMO. And, depsite the fact that I agree with the outcome, I still have no compassion at all for Yates. I wish I could, but I can’t muster it.
I remember Hinkley petitioning for an unsupervised parental visit. I think that it was refused. Does anyone know?
According to CNN (12/05), Hinckley does get unsupervised visits with his parents, with some restrictions.
It’s unfair to compare Hinckley to Yates anyway, because Hinckley never successfully killed anyone. (Come to think…if he’d been found guilty of attempted murder, he’d almost certainly be a free man now!)
I wonder, KGS, are you seriously proposing it as a possibility that Yates just decided to kill her children for some reason, made no effort to escape or deny having killed them, then managed to successfully fake being mentally ill, and is now congratulating herself for the success of her brilliant ploy, which has enabled her to get off scot free, except for almost certainly being locked up for the rest of her life? Does that *really * seem likely to you?
Dio, I certainly agree that the odds of anyone successfully faking psychosis are low, but you are mistaken in thinking that “brain scans” or any other objective clinical criteria are currently in use; that is still very experimental. But someone attempting to fake it would definitely have to go to a great deal of time and effort to learn how to successfully fool the various psychological tests that would be administered; not impossible, but certainly much more difficult than simply figuring out how to commit your murderswithout getting caught in the first place! And I should also point out to KGS that anyone who has committed a crime as serious as Yates’ is not going to have to fool just “some random shrink”, but a series of psychiatrists with extensive training and experience in forensic evaluations.
I generally believe strongly that people should not be held criminally responsible for actions taken while psychotic (and I think it is a shame that Andrea Yates probably never will be released, even though there is no reason to believe her psychosis will ever recur as long as she avoids having more children), but I found
AHunter3 's post extremely thought-provoking and am sorry that it seems to have been ignored. I, however, would need to see some evidence that abuse of the insanity defense is a widespread problem, or that publicized cases of the use of this defense negatively impact public perceptions of the mentally ill, before I would consider revising my opinion that the insanity defense is a reasonable and morally appropriate feature of the criminal justice system.
To keep some perspective, note that the insanity defense is raised in less than one percent of all criminal proceedings, is successful in only about one-quarter of those instances, and in 80% of the cases where it is successful, the case does not go to trial because the prosecution agrees not to contest the finding of insanity. Here is the American Psychiatric Association’s FAQ sheet on the insanity defense.
I note, incidentally, that in the state of Oregon, people found “guilty but insane” are placed under psychiatric supervision for a time not greater than the maximum sentence they could have received for their crime; they may be released to outpatient treatment if appropriate, but have no right to judicial appeal if their state-appointed psychiatrists decide to put them back into the hospital. This link has details and a general discussion of the issue.
Yep. Absolutely, because if the government put Yates to death, most or all of the following things would be sure to happen:
We’d show that we all saw through her clever ploy to rid herself of ther children without penalty, and without the other, of, say giving them up for adoption
Her children would immediately spring back to life
If they didn’t happen to spring back to life, killing their mother would at least balance the scales
Killing her would teach other mothers not to think they can get away with going crazy and killing their childen
Every one of us would save all kinds of tax money over the next thirty years or so.
Glad you’re here to cut through the fog surrounding this issue.
Whoops. “without the hassle, of,…”
No, I think Yates was truly insane. You can’t fake that kind of insanity.
My point is, it doesn’t matter why she did it. Criminals come up with all sorts of crazy mental excuses to justify their crimes, like the “gay panic” defense used by the murderers of Matthew Sheppard. In a way, they have a point – because when you think about it, very few of us have ANY control over our thoughts & actions. We may have the “illusion” of being in control, but really it all boils down to a bunch of unconscious programs in the brain. And most of us are just lucky to be programmed in a socially acceptable way.
Well…OK. I guess we have arrived at the “free will vs. determinism” debate, which I don’t hold out much hope for changing anyone’s mind on. Personally, my unconscious programs lead me to feel that some people have radically less control over our thoughts and actions than others, and that those who are obviously way over on the wrong side of the bell curve should be treated in a way that recognizes their disability and does not assign moral responsibility where it cannot reasonably be assigned.
In addition to the recent supervised visits posted by KGS, Hinckley was also given unsupervised releases in 2000. Those privileges had to be revoked as he immediately went back to collecting material about Jodie Foster again. I’m sure that made her feel real safe. :rolleyes:
Exactly.
I’d think drowning your offspring removes you from the gene pool pretty effectively.
The way I heard it, she didn’t forget to take her pills - her asshole husband threw them out.
It’s stuff like that what makes some of us say he’s as guilty as her.
Andrea Yates showed severe symptoms of mental problems. Suicide attempts. Post-partum psychosis. When she was undergoing treatment and on medication she, apparently, showed significant improvement. Among other things, given her reaction to pregnancy and birth (not to mention the medication she was on having side effects on a fetus) she was told to never produce more children, for the sake of her health. Her husband pulled her out of treatment, metaphorically flushed her medicine down the toilet, and impregnated her. Then left her alone, despite worsening symptoms, with no support or relief in raising the brood of children (Which, if I recall, were about a year apart, except for one, two year gap where she was actually getting some proper care).
This is somewhat like deprieving an epileptic of their anti-seizure medicine, then beating them severely when they have a fit, fall down, and break stuff. The epileptic is the agent that does the breaking, but the person deprieving them of the medication that would prevent or mitigate a seizure bears some of the blame here.
Andrea Yates probably shouldn’t have been producing children, and probably should have had close supervision when raising the children she had, if she was a fit mother at all. However, the asshole she was married to valued producing offspring about the mental and physical health of his wife. If she had never had children she would still have had mental illness, but likely would never have killed anyone. If she had had proper treatment and support, she might have been able to be a good mother to the children she had… provided she didn’t have any more. But like I said, the husband thought baby-producing was the most important thing.
Hinckley was not let go - he was, after years of treatment and good behavior, allowed passes to go off the grounds and visit people like family under controlled conditions
Chad, find something you know something about to talk about.
People of sane mind do not kill their children.
I feel nothing but sorrow for Andrea Yates having to live with the memory of murdering her children. I hope she gets adequate psychiatric support in her remaining years. I hope she can forgive herself, because it seems damned sure that the rest of the world will never forgive her for her sins.