Just In - Yates Guilty - All Counts

Great Debates
21

How did any of this lead her to kill her children? Being suicidal, being self-destructive, having post-partum depression… I could see Rusty being unsurprised if he came home to find his wife dead. But how did suicidal tendencies lead to homicidal tendencies?

Second, addressed to the public in general, what kind of defense is “As a mother myself, I can tell you that no mother would ever do that to her children unless she were insane”? By that definition, a mother killing her children is always innocent by reason of insanity. And I suppose you could extend that to a father killing his children, a brother committing fratricide, a daughter committing patricide… you get the point. Just because you (general you, not anyone in particular) would never drown your five children unless you were bonkers doesn’t mean that it’s inconceivable for others to do so.

And I’ve got to go with zev as far as Rusty’s controllingness. Unless he raped her to have that fifth child, it was a consentual decision, right? I know, he told her what to do, blah blah blah. It’s called a door, maybe she should have learned to use it. It’s called divorce, it’s in the Field Manual, right under “What to do if your husband treats you like shit.”

I’m not saying I don’t feel pity for the poor woman. But to absolve her from all responsibility? What kind of solution is that?

Quix

22

is the inability to distinguish right from wrong. The only relevant question was whether or not Andrea Yates could make that distinction at the time she committed the murders. Clearly the woman has psychological problems. These were exacerbated by postpartum depression. But, could she tell right from wrong?
I have a friend named Andrew. He believes himself to be a werewolf(In his defense no one has ever really proven he isn’t). He suffered head trauma when struck by a car as a child. He woofs instead saying hello. He is not, however, legally insane. Strange though he may be, he knows right from wrong.BTW This is not a hypothetical. If Andrew happens to read this, he should call me. I miss him ever since he move to California.

  I had to drop out of college when my medication stopped working.  At present, I've been receiving disability benefits for several years. I suffer from ADD, OCD, one or two anxiety disorders and chronic, reccuring depression. At times, I may stay in bed for days-not eating, or bathing, only getting out of bed to head for the bathroom. I am legally disabled. But, not legally insane. I realize that although finding the head of my HMO and torturing them to death would be rather satisfying, it would be wrong.

Mental illness does not equate with legal insanity. Yates was ill and suffering. She was depressed and had a history of suicide attempts. She hallucinated. But still the only question the jury had to decide was whether she could tell right from wrong.

23

I don’t think anyone is saying that it would have lead her to kill her children. They’re saying she wasn’t the most responsible person to be taking care of them.

Even if she hadn’t been homicidal, and only suicidal, what would that be like, being left alone with a mother who tries to kill herself? That wouldn’t be bad enough?

24

In lieu of posting a Pit thread or the very pissy three paragraphs that I just deleted: What Milossarian said.

Thank you, Milo. You are a gentleman where I would have wished to say very, very bad things about somebody else in an inappropriate forum.

25

One thing I find disturbing about high profile cases like this one is the tendency of people to assume a right to tell other states or other nations what their laws should be.

Whether I agree with the Texas laws relating to insanity or not (and I don’t), whether I agree with the death penalty or not (and I don’t), Yates was tried under the current laws of Texas - laws which are presumably acceptable to the majority of voting Texans.

Perhaps this case will lead to a review of Texan laws relating to insanity, and perhaps it will not - either outcome will reflect the will of the voters of Texas, and that is democracy in action.

26

It’s a shame one can’t be declared insane and guilty, as that is obviously what she is.

I think she’s guilty, naturally. But I don’t think she should get the death penalty. (Mind you, I don’t think anyone should, but that’s another debate altogether).

I think she needs to be in an institution for the criminally insane-is there such a thing in Texas?

And by God, SOMEONE do something about Russell Yates-the man is a menace to decent men everywhere.

27

Well, that certainly wouldn’t be pleasant, but the children would still be alive.

Incidentally, Guin, why is it that Rusty has (in your eyes, at least, and from where I’m sitting) no right to mourn the loss of his children? To hear your characterization of him, he’s the second coming of John Wayne Gacy. I haven’t been following this case as much as some people, but if you’ve got the time, could you enumerate the reasons that Rusty is a “menace to decent men everywhere”? Also, to save me (and others) some time, while making up your list, make a crude guess at the amount of blame that he has? For example, “Item 1–he only gave his wife 3 hours of free time a week. Rusty’s blame: 75%. That’s pretty barbaric of him, but Andrea could have gone against his will.” That sort of thing.

Or don’t. Doesn’t make much difference to me. But it seems if you’re going to make such scathing indictments, you should have some sort of codified thought process. ::shrug::

28

Even if Rusty didn’t believe she would hurt the children (and I believe that at least one of the doctors told him that it was a risk),he knew she might try to hurt herself,and whether the children were physically hurt in the process would depend on the method she chose,wouldn’t it? BTW she wasn’t diagnosed with post-partum depression- it was post-partum depression with psychosis-and the psychosis makes a very big difference in the risk.

Doreen

29

Well said Milo.

There are thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of women who suffer from post-partum depression. Even more from severe clinical depression. Yet somehow these women get up every day and fight through it, without chasing down their kids and forcing their little heads into the bathtub and holding them down for 3 minutes while they slowly drown to death. She knew that what she did was wrong, and I have no problem with the verdict.

30

Yates hasn’t been sentenced to death; she’s been convicted of capital murder. Do you think that she should have been charged with a different crime?

I know what you mean. I narrowly avoided a four horse pile-up on the way into work today. I shot the guy who caused it. Hey, it’s Texas, after all. The Sheriff rode up after hearing the commotion. He deputized me cause the guy had it coming. Hey, it’s Texas, after all.

Oh Stoid, you might hear that the court in Yates’ case is taking the day off to allow for preparations for the death penalty case. Since you don’t seem all that familiar with how things work in Texas, you should know that it means that the jury asked for a day to find a good hanging tree. Hey, it’s Texas, after all.

31

Okay, Stoid. Here’s the jury:

From The Houston Chronicle:

· Juror 1 – A married woman with a 3-year-old daughter. She works at a state-funded private foundation that places foster children. She has a degree in psychology.
· Juror 2 – A married woman with no children. She also has a psychology degree but works as an office administrator at a Houston law firm.
· Juror 3 – A divorced mother of two adult children who works as a director of plant operations. Before her divorce, she and her husband underwent marriage counseling.
· Juror 4 – A 22-year-old woman who lives with her parents and younger brother. She works as a receptionist and attends classes on computer networking.
· Juror 5 – A male engineer who has been married 15 years and has no children. His wife has sought help from a psychotherapist for depression.
· Juror 6 – A 35-year-old woman who has been married 17 years and has two children, ages 10 and 13. She once worked as a legal secretary and is a native of South Carolina.
· Juror 7 – A 33-year-old salesman whose wife works for a law firm that handles foreclosures. He has no children and has spoken openly about being a recovering alcoholic.
· Juror 8 – A man who enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on his 17th birthday and served four years. He is now a construction maintenance worker and has at least one grown child.
· Juror 9 – A sixth-grade math teacher at a junior high school in the Houston Independent School District. He has been married since 1988 and is the father of a 7-year-old daughter.
· Juror 10 – A woman who works as an air-conditioning technician for the Fort Bend Independent School District. She has at least one child.
· Juror 11 – A married Clear Lake woman with two children, 15 and 18. She is a sixth-grade language arts teacher at a magnet school for gifted and talented children.
· Juror 12 – The married mother of an adult son. She has worked 16 years as a laboratory technician for a beer company and is an active union member.
Eight women, four men. Two with degrees in psychology, one whose wife was treated for depression.

If you wish to continue to infer that these people are small-minded bigots, you can do so. But the small-minded bigotry you reveal is your own.

32

Nit pick-it was post-partum psychosis. There is a huge difference.

Why do I find him a menace? Perhaps I jumped the gun a bit, but I find his defense of their actions-that it was okay for them to have more children-even though they were warned against it by doctors, to be pretty damn sleazy. The fact that he seems to have the attitude that she should have just “snapped out of it.”

And isn’t he saying that given the chance, he’d have more kids with her?

Why, if he knew she was suicidal, depressed, and mentally ill, did he leave her home alone with the children? Yes, she did choose her own path-however, keep in mind that she was suffering from severe psychosis, which would effect her ability to do so. At the very least, he could have had someone come in to help her-a neighbor, fellow church goer, a relative? No, he isolates his family from society.

33

Must agree with Guin on the distinction–both medical and (more importantly) legal–between depression and psychosis. In layman’s terms psychosis is a break with reality which, by definition, makes the distinction between right and wrong problematic if not altogether impossible.

There is a lot to be said about Texas’s especially punitive record on capital crimes, and (more to the point) its relatively narrow definition of the insanity plea. I hope it doesn’t need saying that to criticize Texas’s record on these matters isn’t to criticize Texans. Who in the US doesn’t have a friend or a relative who lives in Texas? And who is naive enough to believe that individual Texans are responsible for criminal statutes, some of which were written before today’s Texans were born? In any case, I don’t take the thrust of this thread to be a referendum on Texas (though I do think a thread on the state of criminal “justice” in Texas would be fair game for Great Debates).

More to the point then. I don’t see this as about the jury’s “bigotry.” I see this as about (as has been said in the New York Times and elsewhere) the understanding of serious mental illness. To understand serious mental illness is not to exonerate horrific acts; but to recognize that horrific acts involving serious mental illness are of a different nature and, arguably, require a different social response.

As I see it, Yates had a history psychosis that made her insanity plea warranted. The acts themselves–the very dispassionate and rationalized way in which she drowned the children–illustrate her psychosis rather than otherwise. Laymen tend to think of insanity as a kind of frenzied state of losing one’s mind; but that’s not what psychosis is about. Yates was doomed, as I see it, not because she was sane, but because Texas law presents a special burden to the insanity plea and–just as important–because people are always scared when a woman kills her children. They believe, in other words, that the only way to deter such unthinkable acts is by responding punitively.

The question of the husband’s responsibility is somewhat different. Obviously, he shouldn’t be liable to the same charge as the killer herself. But there is a problem with a society that, on the one hand, feels it must harshly punish psychotic women who kill their children, while exonerating complicit husbands entirely. This is all to do with a double standard which is all too familiar. From a deterrent point of view it makes no sense at all. If the message is that Mrs. Yates must die or receive life-long imprisonment as though she were sane, the message should also be that the Mr. Yateses of the world must not entrust their ever-expanding families to the care of suicidal and psychotic women, living by themselves, not even taking their medication. Even if Texas law doesn’t, as it appears, faciliate the husband’s being indicted, tried and punished, the same people who cry out to penalize Andrea for her acts should, at the very least. decry her husband’s monstrous and/or monstrously stupid negligence.

34

Oh, and by the way, Milo, which Nation article on Andrea Yates are you referring to above? I’m a regular subscriber and haven’t seen anything in the Nation thus far on the matter of Yates. Care to provide a cite for us?

35

Mandelstam, that post was well reasoned, temperate and completely lacked any wounded and self-righteous chastisement of another poster.
Are you sure it belongs in this thread?

36

Here in Illinois, the defendant also bears the burden of proving that she was insane at the time of the offense. If the State has proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant has to prove “at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or mental defect, she lacks subtantial capacity to appreciate the criminality of her conduct,” and has to prove it by clear and convincing evidence. It sounds quite a bit like the standard in Texas also.

However, Illinois has a kind of middle ground, where a defendant can plead or be found “Guilty but Mentally Ill.” They define mentally ill as: “a substantial disorder of thought, mood, or behavior which afflicted a person at the time of the commission of the offense and which impaired that person’s judgment, but not to the extent that she is unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her behavior.” If a defendant pleads, or is found guilty but mentally ill, the judge conducts a sentencing hearing and can sentence the defendant to any prison sentence allowable under the charge. The defendant is then periodically checked by the Department of Corrections concerning the welfare of the defendant and they have the option to transfer the defendant to the Department of Mental Health for inpatient mental health treatment, if warranted.

This may be a little middle ground that people are looking for. Under this system, the child-killer Yates could have been found Guilty but Mentally Ill.

37

It never ceases to amaze me how elaborately people around here can embroider, misconstrue and sometimes even hullucinate things I’ve said.

I’d like to join Xenophon in admiring Mandelstam’s always delightful and clear understanding of, well, just about everything.
stoid

38

Bullshit. One person, and one person alone, held those children under water until they died.

It’s remarkable how, when women commit filicide, they must be insane, but when men do it, they are obviously just murderers. Even when the husband didn’t commit any crime himself, people still point fingers and claim guilt.

Women that kill their children are hospitalized 68% of the time, while men are only hospitalized 14% of the time. On the other hand, men guilty of the same crime are imprisoned or executed 72% of the time, compared to 27% for women. Interesting disparity.

You can read the cite here. It is a fairly interesting article on Slate.

With these numbers, it would be easy to see how, were the situation reversed, the wife would be considered a victim as well, instead of “complicit”.

It never ceases to amaze me how you can post something inflamatory, then later claim you were misinterpreted. You’ve almost got it down to an art form.

39

So, based on a little bit of information, people made misinterpretations.

One wonders if that has any parallel to a trial, where a jury gets to hear all the evidence presented before they make a decision and the rest of us only get a little bit of information.

Probably that’s just another mistaken view on my part.

40

The most interesting thing about the article is its internal inconsistency. It seems to begin with the thesis that men are treated unfairly and that sympathy towards mothers is unjustified. Then it goes on to outline concrete differences that demonstrate a clear basis for the disparity without ever acknowledging that a connection might exist. Instead it drifts over to an argument that they are all the same because children are viewed as maternal property. Apparently this central factor is sufficient to make them all the same in spite of everything else being different.