Why Andrea Yates Was Found Not Guilty

[WaTcHeR]

The reason Andrea Yates was found not guilty is because the "jury" did what they thought was "best." not what the "law" was telling them to do.

This is a right every jury has! Read more about it here:
flyservers.registerfly.com/members5/policecrime.com/jury_duty.html

[Shuftin]

July 26, 2006

A Harris County jury has found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity during her second capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of her children in the family's bathtub in 2001.

The verdict upholding Yates' insanity defense comes after the jury deliberated more than 12 hours over three days. The decision also underscores the emotional debate on mental illness within the criminal justice system since Yates' first trial in 2002.

"It's a shame it took us this long to get the right verdict,'' said Wendell Odom, one of Yates' attorneys.

Yates appeared shocked and sat staring wide-eyed with her lips slightly parted as State District Judge Belinda Hill asked each juror individually shortly after noon today whether they agreed with the verdict.

The acquittal in Yates' second capital murder trial followed nearly a month's worth of exhaustive testimony, capped by four hours of emotional closing arguments Monday, during which Yates broke down in tears and her former husband, Russell Yates, abruptly left the courtroom.

The jury's verdict means Yates, 42, will be sent to a state mental hospital for treatment, rather than be sentenced to life in prison. Yates and attorneys will return to Judge Belinda Hill's courtroom at 10 a.m. Thursday for a hearing, formalizing the details of Yates' hospitalization. She will go to a maximum security hospital initially.

"I just want to get her back home to Rusk,'' said George Parnham, Yates' lead attorney, in reference to the hospital where Yates had been receiving care before the start of her second trial.

The children's father said outside the courtroom the jury had reached the right conclusion.

"The jury looked past what happened and looked at why it happened,'' Rusty Yates told reporters outside the courthouse. "Prosecutors had the truth of the first day and stopped there. Yes, she was psychotic. That's the whole truth.''

Rusty Yates divorced Andrea Yates after the children's June 2001 deaths and recently remarried. He said they are still "friends'' and reminisce about the children.

"This is about Andrea's quality of life for the balance of her life.''

Yates was critical of the prosecution and the amount of money spent by the state in trying his ex-wife since he says she was clearly "psychotic," when she killed the children. "This could have all been avoided," he said.

Shortly before 10:30 this morning, the jury had sent a note requesting exhibits showing a family portrait and a photo of the children before their deaths.

Over the past two days, the jury appeared to focus on medical expert testimony from both prosecution and defense witnesses.

Tuesday, they asked to see video tapes mental-health experts made of their interviews with Yates after the killings as well as testimony from Park Dietz, a prosecution expert witness, about Yates' statements regarding Satan's presence.

It is unknown how long Yates will be hospitalized, but she will be subject to periodic reviews by state District Judge Belinda Hill's court.

The trial was the second time Yates had faced a jury. She was convicted in 2002 of the crime and sentenced to life in prison, but an appeals court last year threw out that conviction based on a forensic psychiatrist's erroneous testimony.

Yates, a former nurse and housewife with a history of psychiatric hospitalizations and suicide attempts, called police and led them to the bodies of her five children Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and 6-month-old Mary after drowning them in a bathtub at her Clear Lake home on June 20, 2001.

Defense attorneys had urged jurors to find that Yates' mental illness led to the children's deaths. Experts testifying for the defense said Yates drowned her children in an act of love to save their souls from eternal damnation.

Prosecutors did not dispute that Yates was mentally ill, but argued that her condition did not keep her from knowing right from wrong.

A death sentence could not be considered during her retrial since the first jury rejected that option four years ago.

Andrea Yates' mother was one of about 75 to 100 spectators who had filled the courtroom to hear the verdict. She quickly left the room, avoiding media and her former son son-in-law, who congratulated her.

[Shuftin]

Verdict is not the crime - Refusing to step in to avert tragedy is

While a death sentence would have been worse, Andrea Yates' sentence to life in prison is a travesty. She joins the more than 16% of inmates in the nation's jails and prisons who have a severe mental illness - a situation that results in poor or inadequate treatment and increased rates of victimization and premature death.

This is just the latest in a series of unspeakable horrors that began with Yates' descent into madness. Many want to see her punished for the horrific crimes she committed. Others plead for leniency because she was so sick. But where were they when Yates needed them most - when she was too sick to realize she needed treatment?

"That Andrea Yates will live her life confined is not a reason to rejoice. It is time for us to realize that it is just and humane to intervene long before a mother kills her children to save them from Satan - not only for the children, but for the person with the disease."

Acting to avert tragedy is harder than reacting to a verdict that did not take her illness into account. Averting tragedy is not always politically correct. It is not simple, or easy. It often requires family members to petition the court for intervention, and people who are desperately ill to be treated despite refusing treatment.

An estimated 4.5 million Americans today suffer from schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness. The National Advisory Mental Health Council estimates that 40 percent of these individuals, or 1.8 million people, are not receiving treatment on any given day.

Approximately half of those who are not being treated do not understand that they are ill. They suffer from a neurological deficit also found in cerebrovascular accidents (strokes) and with Alzheimer's disease. Such individuals consistently refuse to take medication because they do not believe they are sick. In most cases they will take medication only under some form of assisted treatment.

It is popular to spread the cheerful message that people with mental illnesses are no more dangerous than the general population. It is much harder to qualify that message with the truth - that this is only true of people with severe mental illnesses when they are undergoing treatment. When they are not, studies indicate that the risk of violence increases substantially.

In the past few weeks alone, a man off his medication for schizophrenia shot and killed people in a church in New York, a man with untreated schizophrenia in Washington state was found guilty of murdering coworkers in a delusional rage, and a man in Georgia with untreated schizophrenia attacked a little girl with a hammer.

Treatment embraced voluntarily is always preferred - but in these cases and many others, the disease may not make that possible. That Andrea Yates will live her life confined is not a reason to rejoice. It is time for us to realize that it is just and humane to intervene long before a mother kills her children to save them from Satan - not only for the children, but for the person with the disease.

[WaTcHeR]

Yates' ex-husband criticizes prosecutors

07.27.2006 - HOUSTON - Rusty Yates lashed out Thursday at prosecutors who spent five years pursuing murder charges against his ex-wife, saying they misrepresented certain details of the day Andrea Yates drowned their five children.

Rusty Yates told The Associated Press that Andrea Yates never told him, "I finally did it" in her telephone call to him after the drownings, as a Houston police officer testified during her second trial.

"It's been printed in papers as fact, and it's absolutely not true," he said. "Much of the state's case was built on lies."

A jury on Wednesday found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity in the June 2001 bathtub drownings of her children. She was retried after her 2002 murder conviction was overturned because of erroneous testimony about a nonexistent "Law & Order" television episode.

On Thursday, the 42-year-old was committed to the maximum-security North Texas State Hospital in Vernon.

Hospital officials will review her mental state and decide whether she is a danger to society. State District Judge Belinda Hill will review that report and hold a hearing within 30 days to determine if Yates should remain there or be moved to another state hospital.

During the interview, Rusty Yates said that on the day his children died, Andrea had called him and asked him to come home. When he and his mother arrived and learned from police what had happened, he reminded his mother that Andrea had filled the bathtub for no apparent reason about a month or so earlier.

"I said, `I guess she'd been thinking about this for some time and finally did it," Yates said. He said an officer must have overhead the conversation and took it out of context.

Prosecutors also seemed to change their theory about his now ex-wife's motive, Yates said.

"In the first trial, they said Andrea did this to try to get out, whatever that means, which sounded like she wasn't happy at home ... and this time they said she wanted to run off with me into the sunset," he said. "Well, which is it?

"The fact is, they spent five years and still don't have a reason why she did it because they are unwilling to look at the fact she was psychotic. That's the only reasonable explanation for her behavior."

Prosecutor Joe Owmby said Thursday the state offered no false testimony.

"I do not think about Rusty Yates; I do not want to think about Rusty Yates, and he needs to stop thinking about us," Owmby said.

Yates, an engineer at
NASA's Johnson Space Center, said he plans to visit his ex-wife regularly, but his role in her life will diminish as he moves on with his own. He remarried in March and has now has two stepsons.

"I don't forget my children, and I don't forget Andrea, but I don't dwell on it either. I try to remember my children fondly," he said. "I'm building new life ... and have a new family and am more focused on them."

For his ex-wife to ever be released from state care will require a complicated evaluation process. Experts say it can take decades before psychiatrists decide a patient is healthy enough to leave, and even then a judge can reject those findings.

Yates said he was nervous on Wednesday as he waited for the verdict. The family, which has always supported Andrea, was devastated when she was convicted at the first trial 2002, he said.

Yates had testified for the defense in that first trial, and he said Thursday he didn't know why he wasn't asked to testify again.

"In some respects," he said, "I know Andrea better than anybody."

The defense attorneys never disputed that Andrea drowned the children, but they said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and, in a delusional state, believed Satan was inside her. She believed she was trying to save the children from hell by drowning 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah, they told the jury.

"It's this simple: This lady never did anything, anything wrong in her whole life," defense attorney Wendell Odom said. "She's mentally ill. She wakes up one morning. She drowns her five kids. Come on — we all know she's insane, and it's a shame that it took us this long to finally get the right verdict."

Prosecutors had maintained that although Andrea Yates was mentally ill, she didn't meet the state's definition of insanity: being so severely mentally ill that she did not know her actions were wrong.

The foreman of the jury said Thursday that the group had "some emotional difficulty" reaching its unanimous verdict and would have had an easier time if they could have found her "guilty but insane."

Shortly before they delivered their verdict, the jurors asked to see a picture of the five young children, then sat in silence for 10 minutes — 2 minutes for each child — remembering the victims, foreman Todd Frank, a 33-year-old marketing manager with his own young son, told "Good Morning America" on Thursday.

"We understand that she knew it was legally wrong," he said. "But in her delusional mind, in her severely mentally ill mind, we believe that she thought what she did was right."

[WaTcHeR]

After 5 years preparing for a new trial and with the "state" able to use an endless amount of taxpayer dollars, while using that money on paying doctors and witnesses to testify, the prosecutors were unable to convince a jury.

After a judge told the jury to ONLY consider the facts of the case and only do what the law tells them to do, the jury turns around and ignores the judges instructions and voted with their conscience.

Not a very good day for judges and prosecutors down in Texas. The people or should I say the jury has spoken and once again judges and prosecutors are put at a lower level, under the people of the state and that's how it should be!

People don't understand that when they are serving on a jury, they have more power then any judge or even the President of the United States.