Andrea Yates
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Andrea Pia Yates (born July 2, 1964) is a woman from Houston, Texas, USA, who is as of 2006 currently awaiting retrial after previously being sentenced to life imprisonment for methodically drowning her five children (ages six months to seven years) in a bathtub on June 20, 2001. She was suffering from a severe case of postpartum psychosis, recurring, after having had her last baby. She immediately called 9-1-1 after the deaths and was arrested shortly thereafter.
Yates, a native Houstonian who attended Milby High School, married Russell "Rusty" Yates and moved to the Clear Lake City neighborhood in Houston. Yates had five children and had killed them several months after the birth of her final child.
Yates confessed to drowning her children and her defense asserted postpartum psychosis as the reason she committed the killings. Although all expert testimony agreed that Yates was clearly psychotic, Texas law requires that in order to successfully assert the insanity defense, the defendant must prove that he or she could not discern right from wrong at the time of the crime. In March 2002, a jury rejected the insanity defense and found Yates guilty but spared her the death penalty. The trial court sentenced Yates to life imprisonment with eligibility for parole in 40 years.
On January 6, 2005, the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the convictions because prosecution witness Dr. Park Dietz, a Califonia psychiatrist, made a factually untrue statement in his testimony. Dietz stated that shortly before the killings, an episode of Law & Order had aired featuring a woman who drowned her children being acquitted of murder by reason of insanity. It was later discovered that no such episode existed; the appellate court held that the jury may have been influenced by his false testimony and that thus a new trial would be necessary.
Some believe or believed that her husband, Russell "Rusty" Yates, an employee of the Johnson Space Center, was responsible for creating the conditions that culminated in the tragedy. Andrea's psychiatrist, Dr. Eileen Starbranch, testified that she urged the couple not to get pregnant again to avert certain future psychotic depression, but the procreative plan taught by the Yates' spiritual mentor, Michael Peter Woroniecki, a doctrine to which Rusty Yates subscribed, insisted she should continue to have "as many children as nature allows".
Andrea Yates told her jail psychiatrist, "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell." (This is consistent with Woroniecki's teachings, which are best characterized as "hellfire preaching.")
On January 9, 2006, Yates again entered pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. On February 1, 2006, she was granted release on bail on the condition that she be admitted to a mental health treatment facility. Currently, her retrial is set for June 26, 2006, 6 days after the 5-year anniversary of the deaths. The trial was re-set due to scheduling conflicts.
Her ex-husband, Russell "Rusty" Yates, remarried on March 18, 2006, two days before her first scheduled re-trial.
See also
References
- Bienstock, Mothers Who Kill Their Children and Postpartum Psychosis, (2003) Vol. 32, No. 3 Southwestern University Law Review, 451.
- Keram, The Insanity Defense and Game Theory: Reflections on Texas v.Yates, (2002) Vol. 30, No. 4 Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 470.
External links
- Andrea Yates: More To The Story Time By Timothy Roche March 18, 2002
- Court TV Examines the Yates Tragedy