HOUSTON, March 12 — Andrea Yates, the 37-year-old housewife who admitted she drowned her five children in the family bathtub, was convicted of murder Tuesday by a jury that rejected her claim of insanity after just three hours of deliberations. The jury will now decide whether she should be sentenced to death or life in prison without parole.

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I think the wrong person was on trial for the Yates children’s death. Their father should have been charged. He continued to increase his family size, even though he knew his wife suffered severe depressions after the birth of several of the children. She was so ill after the birth of one of the children she tried to commit suicide, had to be admitted as an inpatient to the hospital for many weeks, and placed on anti-psychotic drugs. Also on trial should have been the insurance company that decided that Andrea was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, while still very depressed and possibly delusional. I feel that her husband and her health insurance company are more responsible for the death of the Yates children than Andrea Yates is.

[ 03-13-2002: Message edited by: Vikan ]

I agree. He apparently refused to let the children go to school too. They lived in an old schoolbus. She was gravely ill too. Her act was one of despair, taking the children to a better world. His act was continuing to get her pregnant and claiming the post partum depression was making her crazy!
This is a very sad case indeed.

Most Western countries consider childbirth a time of increased vulnerability to mental illness. However, the U.S. medical system has been slow to identify these illnesses. In fact, the United States is the only Western country to incarcerate postpartum psychotic mothers who have killed their infants. These mothers are charged with homicide and incarcerated without treatment. In other countries, such as England and Italy,a woman is considered vulnerable because of childbirth with preference for psychiatric treatment.
http://www.mmhc.com/jgsm/articles/JGSM9811/spinelli.html

This case is just sad all around.
Bruyere, I was, perhaps, not paying attention(?)...but I heard nothing of them living in a school bus. I saw her husband giving an odd statement the "day after" the drownings on what I thought was the front lawn of their home?
What puzzles me is that there are so many OTHER relatives around in the courtroom. A mother who's been there the whole time, and other relatives who said such things as "If you knew her....you wouldn't have expected this to happen", and such.
I CAN understand about a controlling freak of a husband. Someone who closes his eyes or "explains away" that which he does not wish to see, that which does not fit into his "scheme of things". It's wrong...but I do understand it happens. I guess my question is Where Was Everybody Else? She was not in isolation! I liked the comment about the medical profession, as well. This was one sick woman...poor thing, really.
She was actually abandoned by every faction that could have helped her, or helped her not to do this!
The drowning of her children sounds like it was a long and labourious process. I actually think she knew it was wrong, but compelled to do it anyway.
I'm conflicted about the death penalty for her, though. I am a real red-neck about these things. I'm not against the death penalty per se, for some crimes, in some cases.
Laws are different all over. Not just countries, but different states, as well, and Texas law seems a bit complicated on this issue.
I'm still watching...and thinking....What a tragedy...

A terribly tragic outcome, you've all echoed my sentiments and I have to agree that too many people looked the other way.

I'd just like to say that Rusty Yates didn't increase his family size on his own. If Andrea didn't want anymore children she could have used birth control pills or had her tubes tied.

How insane could Andrea have been? She admitted that she waited until after Rusty left for work to kill her children, because she said she knew that he would stop her. This sounds like a pretty sane act to me, and premeditated, too.

Andrea Yates deserves the death penalty, but even if she gets life in prison, she won't last long. Prisoners have a code of ethics [if you want to call it that]. They despise child killers and child molesters. And unfortunately, she is a child killer.

Everyone is saying how sorry they feel for Andrea, but what about her 5 innocent children, the ones she chased down to drown? Her children are the ones who we should be thinking about, not her. They are not here anymore, thanks to their mother.

Imagine their horror when they realized what was happening, and who it was that was going to kill them. Andrea was given 5 precious gifts from God, and she destroyed them. She was supposed to love them, take care them, and protect them with her life. Instead, she cold-bloodedly murdered them.

Check this out http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24155-2002Mar13.html
This article reflects my feeling about mental illness and the travsity of imposing a murder verdict on someone with a major mental illness and therefore diminished capasity.

I haven't followed this case much, I think there are bigger issues facing the world that deserve more attention. However, from what I have seen and read about the case, it's completely obvious that Andrea Yates is not mentally fit to stand in front of a jury. The sheer heinousness of her act has compelled the people of Texas (and the United States) to exhibit the kind of emotional response that has almost necessitated her being put on trial. Unfortunately, many people within this country are reactionaries that feed off of these emotionally charged news stories.

I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, in fact I think this country would be better off without it, it's truly barbaric. For certain, the death penalty should not be a consideration when a person is not mentally fit enough to truly understand the 'morality' (read socialization into that) of their behavior. Yet I'm afraid that in this case, the death penalty verdict will be swift and sure...it seems that many folks in the state of Texas have a steady thirst for blood (no offense to those Texans here who are bereft of this bloodlust). How many other individuals have been executed over the past several years who were obviously unstable mentally. I think the only other place in the world that may have a higher execution rate than Texas (and this is a big maybe, I don't know the stats) is China! Some company huh?

Heather was right about the bus. "In 1996 Rusty jumped at a chance to be part of a six-month nasa-related project in Florida, and he wanted to drive his family there in a trailer. So he leased out their four-bedroom house, and Andrea plunged ahead with a garage sale of furniture, Christmas ornaments and clothes. No one recalls her complaining, but her relatives could not help noticing that she saved photos and her wedding dress while Rusty focused on storing his tools and workout gear.

That November, Andrea, Noah and baby John moved into the 38-ft. trailer, setting themselves up in a recreation-vehicle community in Seminole, Fla. While Rusty worked, Andrea spent her days taking Noah and John to the beach, the park and the children's museum. Rusty was head of the household. Andrea was his partner. Their parenting skills differed, he says, but their philosophy didn't. They showed the boys the value of books, sports, the arts. Andrea taught them to shuck corn and snap green beans. She wanted them to appreciate the colors of rainbows. She let them make messes, get away with more. v In Florida, Andrea became pregnant twice, miscarrying the first time but conceiving again by the time Rusty's project ended and they drove back to Houston. She began to call herself "Fertile Myrtle."

They rented a grassy lot for their trailer home at the Lazy Days RV Campground, near a dog track in Hitchcock, Texas. Rusty had no intention of returning to the house in suburbia. Not yet. They were living out a new family motto: Travel light. "We had expenses. We didn't have a budget," Rusty says. "We just kind of lived. We took it easy."

A few months later, in 1998, Rusty came across a newsletter by an itinerant evangelist named Michael Woroniecki, whose advice had influenced him in college. Woroniecki was selling a motor home converted from a 1978 GMC bus that he, his wife and kids had used for their traveling crusade. Andrea and Noah, 4, preferred the bus to the trailer, so Rusty bought it. Noah and John slept in "the hole," a luggage compartment accessible from the cabin through a trapdoor. The 350 sq. ft. of living space would also house Paul, who would be only 17 months old when brother Luke was born.

Yet even as her brood expanded, Andrea was busy caring for her father, who had Alzheimer's and had never fully recovered from a heart attack a decade earlier. During the holidays, with her kids in tow, Andrea usually took charge, dishing up plates of food for relatives even as her own meal went cold. It was always Andrea who visited; she rarely allowed relatives to visit her, even though they lived just 30 minutes away. "We got as close as they would let you," says her brother Andrew Kennedy.

"They were very private." Some thought she was embarrassed by the bus. The stresses seemed to converge in 1999 after the family took the bus to the Grand Canyon. Andrea seemed tired and preoccupied on the drive home to Texas, recalls Rusty, who assumed she was suffering from aftereffects of the flu, which they all had had. But then she slipped into a deep funk. On June 16, 1999, crying and nearly hysterical, she called Rusty at work and asked him to come home. He found her in the back room of the bus. She was slumped in a chair, biting her fingers, her legs shaking even more uncontrollably than her hands. Rusty packed her and the kids into his Chevy Suburban and drove south to Galveston and the bay. There he walked his wife along the seawall in an attempt to calm her. But she remained shaken. He then drove her to her parents' home.

The next day, after Rusty had left to run errands, Andrea told her mother Jutta that she was going to nap. Andrea then took at least 40 pills of her mother's trazodone, an antidepressant prescribed to help Jutta sleep. Andrea was lying unconscious in her mother's bed when Jutta walked in, saw the empty bottle and called 911. An ambulance arrived, with Rusty following behind. As paramedics carried Andrea away on a stretcher, her sons sobbed uncontrollably."
The whole article can be found at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,195267,00.html
As a nurse and mother these events have upset me and I can't seem to let it go.

Once again, I'm not for the death penalty either, I would just prevent an inmate from profiting from a terrible crime by writing a book on it, or receiving any sort of monetary compensation from supporters and also, I would support an inmate taking his own life. If it seems cold and inhuman, it is also a just punishment.
Dakota has one thing absolutely right, if certain people were subject to the laws of the jungle, they would be killed off by fellow prisoners. Manson was in high security for many years because of others not himself.

Even in highly mediatized cases like McVeigh, who admitted it and showed no remorse, I would not make the state into the executioner, and the criminal into the martyr, just simply let him end his own life. If he had the courage.

This woman was so sick, she should have been in an institution, and her cries for help were not heard.
Of course her children suffered immensely but this could have been prevented.
She probably would have gone with them to the "better" world if she'd had a chance.

I just listened to the sentencing arguments the prosecution gave to the jury. While acknowledging that Mrs Yates is a very ill woman, they continued to point a finger at Mr Yates for controlling his wife to such an extent that she killed his children in revenge. They did not argue very strongly for the death penalty, and they seemed to give the jury a way out of returning that sentence.
I really think that if this case had been tried in NY the death penalty would not have been sought. They might have gone for life in prison without parole, but I really don't think they would have gone for death because of Mrs Yate's incontrovertable serious mental illness--which both the prosecution and the defense acknowledged.

Yesterday, Mr Yates made a three minute statement to the jury as a bid for mercy in his wife's sentence. He apparently told the jury she was a "wonderful mother".

I think Mr Yates would have done his wife much more good had he said something like, "Although my wife was a wonderful mother she was also a very, very sick woman. She was hospitalized before and she needed to be hospitalized again last June. I should never have left the house that morning and left my 5 children with a psychotic mother. I bear some responsibility for what happened because I failed to protect my children from my wife's illness. She should not bear the responsibility for this crime alone".

But that's not what Rusty Yates said. Nor is it what he may believe. He is still in great denial about the whole situation. Had he not been in such denial he probably wouldn't have walked out of the house last June and left his children to die.

But is his denial enough to completely excuse Mr Yates? Not really. When one parent is abusive, harmful, or a potential danger to their children, the other parent is legally responsible for protecting his/her children.
Mr Yates is guilty of child neglect and child endangerment. His failure to admit his culpability shifted the thinking about this case. The prosecution could probably have charged him with neglect. Perhaps they feel that the death of his 5 children is enough punishment. I think I am inclined to agree on that point.

But this case should come as a wakeup call to protect children who are living in situations like those that existed in the Yates household that morning last June.

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: chelseabelle ]

Breaking news - Yates got life in prison

[ 03-15-2002: Message edited by: Linda1 ]

I think that life in prison was the only rational and humane sentence this jury could have returned.
Mrs Yates will not be elible for parole for at least 40 years.

She will also probably spend at least the next several years in administrative segregation--which means she will be allowed out of her cell for only one hour each day and can have no contact with any other inmates during that time. She is in for a very isolated existence.

Personally I think it would have been more appropriate to have found this woman insane and to have confined her to a state hospital for the criminally insane for at least 40 years. She would still be incarcerated, but in a more appropriate facility given the facts of her illness.

I listened to the statement Mr Yates made after the verdict was delivered. He blamed his HMO and the treating psychiatrist. He blamed the D.A. for even charging his wife with a crime. But, even after being asked the question several times by different reporters, Mr Yates still does not take any responsibility for his children's fate.

He pleads ignorance of seeing any "signs" of his wife's psychosis or severe depression, yet he described his wife's behavior as "sitting and staring into space". He really seemed totally insensitive to his wife's inner turmoil or to her emotional needs. As far as Mr Yates is concerned, it seems, those are issues for doctors--and not husbands--to attend to. His wife must have felt terribly alone throughout her marriage.

Even if Mr Yates did not think his wife was capable of violence, he did know she was very seriously ill. And yet day after day he left his children in the care of a woman who was not fully competent or even fully rational. How could he feel no responsibility for his children's well being. Didn't he even consider that being in the company of such a disturbed mother was psychologically injurious to his children? Didn't he ever feel he should get someone to come into the home to supervise what was going on--and to relieve his wife of the responsibility of caring for the children?

Yet, even in retrospect, this man can take no responsibility for his failure to protect his children. Oh yes, he pointed out that he put a burglar alarm in his house to protect them from intruders, he just never thought they were in any danger from someone in the family. But he knew his wife had been hospitalized several times, had made several suicide gestures, and that she had been on anti-psychotic medications, and that in the two weeks before the murders she had not received meds--did that make her competent to stay at home and care for her children alone? Where was his concern for his children--and for his wife as well?
Well, it wasn't there then and it's not there now, even in retrospect.

This case is really about a number of issues--including the issue of mental illness and the law.

But it's also about child abuse--child abuse in the extreme of murder. These children had two parents--one killed them and the other stood by and did nothing to protect their welfare.

If Rusty Yates had left his children alone in the house and the house burned down and the children died his negligance would be very clear--probably even to him. But, in a way, that's what Rusty Yates did. He left his children day after day in the care of a woman who was not competent and not emotionally able to care for 5 young children under the age of seven--a task that would be difficult for a mentally sound woman. Who knows what kind of effects her illness had on her children on a daily basis? We only know that one day that illness caused their deaths.

Rusty Yates did leave his children alone to fend for themselves. And the house did come crashing down.

If I felt angry and frustrated listening to Rusty Yates today, I can only imagine how angry and isolated Andrea Yates must have felt. She too was left alone by her husband--to care for her children and to try to fend off her inner demons all by herself.

Sure the doctors made a terrible mistake in Mrs Yates' treatment, and they do bear some responsibility for that. But that does not absolve Mr Yates of the responsibility he had as a parent--to protect his children from his wife's illness, in all of it's manifestations. And he just didn't protect them.

The lesson to be learned from this case is how to prevent such tragedies in the future.