The Andrea Yates Verdict: Making the World Safer for Religious Delusions
I lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief this morning.
Yesterday, Andrea Yates who was previously found guilty of killing her five little children by drowning them in the bathtub, was found innocent by reason of insanity in her second trial.
From AP via the Seattle-PI:
HOUSTON — In a dramatic turnaround from her first murder trial, Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity Wednesday in the drowning of her children in the bathtub.
The 42-year-old woman will be committed to a state mental hospital and held until she is no longer deemed a threat. If she had been convicted of murder, she would have been sentenced to life in prison.
Yates stared wide-eyed as the verdict was read, then bowed her head and wept quietly. Her relatives also shed tears, and the children’s father, Rusty Yates, muttered, “Wow!” as he, too, cried.
Four years ago, another jury convicted Yates of murder, rejecting claims that she was so psychotic she thought she was saving the souls of her five children by killing them. An appeals court overturned the convictions because of erroneous testimony from a prosecution witness.
Yates’ chief attorney, George Parnham, called Wednesday’s verdict a “watershed for mental illness and the criminal justice system.”
Wendell Odom, another of Yates’ attorneys, suggested that attitudes have changed since the first trial: “Five years ago there were a lot of people who could not get past the anger of what happened.”
Yates’ 2002 conviction triggered debate over whether Texas’ legal standard for mental illness was too rigid, whether the courts treated postpartum depression seriously enough, and whether a mother who killed could ever find sympathy and understanding in a tough-on-crime state such as Texas.
Yates drowned 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year- old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah in their Houston-area home in June 2001. Her attorneys said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and, in a delusional state, believed that Satan was inside her and that killing the youngsters would save them from hell.
[...]
Prosecutors had maintained that Yates failed to meet the state’s definition of insanity: that she was so severely mentally ill that she did not know her actions were wrong.
“I’m very disappointed,” prosecutor Kaylynn Williford said. “For five years, we’ve tried to seek justice for these children.”
The prosecution’s witness testified that Yates knew what she was doing. If she didn’t know it was wrong, why did she call the police?
The jury was told about Yates’ two hospitalizations after two suicide attempts in 1999, and about her stays in a mental hospital a few months before the drownings.
But prosecution witness Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist, testified that Yates killed the youngsters because she felt overwhelmed and inadequate as a mother, not to save their souls. He said that it was not until a day after the killings that she talked about Satan and saving her children from hell.
Welner also said Yates showed that she knew her actions were wrong by waiting until her husband left for work to kill them, covering the bodies with a sheet and calling 911 soon after the crime.
Her defense attorneys believe that the fact that she committed such a horrible crime proves she was insane and therefore innocent.
The defense attorneys never disputed that Andrea drowned the children, but they 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.”
Here’s a tip for anyone planning to commit a murder: make it as brutal and heartless as you possibly can and choose your victims from the most defenseless among us–little children–because that will prove you are insane and therefore innocent.
She didn’t just wake up one day and kill her kids. There was evidence she had been thinking about it for a while. Rusty Yates, her ex-husband and the father of the five murdered children has also been one of her stongest defenders. Even he admits she had most likely thought about it before.
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 the news from police officers, he reminded his mother saying 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.”
The jury in this case had a very bizarre take on Yates’ understanding of the difference between right and wrong.
The foreman of the jury said Thursday that he and the others used both their heads and their hearts in finding her not guilty by reason of insanity. He said they had “some emotional difficulty” reaching its unanimous verdict would have had an easier time if they could have found her “guilty but insane.”
Wednesday morning, before announcing the verdict, they 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.”
Huh? She knew it was wrong but she thought it was right?
The real culprit here is religious delusions and our social sanctioning of them.
One can claim religious delusions as the basis for one’s superiority in life, which is the real reason why Andrea Yates killed her children. She believed she was sending them to heaven.
In a taped interview with a forensic psychiatrist that I saw on TV this morning, Yates said she had visions that one of her sons would grow up to be a serial killer and another would grow up to be a “mute homosexual prostitute.” [emphasis added]
Righteous, God-loving person that she was, she could not allow this to happen to her children so she killed them. The homosexual part was I’m sure terribly difficult for her to handle being as religious as she was.
The Andrea Yates case is a study in just how harmful religous delusions are. We call religious delusions moral when convenient to justify certain aggressions against the human rights of others, and the basis for an insanity defense when that aggression exceeds the current popular standards.
Five innocent children were brutally drowned by their own mother, who has now completely lost control of her own life. Religious delusions have a very high price attached to them. That price would not be so high if as a culture we did not actively encourage them.
One can use religious delusions as a moral basis for the murder of innocent children–just ask George W. Bush–and one can also claim them as the basis for an insanity defense, to avoid responsibility for one’s own actions.
Whether a justification for taking something like a life or a defense for that taking, they are still delusions because they are not backed by evidence.
When delusions are beyond the control of the individual, there is no moral right or wrong attached to having them. But religious delusions are well within the control of individuals. People choose to hold beliefs that are not backed by evidence, they choose to ignore evidence. Religious people insist upon their right to hold such beliefs even when confronted by evidence that contradicts them.
Andrea Yates was definitely out of touch with reality but much of that was a function of what she chose to believe. And she is not alone in making such choices. The vast majority of Americans do the same, which is why many of them are “feeling good” and little safer this morning.
There are many people in our society who share Andrea Yates’ religious delusions and who are only a few frustrations away from having their delusional beliefs evolve into something deadly, like flying jumbo jets into the WTC or strapping bombs on your back and blowing them up in crowds.
Didn’t Andrea Yates perform an act of terrorism based upon religious beliefs against her own children?
Those who promote religious delusions as a moral good share some responsibility for her crime. She’s ultimately responsible for the choices she made, but I suspect that in her environment, it would have been very difficult to break away from the religious delusions that informed her choices. It’s very difficult for anybody in our society to do that as they will get much condemnation and little support.
This morning many of those guilty parties are relieved that Yates was found innocent.
The bottom line is this: just as we have a responsibility to not impair ourselves with drugs or alcohol before we drive, we also have a responsibility to not impair our thinking by filling our minds with totally irrational ideas before we decide to get pregnant and have children.
And just as the government and society in general should not encourage people to drink before they start up and drive a car, it should not encourage them to engage in irrational, delusional thinking before they start and raise a family.
There is a tragic irony in the fact that Adrea Yates, a partner in a totally dysfunctional heterosexual marriage which ended with the murder of her own five children, would be found innocent of murder and also insane on the same day that the Washington State Supreme Court voted to uphold a ban on gay marriage because, as far as some of the justices were concerned, “protecting” heterosexual marriage and prohibiting same-sex marriage is essential for the good of society.
Clearly heterosexual relationships need help if Rusty and Andrea Yates are any indicator. But denying other individuals the right to hold values that are not endorsed by religous zealots will not provide the needed assistance. On the contrary, it is detrimental to families, children and society as the Andrea Yates case illustrates so well. Forcing people at the point of a gun to hold beliefs that are not backed by evidence is the root of our problems, not the solution.
But not knowing right from wrong in the rational sense–testing beliefs against objective evidence–I’m sure the majority of the WA State Supreme Court Justices feel they were doing right, just as Andrea Yates did.
Books about Andea Yates are available in the store.
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