Mom guilty of kids' murder

2002-03-13 09:11

Houston, Texas - A 12-member jury on Tuesday found Andrea Yates guilty of capital murder for drowning her five children in the family bathtub.

Yates (37) faces a possible death sentence after the eight-woman, four-man jury, deliberating less than four hours, rejected the claim that she did not understand the crime was wrong due to her mental illness.

Grim-faced, her waist encircled by her defence lawyer George Parnham, Yates stifled a sob as she was led away by guards after the verdict, turning to the astonished audience and searching in vain for her mother.

The Texas housewife was found guilty of two capital murder charges - one for the deaths of her two oldest children, Noah (7) and John (5) and the second for the murder of her daughter, Mary, who at six months old, was subject to a separate statute under Texas law.

Charges in the deaths of Paul (3) and Luke (2) are still pending.

Yates held her children under water in the bathtub until they ceased struggling just four months after being released from the last of four hospitalisations for severe depression.

Verdict 'unexpected'

Judge Belinda Hill warned those in the courtroom to remain calm when the verdict was announced, but outside was "pandemonium", said prominent Houston criminal defence attorney Brian Wice.

"Nobody expected this verdict. In terms of quality, quantity and a general case, the defence had the edge in votes," he said.

Yates' husband, a teary-eyed Russell Yates, who maintained unflinching support for his wife throughout the trial, was hustled out of the courtroom and away from the courthouse after the verdict, as was her mother.

Psychiatric experts for both the prosecution and defence testified Yates killed her children to save them from the fires of hell. But Texas state law permits the insanity defence only if the jury believes the defendant did not know right from wrong.

Texas leads the United States in executions, and Harris County, where Houston is located, leads in the number of capital murder convictions in the state.

But Wice maintained Hill's courtroom was "the best place for the defence to try this case; the jury demographic was sufficiently large that some of these people at least had neither heard nor read about" it.

'Ultimate punishment'

The same jury is to begin deliberations of Yates' sentence on Thursday.

"At this point, they have taken her out of a facility for treatment and put her in a facility to punish her ... or provide the ultimate punishment," Wice said.

But, he added, "I think Andrea Yates has a better chance of winning a daytime Emmy than in being sentenced to death".

There are two conditions Texas juries must satisfy before issuing a death sentence. First, they must determine that a defendant is likely to commit acts of violence that could constitute a continued threat to society, and Yates, Wice said, is unlikely "to be a threat to anyone but her unborn child".

Second a jury must consider whether there are "sufficient mitigating factors" in a defendant's background that warrant a life sentence instead of death.

And Yates, with her chronicled and detailed history of mental illness, repeated attempts at suicide and longtime treatment with psychotropic drugs, "is a textbook case of sufficient mitigating factors", Wice said.

Parnham, who announced his client would appeal, told reporters the verdict "seems to me that we are still back in the days of Salem witchcraft, where we take a demonised woman and take her life". - Sapa-AFP

- SAPA