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