HOUSTON – Andrea Yates, who said she drowned her five children in the bathtub because she believed she was saving them from Satan, was found not guilty by reason of insanity Wednesday at her second murder trial.
The fact that Yates was mentally ill was never in doubt during the four-week trial. Yates said she believed she was possessed by the devil and that the media had planted bugs in her house to record her poor parenting. Nor was it doubted that she had committed the crimes: She called 911 minutes after killing the children and confessed.
But experts for the defense and prosecution disputed whether Yates was legally insane on the day of the murders. Under Texas law, defendants can be found innocent by reason of insanity only if the defense proves that they did not know right from wrong.
The jury, which deliberated here over three days, found that the former high school valedictorian and nurse was not sane the day five years ago that she waited until her husband went to work and then drowned her children, one by one.
Yates appeared shocked when the verdicts were read, and her supporters and family members began to weep behind her. Defense attorneys bowed their heads and tried to contain their emotion, while prosecutors stared straight ahead.
“I look at this and think, this all could have been avoided,” Russell Yates, her ex-husband, said Wednesday. “Andrea was ordinarily a loving mother, who was crippled by disease. … Yes, she was psychotic on the day this happened.”
Yates had a well-chronicled history of mental problems, which had led to several hospitalizations and at least two suicide attempts. A deeply religious woman, she believed she was failing to properly homeschool her children in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake, and was haunted by visions that one of her sons would become a gay prostitute.
In 2002, a jury deliberated less than four hours before finding her guilty of murdering her children. But the convictions were thrown out on appeal last year, because an expert witness for the prosecution who served as a consultant to the television drama “Law &Order” had testified that Yates may have gotten the idea to drown her children and plead insanity from an episode of the show. No such episode existed, and the court concluded the testimony might have prejudiced the jury.
However, the jury’s decision to spare Yates the death penalty stood. So the only options available to jurors in the just-concluded trial were life in prison or treatment in a state mental hospital.
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