Prosecutor Says Texas Child-Drowning Mom Not Insane

Feb 18

By Jeff Franks

HOUSTON  - Andrea Yates, a troubled Texas mother who drowned her five children in the family bathtub last summer was sick, but sane enough to know that she had done wrong, prosecutors said on Monday in opening statements of a murder trial that could bring her the death penalty.

Yates' attorney, George Parnham, countered that the 37-year-old former nurse was suffering from postpartum depression so severe that she thought killing her children was the right thing to do.

 "Postpartum depression with psychotic features is the cruelest form of mental illness," he told a packed courtroom. "It takes the very nature and essence of motherhood -- to love, nurture and protect -- and changes the reality."

 Yates, 37, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to two counts of capital murder in a case that women's rights groups and many mental health experts have denounced because they say she needs treatment, not punishment.

 The bespectacled Yates, her long hair hanging down on a gray dress, showed little emotion during the opening statements. When she stood to make her not guilty plea, she spoke in a barely audible voice.

 On June 20 of last year, she called police to her suburban Houston home to tell them she had killed her children.

 Police found them all drowned, the oldest Noah, 7, still floating face down in the bathtub where they died. The other four, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, six months, were wrapped in a sheet on the bed, with Mary's head cradled on John's arm, prosecutor Joe Owmby told the jury.

 They had bruises on their heads and legs from where they had struggled to escape their mother, Owmby said.

 "She said she killed them because they weren't developing correctly and she was a bad mother," he said. "She told (police) she had thought about killing them for two years. She told them they struggled for a couple of minutes."

 SANE ENOUGH TO CALL POLICE

 Owmby said there was no question that Yates suffered from postpartum depression that began after the birth of her fourth child and flared up again after the youngest, Mary, was born.

 But he said she was sane enough to call police after the crime and to tell investigators she needed to be punished.

 "You will also hear evidence that she knew it was an illegal thing, that it was a sin, that it was wrong," Owmby said.

 "We don't have to defend the mental health system of the United States of America," he said. "We don't have to prove that postpartum depression is a problem. We know it's a problem."

 Parnham said Yates did not receive adequate care for her illness and had been taken off anti-psychotic drugs two weeks before the killings. He said a parade of mental health experts would testify that Yates was psychotic to the point of suffering delusions.

 Prosecutors played a tape of Yates' call to police.

 In a flat, almost expressionless tone, she told the dispatcher she needed a police officer to come to her home, but would not explain why. "I just need them to come," she said.

 "Are you ill?" the dispatcher asked.

 "Yes, I'm ill," Yates replied.

 Yates is being tried in the nation's toughest criminal justice jurisdiction. More death penalties are handed down in Harris County, where Houston is located, than in all but two entire states -- Texas and Virginia.

 She is charged with two counts of capital murder, one for the deaths of Noah and John and another for killing Mary. One meets the requirements for a Texas capital murder charge because it alleges two killings in the same episode, while the other alleges murder of a child under the age of 6.

 Prosecutors did not seek indictments for the murder of the other two children, but could do so later if they are not satisfied with the verdicts.

 Should the jury of eight women and four men, picked during three weeks of jury selection last month, find her not guilty, she would be committed to a state mental hospital for treatment.

 If they convict her, Texas law gives them two punishment options -- life in prison or death by lethal injection.