Paper Example on Psychiatric Evidence and Procedures: Andrea Yates

Introduction

In 2002, the murder of five children by their Texas mother, Andrea Yates, monopolized the attention of the American media. The press never ceased to describe a devoted mother devoted entirely to the education of her children, an accomplished cook, an indefatigable organizer of family celebrations, an exemplary girl who respected and took care of her old sick father, and a wife subject to the authority of her husband. The family was very religious, adept at the apocalyptic teachings of Reverend Evangelist Michael Woroniecki, who preached the end of the consumer society and stigmatized sinful mothers. The five children had Biblical names and the parents were ready to welcome as many as God would send them. That such a pious mother could turn against her children like this and drown them in a bathtub upset American opinion. After the murders, people learned that Andrea Yates already had a psychiatric past and that her mental health had deteriorated with each delivery, especially after the birth of the youngest daughter, Mary.

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The case agitated the community, not only for the sinister outlines of the deaths but also for the debate over the rights of the mentally ill, in a three-week trial where the eight women and three men of the jury took only three and a half hours to decide. During the trial, they paraded testimonies that gave an account of the mental problems of Andrea Yates, who spent the last years of her life in a problematic spiral that began with a postpartum depression when she had the fourth child and that evolved into paranoia and psychosis (Deborah, 2006). Two suicide attempts and four hospitalizations in hospices did not convince the jury, which found Andrea guilty of crimes without condescension because of insanity. Prosecutors argued that the mother was, in fact, ill, but that at the time of the infanticide was healthy enough to know that the crime she committed was wrong, which under Texas law is sufficient proof of sanity (Barnett, 2006). Andrea Yates pleaded not guilty to the crime despite her confession, claiming mental insanity (invoking postpartum depression) at the time she drowned her five children. However, the Judge considered her sound enough to know that the crime she committed was wrong.

Andrea Yates was charged with two crimes. The first one was the murder of his seven-year-old son Noah; and John, five. The second referred to Mary's six-month homicide. There were only two charges because Texas law provides that the willful death of two persons in the same act (in this case, Noah and John) is brought together in a single charge and that the death penalty is assessed in the case of homicide of children up to six months (Barnett, 2006). The defendant confessed the murders and described what happened. She told the police that she was not a good mother and that the children were not developing properly. Andrea was declared capable of understanding and willing, but there emerged a complex mental situation, characterized by depressive and psychotic episodes. After the birth of the fourth child, Andrea began to suffer from depression, went through a period of ups and downs with two suicide attempts, a series of hospitalizations, therapies, and support. On June 16, 1999, Rusty (Yates husband) found Andrea trembling and chewing on her own fingers until they bled (Viguera, Emmerich, & Cohen, 2008). The next day, she tried to commit suicide with an overdose of pills. She was admitted to the hospital, where she was prescribed antidepressants. Shortly after being discharged, she begged her husband to let her die while holding a knife to her neck.

Unfortunately, the week before the killings she went to the hospital and despite a previous diagnosis of postpartum psychosis and despite declaring that she wanted to hurt his children, she was still sent home. In the first instance, she was sentenced to life imprisonment and then on appeal, declared not guilty for reasons of mental insanity - not guilty by reason of insanity. The prosecution that concluded her case stated that Yates knew what she was doing and it wrong because she called 911 after committing the crime (Barnett, 2005). She had told a detective that she had murdered her children because she was a bad mother and God would punish her. Prosecutors added that she committed the crime after her husband went to work and before her mother-in-law arrived (Barnett, 2005). The decision to declare her guilty of murder meant that the jury did not take into account the defense's arguments based on the fact that the defendant suffered from a mental illness that led her to commit the multiple murders of her children.

Yates had attempted suicide twice and had been hospitalized repeatedly for suffering what is technically known as "postpartum depression." Yates herself pleaded not guilty on grounds of insanity and, during the three weeks of the trial, her defense tried to convince the jury of her inability to distinguish between good and evil, suffering from severe postpartum depression complicated by psychosis (Desiree & Lichtenstein, 2016). However, for Texas law, defendants are presumptively considered healthy, and to prove otherwise, the defense had to convince the jury that an illness or insanity had played a sufficiently and significantly large role in preventing the accused from distinguishing between good and evil.

The state of Texas has a rather simplistic legal approach to the insanity that simply requires the accused to distinguish between right and wrong. Since Andrea Yates had called the police after her crime, it was easy for the prosecutor to say that she knew that her act was illegal. Although psychiatric experts from both sides agreed on a diagnosis of severe psychosis, the prosecution maintained that Andrea was able to distinguish right from wrong. After a short deliberation, the jury convicted Andrea and sentenced her to life imprisonment. It is important to know what precipitated the act. The psychological problems of Andrea Yates dated from the birth of her fourth child. From then on, she seemed distant, staying whole days in bed, pulling her hair by scratching her skull and striking the wounds in her nose. She clawed her legs and arms with a silent obsession, she had visions and heard voices (Viguera et al. 2008). She heard a voice telling her to take a knife. She had her first vision of a knife and a stabbed person after the birth of her first child, then again after the birth of the fourth child. She thought that psychotropic drugs were truth serums and hated losing her self-control under their control. To get rid of the voices, she tried to commit suicide, was hospitalized and put on antidepressants. She did not receive any serious psychiatric treatment, left the hospital and stopped taking her medications.

Andrea Yates had two powerful attachments in life: the first for her sick father and the second for the pastor Michael Worniecki who exposed his extremist religious views in the letters he sent her (Holman & McKeever, 2016). In one of them, he wrote that the role of the woman results from the sin of Eve and that the bad mothers give birth to bad children. When her father died, Andrea's condition deteriorated rapidly. She lost herself in reading the Bible. She was constantly carrying the baby but not feeding it. She began to scratch the scalp to make large bald patches. She became so incapacitated that she required immediate hospitalization. After a brief hospitalization during which she was given antipsychotics, the psychiatrist let her leave the hospital. On April 1, 2001, she was under the care of Dr. Mohammed Saeed. She was attended and again discharged (Barnett, 2005). Upon leaving, she nearly suffocated her youngest daughter, who still had no teeth, trying to feed her with solid food. During the interview with the psychiatrists, she quietly let her husband speak without ever showing the slightest desire to talk. On May 3, 2001, she fell into an almost catatonic state and when she recovered, she prepared a bath at noon, filling the tub in her house (Deborah, 2006). Sometime later, she would confess that she had planned to drown her children that day, but in the end, she had decided not to do so. She was hospitalized the next day after a visit to the doctor. Erroneously, his psychiatrist determined that she had filled the bathtub to commit suicide.

On June 20, 2001, Andrea waited for her husband to leave for work and, after breakfast, she drowned her five children one after the other in the bathtub. She laid their bodies on the bed, putting the boys' hands around baby Mary, and then she called the police. She told the police that she had no hatred for her children, that she did not blame them. She had killed them because they did not develop properly. She confessed that she had been thinking about it for two years since she realized that she was not a good mother. Later, she told the prison doctors that her belief in being a bad mother was absolute (Holman & McKeever, 2016). The death of her children was her punishment, not theirs. She explained that killing her children was the ultimate act of pity of a mother and that she had failed as a mother. In order to prove that the devil possessed her, she asked the doctors to shave her head in order to discover the number 666 - mark of the antichrist - on her skull. She also asked that her hair is cut in the shape of a crown, which was interpreted as an attempt to win Jesus' forgiveness.

Andrea believed that her murderous thoughts regarding her children were coming from Satan and that she had been possessed by the devil. All the suicide attempts she had were an instinctive attempt to protect the children from herself. She received psychiatric treatment which mostly consisted of antipsychotic drugs, antidepressants, and cognitive therapy, all these helped in providing tenuous stabilization (Viguera et al. 2008). Yates was psychotic before, during and after the children deaths. Temporary psychotic episodes are as a result of intense anger, severe stress, substance abuse, and the postpartum state, and this was the case with Yates. She already had a history of postpartum depression with psychosis and leaving her alone with the children was wrong and ill-advised.

While the prosecutor asserted that the accused knew that what she was doing was a sin and therefore illegal, Andrea, meanwhile, never ceased saying, during her interviews with the prison psychiatrists, that killing her children was the thing to do since Satan had spotted them, her only way to save them was to kill them. When explaining the reasons for her actions, Andrea Yates testified to this psychotic certainty. She had no doubt about the satanic danger she wanted to protect her children from. She expressed no remorse and, even when she acknowledged her guilt, she did so with a certain innocence, convinced that she, the bad mother, simply wanted to avoid a real danger, Satan (Deborah, 2006). In her paranoid religious belief, Andrea considered the law as a positive force that could help her break free from Satan's hold. It is significant that the state of Andrea Yates has deteriorated dramatically after the death of her father. However, very little is known about this man apart from his depressive state and his Alzheimer's disease. It seemed that one of Andrea's brothers was suffering from bipolar disorder and there were other proven cases of mental illness in her family.

"No objective logic can be imposed on Andrea Yates' actions," defense lawyer George Parnham said (Deborah, 2006). This lawyer argued that Yates suffered from a postpartum depression so severe that it led her to think that killing her children was the right attitude to take. "Postpartum depression with psychotic episodes is the cruelest form of mental...