Andrea Yates Case Essay

The Andrea Yates Case: The Insanity Defense On June 20, 2001, in Houston, Texas, Andrea Pia Yates was charged with the murder of her five children, which she drowned in the bathtub one at a time, and was found not guilty by reason of insanity under the Texas Law Insanity Defense. The legislative history of the Texas Law Insanity Defense begins with the British test for right and wrong, known as the M’Naghten, being adopted in the majority of American states. The M’Naghten test for right and wrong required a mental disease that kept the defendant from controlling their actions and that cognitive impairment is the cause for the defective reasoning of what is right and what is wrong. Beginning in 1973, Texas adopted the American Law Institute’s

For Dena Schlosser, the issue of insanity was less clear. In Schlosser’s first trial, the jury ended up deadlocked as to whether or not Schlosser was legally insane under the Texas insanity defense law. Similarly, in the second trial, the defense and prosecution let the judge decide the verdict, which was not guilty by reason of insanity, and it was revealed that Schlosser had a brain tumor, which could have led to her religious delusions telling her to cut off her baby’s arms, fatally injuring the daughter (New York Times). In the simpler case of Deanna Laney, Laney suffered religious delusions that led her to crush her sons’ skull with rocks, and the expert witness, Park Dietz, said, “Laney didn’t realize her actions were wrong, which means she was legally insane under Texas Law” (NBC). All five psychiatric experts in the trial said Laney qualified as insane under the Texas due to a “severe mental illness [that] caused Laney to have psychotic delusions that rendered her incapable of knowing right from wrong during the killings” (USA TODAY). Laney did not know what was morally wrong due to her psychotic religious delusions, causing a severe mental illness, but it can be said that she knew what was legally wrong because her first call was to 911 after the murders