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The Insane: The Case Of Andrea Yates

768 Words4 Pages

People have their own opinions when it comes to issuing court trials, especially when it comes down to a person being found guilty, or a person being found not guilty by reason of insanity. Did this person know what they were doing when they committed a crime? Did they know it was morally wrong? Do they have any remorse for what they have done? These are all questions courts look at when someone has committed a brutal crime, but is it fair to claim someone as “insane” or “mentally ill”, rather than putting them behind bars and calling them a criminal like the rest of them? The first time I heard about the insanity plea was in the Andrea Yates case back in 2001. Yates was class valedictorian when she was in high school with a good background. …show more content…

After each child, her symptoms seemed to worsen. She overdosed on depression medicine and was admitted for psychiatric treatment many times after multiple attempts to kill herself. Her husband claimed to have never changed a diaper in his life and was also known to be very controlling and manipulative. They claimed to have been living a hypocritical Christian lifestyle, where her husband made it seem like they were a happy family, but was actually a huge role in Andrea’s depression. There is no doubt that all this outweighed stress and manipulation took control of her life. So, in June of 2001, Andrea Yates drowned all of her children in the bathtub of her own home and later called the police and turned herself in. She claimed that Satan had spoke to her multiple times and told her that unless she killed her children, they would end up in …show more content…

Doing this, in her mind, was the only way she could protect her children. In her first trial, she was found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. She found herself being allowed to have a second trial, and after deliberating her mental state at the time of the crime, the court had found her “not guilty by reason of insanity.” She would find herself being committed to a psychiatric facility to be treated, rather than being sent to jail for life. This is where the guilty of insanity plea gets tricky. You can’t send someone to a mental hospital for life. People are sent there to get treated and released once they are better. Once Andrea Yates is claimed to be back in a normal state, she is free to go and can be released back into

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