On June 20, 2001 five children were drown in a bathtub at a home in Houston, TX. The mother of the children, Andrea Yates, confessed to drowning the children. After an initial trial, an appeal, and a retrial Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity and remains in a Texas state mental hospital to this day. For this research assignment you will write a 3-5 page paper (in MS Word or PDF format only) on the criminal elements used by prosecutors against Yates. Specifically you will include in your paper: • The Texas statues used as a basis for the charges filed against Yates • How the prosecution intended to tie her to the criminal elements needed to prosecute the charges • Your conclusion as to whether justice was ultimately done in …show more content…
However, the jury did show mercy and she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In Yates’s case, the prosecutors insisted, and the jury believed, that Yates knew the killings were “wrong.” The evidence presented was that she waited until her husband left the house before drowning the children, and she called law enforcement after she had killed them. But this shows the limited nature of the Texas insanity defense, a limitation the Supreme Court has since sanctioned (Murderpedia.org, 2006). Although the defense's expert testimony agreed that Yates was psychotic, Texas law requires that, in order to successfully assert the insanity defense, the defendant must prove that he or she could not discern right from wrong at the time of the crime. Although the prosecution had sought the death penalty, the jury refused that option. The trial court sentenced her to life imprisonment in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice with eligibility for parole in 40 years (Murderpedia.org, …show more content…
Texas revised its insanity defense statute after John Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1981 attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan. The Hinckley verdict enraged many and fed the common misconception that those defendants “got away with murder.” A key requirement in criminal law is mens rea: a “guilty mind.” The reaction and statute change defined mens rea as simply knowing the act was wrong (Princeton.edu, 2005). Anyone who reads Yates’ mental health records will likely agree that justice was done after the first trial. If there ever was a defendant who deserved the benefit of the insanity defense, it was this sick, sad woman. She is currently serving her time in a maximum-security criminal ward in a state mental hospital. The difference is that in a state mental hospital, Yates will received the treatment she needs and has a chance to get better (Cassel, Elaine, 2006). The mental health community in Texas has its work ahead to persuade the public of the reality of postpartum psychosis and that this illness deserves attention. We also know that we must try to change state law, as well as local opinion, about mental illness and the stigma surrounding it as well as the culpability of patients for their acts (Bowman, Susan,