YATES INSANITY VERDICT IS A RARE SHOW OF
SANITY FOR CAPITOL OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

From the Houston Chronicle:

A Harris County jury has found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity during her second capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of her children in the family's bathtub in 2001.

The verdict upholding Yates' insanity defense comes after the jury deliberated more than 12 hours over three days. The decision also underscores the emotional debate on mental illness within the criminal justice system since Yates' first trial in 2002.

And

The jury's verdict means Yates, 42, will be sent to a state mental hospital for treatment, rather than be sentenced to life in prison. Yates and attorneys will return to Judge Belinda Hill's courtroom at 10 a.m. Thursday for a hearing, formalizing the details of Yates' hospitalization. She will go to a maximum security hospital initially.

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The legal standard in the United States for establishing the kind of insanity that results in a not guilty verdict for the accused is both hard to meet and completely divorced from what mental health experts define as insane: the defendant must be shown to have not known the difference between "right and wrong" when he committed his crime. Obviously, there are quite a few problems there, most notably the fact that intellectual knowledge of morality doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the uncontrollable urges or bizarre interpretations of reality that are associated with numerous forms of mental illness. So Andrea Yates had the deck stacked against her going into this second trial.

Compounding her long odds is the fact that her trial took place in Houston, and H-Town is not known for its compassion and understanding toward people who have committed murder. Indeed, even though I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, Houston has long had a reputation as "Death Penalty Capitol of the World." Fortunately, Yates lucked out because the jury in her first trial, which convicted her, opted against capital punishment, and for some arcane legal reason, this meant she wasn't facing death in the second trial. Nonetheless, the jury pool she faced in both trials is, overall, pretty bloodthirsty, as are her prosecutors. Tough crowd.

Making matters even worse for Yates is the nature of her crime. Nothing, not Presidential intern sex, war, corporate fraud, murdering non-white people, or disco, drives Americans into a self-righteous frenzy like a mother killing her kids. A lot of people just can't think straight about the subject. They freak out. And, trust me on this one, there are a lot of freaks in Houston.

So that's why I'm very pleasantly surprised that this jury did the right thing and had her committed. Really, it's what should have happened the first time around. Never have I read about a case where it was so extraordinarily clear that the killer met the criteria for legal insanity. Her conviction was both heartbreaking and utterly reinforcing of my hometown's reputation for brutal-revenge-as-justice.

I hope this is the beginning of a trend for the city of bayous and petrochemical plants.

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