The Difficulty of the Insanity Defense, Despite the Evidence of Mental Illness - Case Study Example

Running Head: INSANITY DEFENSE Andrea Yates: The difficulty of the insanity defense, despite the evidence of mental illness Andrea Yates: The difficulty of the insanity defense, despite the evidence of mental illness On June 21, 2001 Andrea Yates took her children into the bath tub, one by one, and drowned them. She was methodical about her actions, waiting until her husband left for work and taking an advantage of a spare hour between his departure and the arrival of her mother in law to lock up the dog and commit her murderous act. The problem with the case is that the legal definition of insanity is in direct conflict with the actions and diagnosis that she had received, the framework of her mental status contributing to the actions in such a way as to question whether or not that knowing right from wrong is enough of a definition of sanity to allow for someone who was in such obvious trouble to be convicted of murder. Andrea Yates was sentenced to life without parole as the jury declined to send down a verdict of the death penalty. Subsequently the verdict was overturned and she was found not guilty by reasons of insanity and placed in a mental facility. Andrea Yates had clear signs of mental issues before the actions that she took that stole the lives of her children, yet the system initially chose to punish her as a criminal as opposed to treating her for the clear indications of mental psychosis she had been suffering previous to her actions. The idea of insanity has a great many definitions, the legal use of the word defined by specific parameters that often allows for the incidents of guilty verdicts even when the accused is clearly not functioning in such a way that most people would classify as sane. Part of the problem with the Andrea Yates case is that there is such an aversion to mothers who kill their children that the jury would be hard pressed not to hold her criminally liable. The case of Andrea Yates provided a clear history of psychosis, her post-partum experiences including several bouts of hospitalization and having revealed on several occasions that satanic voices were instructing her to kill her children (Riecher-Rossler, 2005). With the history of behaviors and clear diagnoses of mental illness it is unclear as to why the criminal system did not accommodate her illness and find her not guilty by reason of insanity, sentencing her to receive help rather than punishment. Andrea Yates was a nurse and a devoted mother before she began showing signs of illness due to post childbirth changes in her mental physiology. Yates home-schooled her children and spent a great deal of time in her role a nurturing influence in their lives. By all accounts, outside of the episodes that she experienced in relationship with her mental illness, she was the kind of mother that the American culture respects and aspires for all families (Riecher-Rossler, 2005). Andrea and her husband Rusty had been married for eight years and during that time she had given birth to five children with one miscarriage. In June of 1999 she committed suicide by overdosing on pills and was hospitalized for a short time. She was diagnosed with having a major depressive disorder and was given anti-depressants. She stopped taking her medication after she came home and began showing signs of erratic behaviors which included mutilating herself and not feeding her children because she believed they were eating too much (Hails, 2011). In August of 1999 Andrea put a knife to her throat and begged her husband to let her die. She was hospitalized for ten days and was in a catatonic state. Her doctor advised her to not have any more children as the effect of the pregnancy could put her into further mental distress. Her husband wanted another child, however, so in Andrea became pregnant in 2000 and her fifth child, Mary was born in November. In March of 2001 Andrea’s father died, sending her already precarious mental state into a deeper break where she stopped eating and drinking, stopped feeding Mary, and read the Bible in an obsessive and unhealthy manner (Hails, 2011). Her behavior was described her friends and family as that of a ‘caged animal’ (Riecher-Rossler, 2005). In March and again in May she was in the hospital because of the manifestations of post-partum psychosis that she was experiencing, but during the May visit she was told that she was not psychotic, sent home, and told to consult with a psychologist. Two days later she killed her children (Hails, 2011). It came out that the reason she was sent home was not because she was well enough, but because her insurance would not pay for anymore time in the hospital. There were reports that the staff was exhibiting signs of shame as she was sent home, aware that she belonged in a hospital setting (Denno, 2003). After killing her children, Andrea first called her husband and informed him she had “finally done it” and told him to come home before calling the police (Roche, 2002). Shortly after her arrest she was given an interview by a journalist from the Houston Chronicle and he described her retelling of the events of killing her children as told in “zombie-like fashion” (CNN Justice, 2002). Reports started to come out through journalists who reported that she told them she had been thinking of killing her children for months and that “she was a bad mother and felt the children were disabled -- that they were not developing normally” (CNN Justice, 2002). At the time of her arrest she was charged with capital murder which placed her eligible for the death penalty (CNN Justice, 2002). According to Roche (2002) the laws in Texas on the definition of legal insanity were some of the most rigid and narrow in the nation. The defining aspect of the mental state in determining whether or not sanity was relevant was if the individual was able to distinguish between right and wrong. Because Andrea Yates had created a plan, executed the plan with diligence, and then reported what she had done, the idea of insanity as it was defined by the state was not established. The insanity defense is a difficult defense to use and is rarely successful. According to Denno (2004) “the defense rankles social and community tensions over two conflicting goals: the desire to punish the horrendous, highly publicized crimes that the public typically hears about versus the need to understand that some mentally ill people should not be held responsible for what they do”. The standard by which the defense of insanity is measured is usually through the M’Naghten case which came from the House of Lords in England and defined insanity as a disease which prevents the individual from understanding the “nature and quality of the act” and where the individual was not aware of the act, thus not being able to have the capacity to assess right from wrong (Denny, 2003). Denny (2003) writes that this definition “considers only the cognitive ability and not the volitional conduct”. The American culture has a very rigid interpretation of the nature of motherhood. According to Hyman (2004) “Cases of maternal infanticide are gripping because they seem to violate an inherent natural law, calling into question the essentialist notion that women are endowed with a nurturing maternal instinct” (p. 109). One of the ways that Hyman’s (2004) article reflects culture without reflecting the reality of the psychiatric perspective on the causality of the actions that Yates takes is that it focuses on the nature of the event of infanticide outside of the context of the illness that Yates was experiencing. Yates further proved the effects of her mental illness when in 2004 she was taken to a mental health facility in Galveston from the prison because she had begun to refuse to eat and was under the belief that her children were still alive (Barnes, 2004). The United State legal system is one of the few in the world that recognizes infanticide as a seriously as it does the murder of a person beyond the state of infancy. In Italy, killing an infant warrants a penalty that is limited between three and ten years in prison, while killing a parent will have a sentence between 24 and 30 years. Statues in New Zealand and those states under British rule require a mother who has killed an infant under the age of 12 months to undergo mandatory psychiatric treatment and are given probation. These states recognize that the murder of an infant, particularly by the mother, is most often a consequence of mental illness brought on by post-partum depression or psychosis (Riecher-Rossler, 2005). Andrea Yates, however, faced a system that had no understanding or provisions in place for mental illness and the consequences of having issues that did not allow for rational thinking. One of the primary reasons that Yates was granted a new trial is that during the testimony of the state’s hired psychiatric witness he related that a recent episode of Law and Order had a similar plot and that Yates had used this as a basis on which to kill her children through a logic that was not based upon a mental illness. She believed she would get away with the act because the result of the television show was an acquittal through insanity. The fact was the episode was not aired and had only been a script that the psychiatrist had reviewed for the program. This false testimony lead to the eventual defense of insanity to prevail and in 2006 Yates was sentenced to a mental facility rather than a life sentence in prison (Hails, 2011). As a result of her experiences, House Bill 341 in the State of Texas, which is known as the Andrea Yates Bill, requires healthcare providers to treat pregnant women through information and counseling for the effects of pregnancy on mental health (Depression Questions, 2010). Andrea Yates was experiencing a phenomenon that has existed throughout time, but had yet to be recognized within the American culture. Despite her clear past actions that had shown her inability to function, the medical community had failed her through restrictions that the health insurance system placed on her treatment. The legal system initially failed her as false testimony and a definition of insanity that was irrelevant to her experience placed her in the criminal system. Through the opportunity to redo her trial the legal system placed in a facility where she could receive health for the illness that had devastated her life. References Barnes, S. (22 July 2004). National Briefing | South Texas: Mother who killed is refusing food. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/us/national- briefing-south-texas-mother-who-killed-is-refusing-food.html?ref=andreayates CNN Justice. (22 June 2002). Newspapers tell how mother allegedly killed children. CNN News Network. Retrieved from http://articles.cnn.com/2001-06- 22/justice/yates.arraignment_1_joe-owmby-kaylynn-williford-andrea- yates?_s=PM:LAW Denno, D. W. (2003). Who is Andrea Yates? A short story about insanity. Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy. 10. Retrieved from http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?10+Duke+J.+Gender+L.+&+Pol%27y+1 Depression Questions (2 July 2010). Andrea Yates and post partum depression. Depression Questions. Retrieved from http://depressionquestions.org/andrea-yates-and-post-partum- depression.html Hails, J. (2011). Criminal Evidence. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Hyman, R. (Fall-Winter 2004). Medea of Suburbia: Andrea Yates, Maternal Infanticide, and the Insanity Defense. Women’s Studies Quarterly. 32 (3/4): 192-210. Lee, R. C. (20 June 2011). Yates case a decade ago made sad moms easier to spot. Houston Chronicle. Retrieved from http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Yates-case- a-decade-ago-made-sad-moms-easier-to-2082307.php Riecher-Rössler, A. (2005). Perinatal Stress, Mood and Anxiety Disorders: From Bench to Bedside : 5 Tables. Basel: Karger. Roche, T. (18 March 2002). Andrea Yates: More to the Story. Time U.S. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,218445,00.html Read More