SHORTLY AFTER she was sent to Harris County Jail to await trial for drowning her five children in a bathtub, Houston housewife Andrea Yates asked a psychiatrist to shave her head so she could see if the number 666 was still printed on her skull. That wasn’t her only problem. A full month into her incarceration, despite regular 15-milligram doses of the potent anti-psychotic Haldol, she was still seeing hallucinations of horses on the prison walls. Since the birth of her first child, she had heard voices that she associated with Satan telling her to kill her children with a knife. She was convinced a character in the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” had sent her a message from Satan: “You have eluded me long enough.” She thought the news networks had put cameras in her house to monitor her performance as a mother. She had been diagnosed with–and hospitalized for–psychosis, schizophrenia, severe postpartum depression, and a frontal-lobe brain disorder. She had attempted suicide twice. The evidence of mental unfitness presented at her murder trial this spring would run to 1,000 pages. Andrea Yates, who was sentenced to life in prison on March 15, was crazy as a loon. Her craziness had everything to do with the murders she committed. While the Harris County prosecutors pretended not to believe this, it is hard to see how 12 jurors could have thought otherwise. Their decision to convict Yates of murder, rather than rule her not guilty by reason of insanity, has given rise to accusations from columnist Richard Cohen that witch trials are back, and to European declarations that Texas is collapsing into barbarism. These worries tell only one side of the story. They ignore the very real possibility that, had she been acquitted, a violently insane woman could have found herself back on the street in short order. The ultimate outcome–life incarceration, no possibility of parole, with psychological care–will strike many Americans (including this writer) as fair. But the Andrea Yates verdict rests on a kind of jury nullification. It was obtained by the willingness of a merciless prosecution to seek the death penalty, and thus to risk involving the state in killing a mentally deranged woman. And it produced a nudge-nudge, wink-wink application of the law, revealing that common sense and legal statutes have been driven dangerously asunder. The insanity defense has a long history. Texas’s version descends from the 1843 M’Naghten Rule, named for the Scottish psychotic who murdered an aide to British prime minister Sir Robert Peel during a bungled assassination attempt. M’Naghten holds that insanity can be claimed in a courtroom only by those who, at the time of their misdeed, could not tell right from wrong. There have been attempts to produce more flexible guidelines. In the 1950s and ’60s, insanity could be claimed by any who showed their deed to be a “product of mental illness.” But since John Hinckley’s acquittal on insanity grounds for trying to kill President Reagan in 1981, states have borne down hard on insanity claims. Four states have abolished them altogether, and a dozen more have introduced the verdict of “guilty but insane.” The others, including Texas, have reverted under various formulations to the M’Naghten rule. Harris County assistant district attorney Joe Owmby admitted right off the bat that “there’s no question Andrea Yates had some form of mental illness.” But he and other prosecutors sought to show that the voices she was hearing had done nothing to impair her sense of right and wrong. This was highly implausible. Yates called 911 and told the police to come over, prosecutors noted. She admitted she expected to be punished. Ergo, they reasoned, she knew right from wrong. What’s more, prosecutor Karlynn Williford made the implicit claim–in the face of everything we know about Andrea Yates’s conduct as a mother–that this was a long-hatched premeditated murder, grilling a psychiatrist with a question, “Do you recall her saying, ‘After thinking about my options, I decided drowning them was the best way to end their lives’?” But this is not evidence of “criminal intent,” as any reasonable person would understand it. It is evidence that the defendant is hearing voices, which she takes to be either divine or Satanic, taunting her with the words of Matthew 18:6, Mark 9:42, or–in the version most open to misreading–Luke 17:2: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” That Andrea Yates knew her actions would be perceived as wrong does not mean she had a meaningful sense that they were wrong. Those who think God is commanding them don’t await a second opinion from the Houston police department. “Andrea Yates had bigger fish to fry than seeing a psychiatrist,” said psychologist Xavier Amador, who has treated women who have killed their children. “She was grappling with Heaven and Hell.” The prosecution disingenuously blurred the distinction between insanity and stupidity. They called Harry Wilson, a pediatric pathologist, to do a blood-and-guts reenactment of the sort prosecutors always assume will impress juries. As the Washington Post put it, “Wilson emphasized that killing the children in an hour, as Yates did after her husband left for work and before her mother-in-law came for her daily visit, was not the work of a psychotic with jumbled thoughts.” No, it was the work of a psychotic with tragically clear thoughts. The prosecution seemed to understand this, because it also made very nearly the opposite claim: that Yates was proved insane by her failure to obey some Unwritten Rulebook of Religious Psychos. Park Dietz of UCLA, a longtime prosecution rent-a-witness in such trials, said Yates probably didn’t really think she was saving her children from Hell because “she doesn’t tell them they’ll be with Jesus or God.” ONE ASSUMES that hostility to the insanity defense would be the mark of “right wing” forces, like the Texas judiciary system. But they had help. Feminists, who were the most vocal participants in interpreting the Yates trial to the public, had their own axe to grind. Feminist skepticism about any stereotypical “maternal instinct”–in the context of which Yates’s behavior appears even more insane–weakens a child-murderer’s ability to use the insanity defense, of course, but that’s a topic for another article. What is noteworthy in this context is the way feminists cast Yates’s behavior: as an understandable (if extreme) reaction to the oppression of normal bourgeois family life. They wound up undermining her insanity defense, even as they thought they were promoting it. Aside from her final murderous act, Andrea Yates was by all accounts a generous soul and a wonderful mother. This sounds like a sick joke, but it is not. When Yates’s attorney asked one of the crime-scene policemen: “Weren’t those five bodies in absolute stark contrast to everything else we saw in that house?” the policeman replied, “I would have to say yes.” Yates’s competence as a mother would seem to be independent of her psychosis–but “women’s advocates” didn’t see it that way. They placed Yates on a continuum with housewives everywhere. Her being a born-again Christian and a home-schooler made her even more appealing as a symbol. There but for abortion, day care, and secular humanism go I. There has never been a better illustration of feminism’s degeneration into a populist movement for the privileged classes. As Bob Herbert put it in an excellent column after the murders: “Suddenly the nation has a mass killer it can empathize with, identify with, care for, even love.” Having five children struck some feminist writers as incitement to murder in the first place. Suzanne O’Malley of the New York Times thought early on that Yates’s husband Rusty, a NASA engineer, had “nudged his wife over the edge,” particularly because he “had fathered a fifth child.” Yates’s shrink Eileen Starbranch noted: “Apparently [patient] and husband plan to have as many babies as nature will allow!” (This may have been a bad decision in Yates’s case–but the exclamation point indicates that Starbranch saw it as an unpardonable eccentricity in general.) The height of feminist absurdity was reached last August when Abigail Trafford, in a Washington Post op-ed, derided the NASA community as “Mommyville, USA, . . . a place where the children are small, support is scarce, husbands are mainly absent and responsibility is overwhelming.” Although the Yates case had initially spurred sympathy for sufferers of post-partum depression, Trafford noted, “now a backlash is setting in.” (Backlash against what? Against a woman’s right to kill her kids?) “Many mothers could imagine going a little stir-crazy in a house alone with five small children, day after day. And those who have had an episode of postpartum depression would know the depth of Andrea Yates’s pain.” But the question is not whether Yates was “a little stir-crazy”; it’s whether she was crazy. In this, feminists were quite confused. When Katie Couric famously aired the number for Yates’s defense fund, and announced that money left over would be given to mental-health charities, her spokesperson dippily told the Washington Post, “I don’t see how it would suggest that NBC is agreeing or supporting” the insanity defense. And when NOW rightly condemned the decision of Harris County prosecutors to seek the death penalty, it did so on the wrong grounds. Prosecutors were seeking to kill Andrea Yates because they pretended to think she wasn’t insane. And they pretended to think this not because they questioned NOW’s assertion that the murders were the act of an overtaxed housewife, but because they accepted it. Both of them were wrong. So what happened to make the jury decide as it did? According to Stanford law professor Lawrence M. Friedman, the M’Naghten test of right and wrong is “at bottom, nothing but words, which a judge can read or recite to a jury. . . . Folk concepts of sanity and insanity [have] probably played more of a role than the official concepts.” It is just such “folk” concepts of sanity that Texas jurors were exercising when they decided to reject the insanity defense. Take the Paul Harrington case, for instance, which many of them had probably discussed around the water cooler at work. Harrington, a Detroit policeman, was found not guilty by reason of insanity after killing his wife and children in 1975. He was released after two months, when it was determined he posed no threat to anyone. In 1999, he killed his second wife and his 3-year-old son. In his 1995 study of juror behavior, “Commonsense Justice,” Georgetown psychology professor Norman J. Finkel wrote that some jurors faced with insanity pleas “may reach a verdict ‘backward’: that is, they first decide whether they want to see the defendant in prison or in a psychiatric hospital, and then decide which verdict is likely to achieve that outcome.” The term of art for this type of reasoning is jury nullification. Capital murder has only two punishments in Texas: death and life in prison. The insanity defense, in the minds of jurors, adds a third possibility: throwing the murderer’s fate into the lap of some credentialed ignoramus from Harvard Medical School who may decide to release Andrea Yates into the neighborhood where their children play. Under the circumstances, the jury was simply not ready to surrender its right to dispose of the case. Criminal-justice intellectuals like to snicker at jurors who think of the insanity defense as an easy out. Such jurors seem not to realize that those acquitted as insane actually spend more time in mental institutions than those guilty of murder spend in jails, according to the American Psychiatric Association. But in this case, the APA might have been wrong. Under Texas law, had Yates been acquitted by reason of insanity, the decision on whether to commit her to a mental facility would have been made by either the judge or a brand new jury. (Yates’s lawyers would have been allowed to pick their preferred option.) And if committed, Yates would have had to have her commitment reauthorized year by year. One local psychiatrist told the Houston Chronicle that he did not believe Yates would have been considered dangerous. There was thus a chance she could have gone free–and soon. What happened in the Yates trial was that a “guilty but insane” verdict was engineered by an obdurate prosecution and abetted by jury nullification. The prosecution clearly did not believe its own case for Yates’s sanity, for it made no argument for capital punishment in the sentencing phase of the trial. The only part of its case that the prosecution believed, in fact, was that Andrea Yates ought to be locked up for a long, long time. That is nothing to be scoffed at; in fact it’s something to be glad of. Prosecutors have a duty to protect us from such people. But the way they did it in the Yates case corroded the justice system by fostering cynicism among jurors, writing into precedent a phony understanding of how the human mind works, and making the law less intelligible and less compelling to those who live under it. Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
