Yates gets a new trial... yippie!!!

[Steff]

http://www.theindychannel.com/news/5286592/detail.html

 

 

Andrea Yates To Get New Trial In Kids' Deaths

POSTED: 10:37 am EST November 9, 2005

 

Andrea Yates is going to get a new trial.

 

The Houston homemaker had been sentenced to life in prison for the deaths of three of her five children she says she drowned in 2001. A three-judge appeals court in Texas sided with a defense claim that Yates had been convicted three years ago partly on the false testimony of a prosecution expert witness. The state's First Court of Appeals struck down the convictions earlier this year, saying erroneous testimony by prosecution expert Dr. Park Dietz may have swayed the jury against her.

 

Dietz testified about a "Law & Order" episode in which a woman was acquitted by reason of insanity for drowning her children. No such episode exists.

 

Dietz said he became confused after prosecutors told him there was a "Law and Order" episode with that plot. Dietz -- who's also a consultant to the "Law & Order" producers, said he wrote that information down in his notes.

 

The Newport Beach, Calif., forensic psychiatrist called the error an "honest mistake." But regardless of his misstatement, he said he has no doubt Yates knew right from wrong when she drowned her children.

 

Dietz had attempted to correct his testimony.

 

In a letter Dietz sent to the Harris County District Attorney's Officer shortly after he testified, he admitted to his mistake.

 

"My memory about the content of the show was incorrect. I was confounding the facts of three filicide cases I worked on and two episodes of 'Law & Order,'" Dietz's letter, dated March, 14, 2002, stated.

 

 

The psychiatrist was paid nearly $100,000 to testify at the Yates trial.

 

After the conviction was overturned, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry said he was disappointed and felt the reasoning was not substantial enough to support the new ruling.

 

"We don't believe isolated testimony on cross examination by one of our witnesses had such an impact that it defeated the reliability of all of the other testimony that was presented during the trail. So, that's why we're going to continue to pursue the matter. And that's one of the biggest reasons why we're disappointed," Curry said.

 

A juror from the original trial said previously that testimony about that "Law & Order" episode did not affect their verdict.

 

Leona Baker said Dietz's testimony had no effect on the way jurors reached their verdict and was disappointed the conviction was overturned.

 

"Personally, it made me feel a little discounted in what I did and what I invested my whole life in for a month," Baker said.

 

Baker said she fears another jury would now face the things she did and will have to hear the case again.

[FlaSoxxJim]

I can't even think of what had to be going through the minds of her four kids when she drowned them. Mom, why are you doing this??

 

Even 4 years later I get choked up thinking about this one, it's just absolutely brutal. Poor, poor kids.

[Mercy!]

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November 9, 2005

 

Appeals Court Upholds Ruling in Andrea Yates Case

 

By MARIA NEWMAN

 

Texas's highest criminal court today upheld a lower court ruling in January that tossed out the murder conviction of Andrea Yates, the Houston-area woman who was accused of drowning her children in a bathtub in 2001.

 

The Harris County district attorney's office, which appealed the lower court decision, will now have to decide whether to seek a new trial for Ms. Yates, who is at the Skyview prison psychiatric facility near Houston, or whether to consider a plea bargain.

 

Alan Curry, an assistant district attorney, told The Associated Press that if the case goes back to trial, he is confident Ms. Yates would be convicted again.

 

"Andrea Yates knew precisely what she was doing," Mr. Curry said. "She knew that it was wrong."

 

Wendell Odom, one of Ms. Yates' attorneys, told the Houston Chronicle in today's online edition: "It's good news."

 

He also said he and his colleague George Parnham, who also represents Ms. Yates, will meet with prosecutors and state District Judge Belinda Hill to determine when or whether there will be a new trial.

 

Ms. Yates, who had received diagnoses of postpartum depression and psychosis, confessed to the police in 2001 that she had drowned her five children, ages 6 months to 7 years. A Houston jury convicted her of murder the next year for three of the drownings, rejecting her insanity defense.

 

Ms. Yates's case ignited a national debate about mental illness, postpartum depression and the legal definition of insanity.

 

Today, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin refused to hear the state's petition for discretionary review after the Court of Appeals for the First District of Texas ruled in January that a prosecution expert's false testimony about the television program "Law & Order" required a retrial.

 

During the original trial, Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist who was the prosecution's sole mental health expert, testified that Ms. Yates was psychotic at the time of the murders but knew right from wrong. The latter conclusion meant that she was not insane under Texas's unusually narrow definition of legal insanity.

 

On cross-examination, Dr. Dietz was asked about his work as a consultant on ' "Law & Order," a program Ms. Yates, the appeals court said, "was known to watch." He was asked whether any of the episodes he had worked on concerned "postpartum depression or women's mental health."

 

"As a matter of fact," he answered, "there was a show of a woman with postpartum depression who drowned her children in the bathtub and was found insane, and it was aired shortly before the crime occurred."

 

The prosecution returned to the issue of the show several times in closing arguments. But it turns out there never had been such an episode. The falsehood was discovered after the jury convicted Ms. Yates, but before they had sentenced her.

 

Dr. Dietz insisted he made an honest mistake, and the prosecution asked for a mistrial. Judge Hill refused, but made sure jurors were told of the error before they began deliberating on her punishment.

 

The jury sentenced Ms. Yates to life in prison after rejecting the death penalty.

 

The appeals court ruled that Judge Hill should have declared a mistrial based on the erroneous testimony, and today, the higher court agreed.

 

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

[Mercy!]

Time to Stop the Madness

 

Nov. 9, 2005

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The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals confirmed Wednesday what we already knew about the monumentally sad murder trial of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned all five of her children, one by one, in the bathtub of their home in June 2001.

 

Yates conviction was tainted, the appeals court reiterated, by the false testimony of a hired-gun expert witness for the prosecution who helped convince tough-on-crime jurors that Yates' actions that awful day were premeditated and thus criminal. In a justice system known sometimes less for its reason and more for its passions the ruling by the panel is as righteous as it is fair.

 

Anyone who sat through even a portion of Yates' trial in the late winter of 2002 knows that the evidence clearly established that she was severely mentally ill when she killed her kids; that she was delusional, that she was on the wrong medication at the time and that many people close to her let her down on many different levels. Anyone who listened to the testimony of the witnesses knows that if we are to have an insanity defense under the law it ought to have been applied to someone like Yates.

 

Now that they have failed to defend on appeal what amounts to an unconstitutional trial Texas prosecutors have to decide whether to retry Yates or try to work out a deal with her lawyers that would end the litigation once and for all. This should not be a difficult choice. Every relevant factor a prosecutor typically would look at in deciding whether or not to bring a case to trial weighs in favor of a deal here. It's time to stop the madness. Time to stop trying to force the health-care case of Andrea Yates into the prism of the criminal justice system.

 

Yates' family never wanted a first trial and almost certainly won't want a second one. As the putative surviving victim, Russell Yates, the defendant's former husband, certainly won't be pushing to put his ex-wife back in court. He is not entirely blameless in this story, of course, and no doubt wants to put it behind him as much as is humanly possible as he charts a course toward a new life. Every family member who has spoken on the public record seems to agree that the killings were a tragedy, perhaps an avoidable one, but not worthy of a push to send Yates off to prison for the rest of her life. Prosecutors must listen to their pleas.

 

Yates' prosecutors also have to look at the public interest that would be served by re-trying Yates. Will the "interests of justice" -- whatever that means -- be served if Yates is tried again? Does anyone seriously believe that Yates will have "gotten away with it" if she is not prosecuted again? I don't think so. Especially after her first trial, when the breadth and depth of her illness became clear, I have not sensed a great public clamor to send Yates away to prison as opposed to sending her to a mental health facility. In fact, I sense the opposite.

 

If there was something positive to come out of the killings, it was that the Yates' trial educated a great many people about the horrible effects of post-partum depression and its related illnesses. That education should not have faded during the intervening four years. I suspect that more people than before perceive Andrea Yates herself as a victim -- not as someone who deserves to spend the rest of her life in complete freedom but not as someone who deserves to spend the rest of her life in the Texas penal system, either.

 

And that's perhaps the best reason to avoid a trial. Whether prosecutors get a conviction or not, Yates will be confined and heavily medicated for the rest of her life. She will not in either case be free to enjoy the life she knew before her illness took hold. She will not in either case be writing any books or taunting her jailors or initiating frivolous litigation.

 

So why spend the time and the money and the effort -- why put so many people through the pain of that particularly painful trial -- just to ensure that Yates becomes a convict? When you consider that a conviction at trial is no sure thing, a new trial just doesn't make legal sense.

 

You wouldn't know it from listening to prosecutors Wednesday in the wake of the appellate court action. They were defiant. "Several witnesses, ours and there's, testified that Andrea Yates knew precisely what she was doing," said Harris County District Attorney Alan Curry. Yates, he said, "knew that it was wrong under God's law, under man's law under society's expectations, her family's beliefs. We would anticipate that a jury would come to the same conclusion with regard to her insanity."

 

This is not the language of solemn and judicious thought. It is the language of conflict and ego. Harris County prosecutors now have a rare second chance in the law to do the right thing. Andrea Yates never should have been tried in the first place. And she should never be tried again. Her place is not in a Texas prison. Her place is in a mental health hospital, where she can be treated for her illness and studied as a test case so that women in the future may be spared her pain and the pain she caused so many others.

 

Sometimes good people do terrible things for reasons the rest of us cannot fathom. Sometimes those things constitute a crime, for which severe punishment is appropriate, and sometimes they don't, in which case our society offers other options. This is one of those times. Prosecutors should back off Yates and let the doctors take over. She was a loving mother who in a moment of madness killed those she loved the most. That is the epitome of madness and it has no place in our court systems or in our prisons.

 

Prosecutors always talk about crime and punishment and remind us of how one should fit the other. But even if you stipulate that Yates committed the "crime" of murder there is no fit "punishment" for her. Yates herself is uniquely situated. She is the killer of her children but also one of the few most deeply affected by their deaths. No matter where she spends the rest of her days, she will have to live with the memory of what she did on the morning of June 20, 2001 to the five little souls she loved most in the world.

 

That is more punishment than any prosecutor or jailor ever could mete out. It is more punishment than most of us ever could take. And if you ask me it is punishment enough.

 

 

By Andrew Cohen

©MMV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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[kapkomet]

It's amazing to me the different spins that different people put on the same story. This is a clasic example.

[Steff]

It's amazing to me the different spins that different people put on the same story.  This is a clasic example.

 

 

No matter the view.. the bottom line is the same. The woman killed her kids, and has no business being able to roam free. Does she belong in prison or a mental institute is the question.. a question that can be answered without spending anther few million $$'s on a trial.

[FlaSoxxJim]

I can't even think of what had to be going through the minds of her kids when she drowned them.  Mom, why are you doing this??

 

Even 4 years later I get choked up thinking about this one, it's just absolutely brutal.  Poor, poor kids.

I never said there were not underlying psychological and/or pharmaceutical reasons underlying her actions (as is the case with so many brutal acts), simply that the story hit me incredibly hard when it happened and it still hits me hard now that it is back in the news.

 

From my standpoint, except in the case of the most singularly selfish individuals, maternal instinct would override murderous postpartum urges. If things seem so hopeless and desparate, take yourself out of the game and leave your kids alive.

 

JMO

[Steff]

JMO

 

 

Excellent opinion, IMO.

[Mercy!]

I never said there were not underlying psychological and/or pharmaceutical reasons underlying her actions (as is the case with so many brutal acts), simply that the story hit me incredibly hard when it happened and it still hits me hard now that it is back in the news.

 

From my standpoint, except in the case of the most singularly selfish individuals, maternal instinct would override murderous postpartum urges.  If things seem so hopeless and desparate, take yourself out of the game and leave your kids alive.

 

JMO

Hi Jim – Just to be clear, I wasn’t commenting on your first comment just because I posted after it twice above.

 

Regarding your second post, however, I'll agree that the notion that people possessed by these (biochemical) demons are either “selfish” or should be able to just walk away from their situations is probably a common one.

 

I found the article below to be an interesting analysis of this woman’s case

 

http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/djglp/art...gen10p1.htm#FA0

WHO IS ANDREA YATES? A SHORT STORY ABOUT INSANITY