Andrea Yates Retrial

Browsing the news today, I discovered that Andrea Yates is having a retrial for the murder of her five children by drowning in 2001. Her original conviction was overturned because erroneous testimony may have influenced jurors.

There's no question that she's guilty, the question is whether she was of sound mind when she did it. In other words, what will be decided is whether she goes to prison or to a mental hospital.

While I think she needs to be held accountable for this heinous crime, her psychiatric history brings many mitigating factors into how this case should be decided.

She has a long history of mental instability, and the type of life she led only exacerbated her problems. One doctor had even recommended that she not have any more children.

However, her instability and her religious beliefs hampered her ability to do what was best for her and the children she had. She was married to an extreme fundamentalist husband and they both believed that a wife was to be submissive to her husband and obey him in everything, no matter how unreasonable.

Rusty Yates did not believe in birth control, public schools, nor did he want his wife earning money. And he was frugal with his money. He moved the entire family into a small trailer, decided that Andrea should homeschool the children, and decided to ignore the advice from the doctor that Andrea not have more children, believing it was up to God to decide how many children they would have. Andrea, as a proper submissive fundamentalist wife, and one with shaky self-esteem, did not challenge any of these decisions, but went along with it, even as it continued to erode her already precarious mental health.

One day, she snapped. Unfortunately, her innocent children paid the price.

She's guilty. No doubt about that. And she needs to pay for what she did. No question about that, either.

But I can't help but think that it's not right that Rusty Yates will go completely scot-free for his contribution to this tragedy. He might not have personally drowned those children, but he most certainly poured gasoline on the fire of Andrea's mental illness that ultimately led to the crime. I'm thinking that if he'd taken her mental illness more seriously, this was a crime that could have been prevented.

Thoughts?