Texas has one of the nation’s highest bars for a successful insanity defense. When John Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity for attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan, the mental illness test went out the window and federal law and many states returned to a right-wrong standard. This proved to be the loophole that everyone had been afraid of. Around fifty years ago, there was a swing away from the right-wrong test toward a mental illness standard: If a criminal act was the result of a mental disease or defect (even an irresistible impulse), the defendant was not guilty by reason of insanity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a test was in place that in some form prevails today: A defendant was insane if he did not know the nature and quality of his act or if he did know it, he did not know it was wrong. The question has always been how to limit the defense so that every criminal can’t claim to have acted under the spell of a delusion and go free. English law has recognized for more than four hundred years that children and “lunatics” lack the mental capacity to form a criminal intent. The insanity defense exists because the intention to commit an illegal act is a fundamental element of criminal conduct. Was this a choice for which she should be held responsible? Or were her neurons, synapses, and brain cells wired in such a way that protecting her children and being a good mother did not mean the same things to her that they mean to you and me? To put it in the language of the legal system, Was Andrea Yates not guilty of capital murder by reason of insanity? She came to believe that she was possessed by Satan and the only way to save her children from the evil one for all eternity was to kill them now so that they could get to heaven before it was too late. Some of humankind’s most cherished qualities-a mother’s instinct to protect her offspring, the power of reason that elevates us above the rest of the animal kingdom, the religious faith that impels us to identify and resist evil-went wrong inside the mind of Andrea Yates. It leads us to question something that we like to think of as a settled moral issue: that a person ought to be held responsible for her actions and her choices. But the case of Andrea Yates may be the most disturbing of all. “Probably since I realized I have not been a good mother to them.”Īs you can see from perusing the pages of this issue on crime, Texas has provided the world with many a sensational murder story. “Um, how long have you been having thoughts about wanting, or not wanting to, but drowning your children?” “Okay, um, you had thought of this prior to this day?” “Was it in reference to, or was it because the children had done something?” he asked. The transcript reads, “15 seconds of silence.” Why were you going to drown the children?” “Um, after you drew the bathwater, what was your intent?” “About three inches from the top,” he said. Then she filled the bathtub with water, about three inches from the top. In response to Mehl’s questions, Yates told how the day began normally: She got up a little after eight o’clock, fed the children cereal for breakfast, and said good-bye to her husband, Rusty, when he left for work around nine. ON THE AFTERNOON of June 20, 2001, Houston police sergeant Eric Mehl turned on a tape recorder in an interview room in the homicide division and began to take the confession of Andrea Yates, who earlier that day had drowned her five children, ranging from six months to seven years old, in her own bathtub.
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