Yates case

I was just wondering...does anyone know the particulars of this case? From what it sounds like this woman was mentally troubled to begin with and subsequently suffered a severe post partum psychosis. It sounds like the prosecution won the case by arguing that even though she was "mentally disturbed" she still knew the "difference between right and wrong". My question is, if someone is psychotic, which right away means they have a disturbed perception of reality, how do you differentiate between right and wrong? I believe this case sets a dangerous precedent. Let's say I am on a medication that has a rare side effect of inducing psychosis. If I now go out and do something horrible, am I "responsible for my own actions"? Something about this case troubles me very much.

I have a rule for dumb, crazy people: SIT STILL IN THE CORNER WITH YOUR HEAD BETWEEN YOUR KNEES, AND DON'T MOVE UNTIL YOU STARVE TO DEATH.


Anything else is just arrogance. I don't presume myself to be capable of writing an exhaustive volume enumerating every aspect of right and wrong in every situation. Meaning, the easiest way to differentiate right from wrong is to run it by your peers. If this woman had run it by her peers, they would have said "Don't drown your children." It is not given to us as individuals to play God. So, sure, I may have a twisted idea of right versus wrong, but that only becomes dangerous if I choose to act on it in violation of popular notions and the law. And to go against the world isn't just crazy, it's arrogant.


This woman was not just crazy, but arrogant when she took such a serious moral calculation into her own hands. She is not being punished for craziness, but for arrogance. Whatever her higher ideals may have been, she simply has to put them on hold in this lifetime, or be locked in a cage. That's reality.


eLROY

She was psychotic, but not legally insane.

It was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that she was aware killing her children was wrong. She locked all doors..hid all keys..took phones off of hooks..placed each child in the bed after she drowned him/her...so that the remaining children would not see what she had done to their siblings and thus become more alarmed. This points to her being aware of the fact that what she was doing was wrong. Her eldest son, Noah, begged and pleaded for his life, screaming that he was "a bad boy and that he was sorry." She thought about herself..and her husband. Many people that kill their children do it to hurt their spouse. It was proven that her husband had been very critical of her home-shcooling efforts and general raising of the children. She must have felt hopelessly trapped. What chance does a woman with five babies have of making it on her own..and maybe the thought that being stuck with an imbecile like Russell Yates was unacceptable to her any longer.

When an officer that had just emerged from the back bedroom after viewing the dead children asked her, "Do you know what you have done, lady?" She responded, "I killed my children."

She was not insane..she knew that killing them was wrong. The legal criteria for insanity has been, for hundreds of years, the ability to discern between right and wrong. I firmly believe she knew she was committing murder that day. And that she could have called for someone to save those lost angels from their mother had she wanted them to live. She was an ice-hearted monster that day. I do believe she may have gone insane post-event. How could she not? How could anyone deal with the fact that they killed five innocent babies. And, if there is a God, I truly do believe the worst punishment for her is yet to come.

Insanity is still a viable defense. It was proven in my mind..and in the mind of 12 jurors..that she, with deliberate thought and awareness of her actions, massacred those five babies.

The world is a messed up place.

"She was psychotic, but not legally insane."


Psychiatrically speaking, there is no such thing as "insanity." At least I don't remember learning about any such condition every existing in the DSM IV. Psychosis refers to "A severe mental disorder, with or without organic damage, characterized by derangement of personality and loss of contact with reality and causing deterioration of normal social functioning." I think she fully qualifies for this definition. I disagree with what you said about her knowing what she did was wrong. If what she did was wrong, why did she openly admit to doing it immediately afterwards to the police? How can a person who has lost touch with reality be able to discern between right and wrong?

almost all of these killers have been on mind altering drugs like prozac.


i believe in this specific case the woman was on 4 or 5 such drugs.


brad

I guess we are arguing semantics here.


I believe in varying degrees of psychosis. I believe she was in desperate need of medication and treatment. However, I dont believe she did NOT know that killing her children was wrong. Her actions before, during and after the murders leave that to be the only viable conclusion. I also believe she made a choice to kill them and willfully did so. And I believe she could have decided not to kill them. An insane person does not do and say the things she did to accomplish that unspeakable act.

'I believe she was in desperate need of medication and treatment.'


im pretty sure she was on 4 or 5 mind altering medications (which have homicidal tendencies as side effects).


brad

almost all of these killers have been on mind altering drugs like prozac.


Prozac is an antidepressant. Its effects against psychosis are probably none or at most minimum. All psychiatric drugs are "mind altering" to some extent. I am pretty sure she was not on any anti-psychotics.

ill look it up and post a link.


but some antidepressants like prozac do have side effects which include extreme rage, homicidal tendencies, whatever. if you dont agree with that i can look that up too.


brad

a routers story posted in a newsgroup. (if you contest this i can find you know a news story on a newspaper webpage, but this should do)


you have to copy the text and then paste it into your browsers address bar, for some reason you cant just click on it.


http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9guhqk%241hr%241%40pencil.math.missour i.edu&oe=ISO-8859-1&output=gplain


husband: 'She was currently taking medication that included

Haldol, Yates said.'

http://www.mercola.com/2001/aug/4/drowning.htm


'The first of these psychopharmacological cocktails included Haldol, an antipsychotic most often used to treat schizophrenia; Effexor, an antidepressant very similar to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs); and Wellbutrin, a unique antidepressant that has amphetaminelike effects.'

the fact that if this were a man that did the same crime, he wouldve got the death penalty.


nothing like equality...


b

I guess her psychosis WAS diagnosed if they were trying to manage it with haldol. Like I said in my original post, I don't know all the details of the case, but it does sound like she was a loving mother. Whatever the details, I remain convinced that if the lady was not psychotic, she would not have killed her children.


By the way, the website you referenced in the last post looks to be one of those "natural wellness" sites that have a strong anti pharmaceutical bias. I'm not saying drugs or the companies that make them are perfect, but many of these sites skew facts and statistics in order to support their agenda.

Do you believe that psychotic people are able to differentiate between right and wrong?

This seems a little silly. I don't think anybody, subjectively, is able to "differentiate between right and wrong." Morals are an objective thing. You need one person to come up with a subjective idea and survive, and then another person for whom the survival of this first person becomes an objective fact, proved beyond doubt by the fact the survivor was able to pass his idea on.


The strength of a moral is a function of how many people it has safely been passed through, across how many generations. The minimum validation distance is probably something like you have to pass it on to children who survive to pass it on to children, or something. And horizontal propagation isn't really "morals" at all, more like AIDS.


Some "scientific" people might consider the "hallucination" that Jesus loves them to be a manifestation of psychosis in other people. But I would argue that the human brain is perfectly built to absorb and exhibit just the sort of social hallucination that morals require. It is only when you detach the psychotic brain from the social moral thread that it begins to drift into dangerous behavior.


Put simply, psychotic people make good religious fanatics, and we need only to plug them into the wellspring. A psychotic human brain - and all are originally "psychotic" - that flails independently from the social/moral root network is really just a wild animal, and needs to be treated as such.


But that is not even what we had with Andrea Yates. Yates new she would be punished for her deeds. So, yes, I believe pyschotic people are capable of learning and realizing what will make other people mad. But the funny thing about morals is that the reason you suffer consequences for bad deeds is not because you know the deeds are bad.


The consequences for immoral behvaior are inherent in the physical universe, and as such exist regardless of what the individual knows. If you want to adopt morals to protect yourself, that is your own problem. You just cannot make immoral behavior moral by being ignorant. The consequences are not some free-floating game we invented to entertain ourselves.


5 children are dead. The way the universe works its magic to stop that is by short-circuiting the perpetrator. The idea that people might, for their own interest, elect not to be perpetrators, to avoid this, is irrelevant. The universe deals with killers. If everyone who is psychotic gets a free pass, you will end up with a society of psychotics, that will quickly disintegrate and be replaced by a society where psychotics are either indoctrinated or erased.


It's like, if she couldn't tell she was murdering them, does that me they can't tell if their dead? As one economist put it, bats may be blind, but they'll still slam into a cave wall as hard as anyone else. There is a reality, regardless of your opinion of my opinion of his opinion. And it grinds along and disposes of murderers, even as intellectuals mumble to themselves and second-guess it.


If we cast our lot with murderers, we just slam into the wall alongside them. Anyway...


eLROY

All I know is that anyone who can kill their own child is not looking at the world right. Period. Whether or not they were cognizant and/or deliberate in their actions. Then again, I'm not saying the verdict was wrong.


I can't help my wanting to hug my kids after hearing f*cked up stories like this.

There are a lot of loving mommas in jail. I seriously doubt that she will make it a year before somebody offs her. unless they put her in a nut ward.


The number of child molesters who die in prison is one of the few things that leave me with any faith in humanity. I hope she gets the same treatment.

Hetron, you said something interesting:


"Something about this case troubles me."


Maybe that is the whole point. After all, there is no question we cannot have people going around killing five children. But there really isn't much "we" can do about it, short of doing away with the perpetrators after the fact.


But I bet you, Hetron, would think there is something we can do, or should do differently. Only, if we don't punish YOU - by "troubling" you by putting Yates in prison - you will never waste your time to figure out what that something is. Meaning, if we don't do away with her, nothing will change, and children will be killed again.


In all honesty, you would probably be happy to see a woman who killed 5 children walk. And we just can't have 5 children being killed, and you being happy. There has to be a feedback loop, which causes undesirable things to be less likely to happen in the future.


So the more people who are "troubled" by the fate of Andrea Yates, the better. You should be so fortunate that, if you are ever ruthlessly murdered, somebody somewhere will be troubled as a result of it, on your behalf, as well. It's amazing how the footprint of local costs can be spread around to remote lives!


If you think you are responsible to these people then you are the criminal, are you not? Funny how natural human tendencies are so efficiently harnessed and exploited by a legal system that evolved around humans for the last several thousand years:)


eLROY

i believe that number is skewed more-so in male prisons than female ones.

What ever happened to: I killed five people...I go to prison for life! Or has The socialite Charles Manson been released yet?

If it was your five kids,would you let her go? If my wife killed my five kids,I might help the prosecution anyway I can. Whats wrong with your thinking,is that you have been brainwashed since grade school.You have been brainwashed to FEEL instead of think. Reality plays no part in your emotions.How could it. You have been taught to UNDERSTAND that people have the So Called Right to do what they FEEEEL. Ya,Hitler did what he felt like too.I wouldn't care about this if I only had six months to live,because I wouldn't be affected by what the future generation does to our society.


Screw you Brad and all of your co-friends

i just did a search and some stuff popped out. the one somebody pasted into a newsgroup posting was by reuters.


brad

So many people discount the fact that some people just are evil. How can people say this woman was insane and Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate his victims, not be? I honestly believe that she was married to an idiot and that she felt trapped. Stuck in a marriage that she could never extricate herself from. Five children to care for that would keep her forever bound to Russell Yates. And lastly, she is now being scolded and berated by him for being less than a good mother, i.e. the children's home-schooling being sub-standard in his opinion. I honestly can look at this woman, she is plainer than a box of grey moon rocks, and see how she could have felt she would never be able to have any kind of viable life. Try being a single woman with five children to raise, unstable as it is and looking like her. I would certainly feel trapped if I were her. And I would be pissed off as all hell at the husband that, by his own words, was little help with the children when he wasn't off working. Imagine her thinking her life is over anyway and harboring hatred for this man. And then imagine hating him and her life so very much that she took away the only things that kept her bound to him..the children. I believe she thought she found a way to hurt Russell, which doesn't seem to be the case. He is the most unemotional person I have ever seen that has just lost loved ones. He seems to refer to the children only when asked and then in obligatory terms. This would mean that she was an evil person that very effectively extricated herself from what to her could have been interpreted as a fate worse than the death penalty...having to wake up next to that moron for the rest of her life.

This idea that she is "trapped" by having to take care of the children she produced, and by having to hang around with a guy whom she had sex with at least twice spaced apart by a 4-year interval - and probably much more - is offending me.


Taking care of these children is her role on this Earth. It is what she was put here for. What is her ambition, to become an astronaut and walk on the moon? To become a famous baseball player? Come on, now. Here life wasn't "over," rather, it had just been discovered:)


eLROY