Andrea Yates - Still Crazy After All These Years

7/31/2006

News Flash: She's still nuts

Back in the good old days, before 9/11, Katrina, the Iraq war, the rise of Hezbollah, and Big Dick Cheney with a shotgun, the evil doers we had to deal with were still evil, but their scope was a bit smaller. In June 2001, the worst evil we could conjure up was, oh let's say, some mother drowning her five kids in the bathtub. Seems kind of quaint and naive now, doesn't it? 

Not only did Andrea Yates do that, she had the misfortune to do it in Texas. Down there, they don't put up with any of that insanity defense crap. The hell with that, the Long Tall Texans say, throw the crazy bitch in jail and toss the key down to the bottom of the Rio Grande! She's lucky George W Bush ain't still the governor cause he'd stick that lethal injection needle right through her damn arm hisself! 

So with that kind of attitude pervading the jury pool, you'd think all the prosecutors would have to do was display a few pictures of the drowned kids and point the long finger of the law right at crazy old Andrea, right? Apparently taking lessons from OJ Simpson's swinish prosecution team, these Texans wanted to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Andrea was guilty, even if they had to make stuff up to do it. 

Their stupid little plot was to have a psychiatrist testify at Andrea's trial that he'd seen an episode of "Law and Order" where a mother suffering from postpartum depression drowned her children. That should prove to any idiot that Andrea methodically and cunningly planned the whole thing! She wasn't crazy! She was just a couch potato corrupted by TV! 

The jury bought it all, found Andrea guilty and sent her to jail for life. She's been there for the last five years and presumably would be there until the end of time but for one inconvenient fact: There was no such episode of "Law and Order". It was a scam set up by overly zealous prosecutors. Why her defense attorney didn't check that out at the time is unclear, but someone managed to bring it up to an appeals court and get Andrea's conviction overturned. 

Think that's an unfair outrage and another sign of Evil winning over Good? Take it up with the Houston DA. A second trial was held and last week, Andrea was found not guilty by reason of insanity. This jury decided that any woman who chases down her five children and drowns them one by one in the bathtub because God wanted her to must be out of her freaking head. My brief reaction to this bit of profound thinking: No Shit! 

Among the many Texans who might have been disturbed by the thought of Andrea being released from jail was her ex-husband Russell. Russ and his religious gurus were the ones responsible for throwing gasoline, in the form of religious mumbo jumbo, on what was already a raging forest fire of insanity in Andrea's head. They told Andrea that her whole family was on a one way trip to hell, so she figured out one way to reroute the trip. Add that to multiple pregnancies after a diagnosis of severe postpartum depression and the responsibility to be the family home school teacher, and you have one very sick momma. 

One sick momma who will now be in a mental institution subject to annual sanity hearings to determine whether she's fit to re-enter society. Russ, who's now re-married, must be soiling his underwear at an amazing pace. You should be, too. Do you know where your kids are taking their baths tonight? 

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