{"id":4005,"date":"2006-07-26T11:31:44","date_gmt":"2006-07-26T18:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/index.php\/archives\/2006\/07\/26\/andrea-yates-not-guilty\/"},"modified":"2006-07-26T11:31:44","modified_gmt":"2006-07-26T18:31:44","slug":"andrea-yates-not-guilty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/26\/andrea-yates-not-guilty\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrea Yates Not Guilty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tThanks to a comment by reader Amber, I’ve learned that Andrea Yates has been found not guilty of murdering the five children she drowned in Texas some five years back:<\/a><\/p>\n

\nA Harris County jury has found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity during her second capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of her children in the family’s bathtub in 2001.<\/p>\n

The verdict upholding Yates’ insanity defense comes after the jury deliberated more than 12 hours over three days. Yates appeared shocked and sat staring wide-eyed with her lips slightly parted as State District Judge Belinda Hill asked each juror individually shortly after noon today whether they agreed with the verdict.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s no question that she did it, of course, but she was clearly nuts and off her meds at the time. This verdict is as much a miscarriage of justice as the guilty verdict in the original trial was. John Cole<\/a> suggested we need a “guilty but insane”<\/a> verdict in cases like this, and I suppose that’s right.<\/p>\n

I went to the same high school as Yates, where we were both on the swimming team (at different times.) The news article doesn’t mention that she’s a fundamentalist Christian, which probably figured into her mental state in a significant way.<\/p>\n

I rather doubt that a father who did something like this would have elicited as much sympathy.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to a comment by reader Amber, I’ve learned that Andrea Yates has been found not guilty of murdering the five children she drowned in Texas some five years back: A Harris County jury has found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity during her second capital murder trial for the drowning deaths of … Continue reading “Andrea Yates Not Guilty”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-12B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}