![]() ![]() "What's wrong with Mary?" asked Noah, 7, eying his 6-month-old baby sister, who lay motionless in the water. “Defendants whose crimes derive from their mental illness should be sent to a hospital and treated-not cast into a prison, much less onto death row.Andrea Yates had just killed four of her children when the fifth one wandered into the bathroom, where his mother was kneeling by the tub. Prisons are overloaded with mentally ill prisoners, most of whom do not receive adequate treatment,” they said. ![]() “The victims of mental illness are sick-just as sick as if they had cancer or chronic heart failure-and, as human beings, deserve humane and effective treatment for their illness. She added that “many people simply don’t believe in psychiatric conditions as genuine diseases.”Īt the time of the first trial, APA released a statement highlighting the importance of understanding mental illness. So they thought it was essential that the court send a message that would convince other mothers out there that they couldn’t get away with harming their children.” “They could not accept any excuse for a mother harming her children. “It was clear that some people were swayed by their intense feelings about the sanctity of motherhood,” she said. Many mental health advocates were pleased with the outcome of the latest verdict, with the vice president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Dr. The money she earns goes to the Yates Children Memorial Fund, which Parnham started with his wife to raise awareness about mental health for women. Parnham keeps in touch with Yates and said she makes small items for the state hospital, like cards, aprons and gifts, to sell. This undated file photo shows four of the five Yates children, from right, Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, and Luke, 2. “There’s not a day that goes by where she doesn’t care for, talk about, is happy for her children’s lives before June 20 - and grieves for her children,” Parnham told Today. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. ![]() She was convicted of capital murder in 2002, but it was deemed a mistrial because one of the psychiatrists gave incorrect testimony. Yates saw her doctor on June 18 and denied having any “psychotic symptoms or suicidal thoughts.” When asked, she told her mother-in-law she might “need it.” In May 2001, her husband’s mother observed that she would fill up the bathtub at her house for no apparent reason. ![]() When she was discharged from one of her hospital visits, the doctor recommended that “someone stay with her at all times and that she not be left alone with her children,” according to court documents. Yates ended up giving birth to a daughter, Mary. “Despite a psychiatrist’s warning that having another child would almost certainly provoke another psychotic episode, the Yateses had a fifth child.” The medication was apparently effective, but Andrea believed she had been given ‘truth serum,’ which caused her to lose control of herself,” according to an article in The Lancet. “Finally, she received a drug cocktail containing an antipsychotic agent. This image released by Houston Police shows Andrea Pia Yates 21 June, 2001 after being arrested and charged with capital murder-multiple counts in the deaths 20 June of her five children, Mary 6 months, Luke 2, Paul 3, John 5 and Noah 7. Yates had been suffering from severe depression and had attempted suicide on multiple occasions.ĭespite a string of hospital visits, treatments before the drownings were unsuccessful. “If I didn’t do it, they would be tormented by Satan,” she said in an interview from jail. Yates, who was influenced by the teachings of conservative Christian minister Michael Woroniecki, reportedly believed that killing them would save their souls. She then called her husband and told him to come home. In June 2001, after drowning her five children in a bathtub at her home in a Houston suburb, she called police. “And I mean, hypothetically, where would she go? What would she do?” Where she needs to be,” her former attorney George Parnham told ABC13. ![]()
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