Lead prosecutor Joe Ownby told NEWSWEEK that he will not call any witnesses in the morning when state District Judge Belinda Hill asks him to begin presenting his case for punishment. Ownby says the egregiousness of her crime–drowning her five children in the family bathtub on June 20 of last year–is evidence enough that she deserves to die by lethal injection. Yates was convicted Tuesday on two counts of capital murder in the deaths of three of her children.
“We feel we already have sufficient evidence to meet our burden of proof,” Ownby told NEWSWEEK. But Yates, a former high school valedictorian, nurse and stay-at-home mom, has no prior offenses, legal experts note, meaning prosecutors could have a hard time convincing a jury that she would be a future danger to society.
“I’d be surprised if the state could find evidence that Andrea Yates ever got sent to the principal’s office,” says Houston defense lawyer Brian Wice. “Andrea Yates is your totally atypical death penalty defendant,” Wice adds. “Your typical death penalty defendant has a list of crimes longer than an Amtrak ticket on the Eastern seaboard….I really believe no jury in Harris County would give Andrea Yates the death penalty.”
Yates’s defense attorneys, though, still intend to call several witnesses to show that her well-documented history of severe mental disease should be considered “mitigating evidence,” or reason to sentence her to life in prison rather than to death. If sentenced to life, Yates would be 77 before considered for parole.
Wice, a criminal defense lawyer in Houston for more than 20 years, says he even questions whether Harris County District Attorney Chuck Ronsenthal, who made the decision to seek the death penalty for Yates soon after the drownings, continues to believe she should pay the ultimate price. “I’m not sure he thinks that it is the appropriate punishment,” he says.
Gerald Treece, associate dean of the South Texas College of Law, says he also expects the jury to decide to sentence Yates to life in prison, in part because the state will call no witnesses, but also because of Yates’s history of illness. “They’re not going to execute her,” Treece says. “This woman has too many mitigating factors.”
Yates, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was hospitalized twice in 1999 after she tried to commit suicide on two occasions following the birth of her fourth child. Doctors testified that she was originally diagnosed with major depression and psychosis. She improved after being treated with a combination of drugs, including the powerful anti-psychotic drug Haldol, according to testimony and her medical records.
But she suffered a setback in early 2000, shortly after the birth of her fifth child. Ironically, the death of her father on March 12, 2000 has been noted as the day when Yates’s mental health began to deteriorate. (The jury returned its guilty verdicts on the one-year anniversary of her father’s death.)
Yates was again hospitalized two more times in the spring, each time with major depression and symptoms of psychosis. She improved slightly, again after being placed on Haldol, but declined rapidly when she was taken off the drug two weeks before the drownings. (Her treating psychiatrist testified that he took Yates off the drug because he did not think it was helping her and that he saw no evidence of psychosis.)
Defense attorneys argued that Yates slipped into a deep psychosis in which she began to have both hallucinations and delusions. She told a jail psychiatrist the day after the drownings that she believed she was possessed by Satan, and that she was such a bad mother that her children were not “righteous.” She said that, although she expected to be punished, she felt she had to kill her children to save them from eternal life in the fires of hell.
During closing arguments, defense attorney George Parnham noted that Yates was by all accounts a loving mother who doted on her children, but who was so mentally ill that she did not fully understand that her actions were wrong. “If Andrea Pia Yates doesn’t meet the test for insanity, than nobody does,” Parnham said. “We might as well wipe it from the books.”
But prosecutors pointed to several statements Yates made to police and others that she knew her actions were wrong. And in a play to the jury’s emotion, prosecutor Kaylynn Williford asked jurors in closing arguments to sit in silence in the jury room for a full three minutes–the minimum amount of time it took each child to lose consciousness while being held under water by Yates. She also reminded jurors of Yates’s own confession in which the mother described drowning the children one by one face-down. “I want you to look at the loving act of a loving mother,” Williford said.
