Jury's Duty

The jury in the trial of Andrea Yates found her guilty of murdering three of her children. (The state may prosecute her for the murders of the other two children she killed if it isn't satisfied with her eventual sentence in this trial.) It shouldn't have been such a hard decision, and indeed it only took three-and-a-half hours of deliberation. After all, Yates had confessed to the crimes.

But Yates and her defense team tried to argue that, even if she did it, she wasn't responsible, because she suffered from a postpartum mental illness. Yet juries, using common sense and traditional notions of moral culpability, tend not to be sympathetic to insanity defenses.

And indeed they shouldn't be. The defense was essentially arguing that Yates suffered from a "mental illness," and hence was no more responsible for the very complicated act of drowning five kids in a row than a hemophiliac is responsible for bleeding when cut. But there's no scientific evidence that an "illness"–organic brain disease–compelled Yates' crime. There's only the defense implication that you'd have to be crazy to do something that awful. So it's no surprise the jury decided as they did.

A comment from Yates' lawyer George Parnham is telling for how completely he misunderstands the situation. "It seems to me we are still back in the days of the Salem Witch Trials" he said after his defendant was found guilty. That's a bad analogy. In witch trials, a woman who had committed no crime was found guilty because of a belief, for which there was no legitimate evidence, that she occupied a role-that of witch-that made her instantly guilty. In Yates' case, a woman who had committed a heinous crime was found guilty for what she did, despite attempts, for which there was no legitimate evidence, to claim that she occupied a role-that of the mentally ill-that made her instantly not guilty. Parnham's real complaint is that the jury was not bewitched by his claims about his client.