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Yates Conviction Overturned


Shellon
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I totally agree, david, its just that she needs mental help!!! I think she should be in the mental ward for a long long time. Or at least until she is well and years afterwards to make sure she stays stable.

I think her hubby should have gotten in trouble too, as I felt that he had played a part in it knowing she was having mental problems.

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ONe thing shell, that troubles me and maybe you can answer me this knowing you have had some training in this area....

What troubles me is when she was told the news she was excited and smiled. I don't know if I would be doing well and would just want to die realizing I had killed my kids....all five of them...something isn't quite right, I don't think...or am I thinking too much?

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quote:
I think her hubby should have gotten in trouble too, as I felt that he had played a part in it knowing she was having mental problems.

That gets a Hmmmmm (since we don't know what was all going on), but I absolutely agree with you -- there probably were "warning signs", and tragically -- I think that he either did not see them, or ignored them.

This whole thing is making me re-evaluate how a person who is *mentally ill* really does *think*. I still believe her guilty, regardless of whatever mental process happened to be in gear at that time, but you raise a good point.

Gotta think that lack of *proper court proceedings* doesn't make her any less guilty, or any less in need of help, but I do wonder what kind of help she can get, that would do any good -- at this late date.

Just an IMHO.

David

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She is insane, she has a long documented history of a serious mental illnes. Does that excuse her act? no but it gives reason.

The husband on the other hand KNEW she was unstable KNEW she struggled to the degree she did YET continued to demand she have more children. Continued to tell her God will judge her and heal her etc. and that she was weak and condemed her.

he set up the crime in my opinon. He had his mother stay with her knowing full well how very very ill she was after the birth of her last child...the Drs. warned them and she got worse with every pregnancy not better. He was the one insisting she go off the medicine to have another child to nurse another child. He burden a disabled person with so much stress and inability to cope KNOWING she would in no way be able to cope.

It didnt take two to have these children now dead it took one controlling demanding man who abused a woman who was very ill. I see no love for her or these children in him only a pomppous self righteous abuser who demands his way at any cost. and the cost wa very high in the end.

I saw him in his church with the five caskets and the tears with the pastor and congregation supporting him and I wanted to choke him my own self.

she did what she did because she was trapped in an illness and a abusive marriage with no way out and wanted to save what she loved by sending them to God, the same god her husband abused and condemed her with every single day.

she was a good mother and a good wife. What eles could she do?

She recognized she couldnt handle what was going on in her brain and at least tried to take care of the children and obey her husband. What did HE DO ?

I think he is as guilty if not more so than her.

Is she ill? no question . She never not once denied it, Is he a killer of people and of inncocent souls again no question. Yet the rally of so called christians with the victim mentality rally once again not to the sick and broken hearted as Jesus would have done but to the man who claims to know all what is best for his wife and children yet never once loving her enough to rise up and truly love or help her in honesty and truth.

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Yes ex.

If she is able to get a grip and become aware of what happened she has to live with it , she will never be allowed to have children again . I think she did what she did out of love. not hate or selfish pride .

HIM on the other hand will have more kids and will be applauded by the world of fools as a victim who has overcome all with God.

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I have a sibling with serious mental illness(paranoid schizoprenic, obsessive compulsive and bi polar. Nice mix.) With medication he is still not able to live a 'normal' life. With out medication he is completley delusional and believes/thinks/acts in weird, dangerous, unpredictable and unexpected ways--which seem logical to him. He is also genius level IQ, a scary guy when not medicated.

He is currently in a mental hospital, and will probably be there for at least two years. Maybe longer.

He has lived his entire adult life(he's in his fifties) with family members. When he is on medication(which takes months to take full affect) he does not particularly remember his delusions...my mother once had him write down a wild story so she could 'investigate' it, he does not remember the story or the writing it down and was quite upset when it was given to him( we were trying to help him voluntarily commit himself and go to counseling by pointing out how crazy he can be.)

I see Andrea Yates more as a victim than anything else. How could her family and husband not know how sick she was? Some one that ill, that delusional---surely it was noticable, if anyone was paying attention. Unless she was isolated? SOmething was wrong there, beyond her mental illness.

Who would leave children with someone that ill?

I have the impression their religious beliefs were somewhat like the Way's--prayer and casting out of spirits, memorising bible verses, total denial etc was how her mental illness was handled. Perhaps reproof/correction type stuff. SO helpful with real mental illness.

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This isn't about gender bias, johniam. The woman has severe mental illness. The husband knew that, yet he insisted she keep having babies. He, being the one with a sound mind, should have discouraged her from conceiving again unless or until she had been successfully treated for her psychosis. Instead, wham bam, another baby.

If you watch videos of her with her children when she obviously wasn't experiencing a psychotic episode, it sure looks to me like she adored them. Her whole demeanor was soft and tender and loving, and you can see the joy in her face when she looked at them.

I hold the healthcare system accountable, too, for their part in this. To her husband's credit, he did try to get her help, but when it didn't materialize (at least not enough of it), he left his children with her--he probably told her to renew her mind!

I agree with mj. This woman needs to be held responsible, but she sure as hell warrants compassion.

I heard the saddest thing about this on one of the morning shows today. Apparently she drifts between being out of it and having no recollection of the horrendous thing she did and, when successfully medicated and functioning mentally, she is fully aware that she murdered her children and is absolutely tormented.

I'd say that sort of hell is punishment enough.

I can't begin to fathom killing my own child whom I love with all my heart. But then I don't know what it's like to be delusional and in a psychotic state of panic.

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I couldn't begin to imagine what she must be going through.

If I were in her shoes, I would seriously consider putting a bullet in my head.

You are absolutely right, Linzee, when you say that she warrants compassion.

And if there ever comes a time when she can be considered "cured", imagine the crappy life she'll have. It would not be any reward to her to let her live outside of the system.

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Call me a crotchety old lady - but once I heard the reason she was granted a new trial I was incensed!(sp?)

The prosecution stated in the trial that she copied an eppisode of Law & Order where some one did something similar to that. THERE WAS NO SUCH EPISODE. The Prosecution made it up!

That's what should grab our attention! Anybody with a grain of sanity would know the woman did it but furthermore must have thought she was not in her right mind!

If the prosecution pulled a stunt like this to insure conviction in this case, where the evidence was already strong....what in the name of all that's holy could they - or did they do to other defendands who may or may not have been guilty.

Surely another trial will give this woman the opportunity she requires for compassionate care - meaning - treatment even it's life care. BUT let's also hope somebody goes over that Prosecution's Office with a fine toothed comb to make sure other improprieties are weeded out and stopped.

Climbing down off my soap box now..........

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The woman had a psychotic explosion when she held each of her babies in the water until they died.

Noone, not even this woman, knows the pain she was living. I don't care what any tv show says. Her husband knew 'something' was wrong with her and he'd spent his time arguing with the mental health professionals to get her help and he believed them.

We want to believe our doctors when they tell us it's ok, do this or that.

We don't really know her or his background, upbringing, belief system.

This woman also hid her psychosis really really well. She was the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect neighbor. Her community was aghast, shocked! at her actions. Noone that knew her could have predicted this of her.

AS ex-cult people, I'm surprised that isn't easier to understand. Husbands in TWI alot of time have no idea their wife is beyond miserable, cuz she can't/won't tell him, cuz he can't/won't listen. Or the other side of the table.

Yet more often than not when the wife in twi leaves, behaves badly, divorces, whatever the husband is shocked and held culpable by the leadership.

Women, as a whole, don't talk, in these situations. It's not her husband's 'fault', it just is the way it is because she doesn't think she'll be believed, heard or anyone will give a dang and take action anyway. Alot of time mental illness doesn't have a thing to do with it.

Then factor in our system that people keep saying works. This woman had done something that set the mental health world on it's ear with such shock, horror, confusion.

How many meetings did her therapist have to sit through with his boss or attorneys going over notes, for their own protection? "Is there anything in her visits/hospitalizations that shows we should have known she'd kill her children?"

Probably not.

What was her family like growing up? Did her parents live an isolated life as well, was it told her from day one that she serve her husband, have all the babies he wants and like it?

Thank God we can't understand this woman or her life; I sure wouldn't want to be able to say 'oh yeah, I feel like that, I get her'.

If that were the case, if one of us knew of such a person, knew the family, her husband, lived with or around them......I wonder if we'd be so quick to judge him. She was like my neighbor, yours. Look next door to you, can you fathom this horror happening there? Would you blame him if she did such a horrendous thing?

Postpartum depression is powerful!! When I experienced this with both my babies, it scared hell outa me. The second baby was while in TWI and no way was I going to tell them some of the stuff I was feeling. Like everything else, one learns to deal with it, move on and keep the mouth shut. My husband didn't know either.

But most women don't act on the delusions and kill their babies.

Andrea Yates did. The system couldn't save those kids, her husband couldn't. In the system the way it is today, would they have believed him had he taken a meeting and said "I think she's fixin to kill our children, I see it in her eyes or something".?

Sadly there are many more of these messes where mama's kill their babies cuz God told em to, a spider crossed ones hand with a message to kill her children, one cut off her baby's arms. Each one had psychotic meltdowns that thankfully none of us could begin to understand.

I'm sure Mr Yates will blame himself for the rest of his sad life. He's had to have gone through the pains of wondering why he trusted the mental health professional, why he didn't "know what was going to happen".

We believe the therapists, the doctors. We are not the ones that spend the years and years studying this information, they are, so we believe them when they tell us what we need.

It's not an exact science and they are learning things every day.

On another strange note, should Andrea Yates be help accountable for the mothers who followed her example and killed their babies in the years since she did?

And now Park Deitz's practice is going to take a massive hit from his giving this wrong information on the stand, causing this mess. What should he be held accountable for?

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I don't think I've ever read anything more disturbing in my life than the transcript of Andrea Yayes confession. It gives you cold chills to hear her say how she fed the children cereal for breakfast that morning and then started drowning them one by one, how she called the oldest child into the bathroom so he could see his little sister dead, how he ran and she had to chase him, how she killed them because they weren't "developing correctly." Horrible. Its impossible to comprehend how somebody could do such a thing, especially to their own child.

Randy Yates blames shoddy medical treatment that allowed his wife to reach that point, but he never even sought medical help until she tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills two years before she killed the children. This was a woman who says she had thoughts of killing her first child right after he was born, who believed that Satan could only be defeated by George W. Bush, who believed cartoon characters were speaking to her, who thought the number 666 was marked on her head, who thought she was receiving messages from a character in "O, Brother, Where Art Thou," who was pulling her hair out to the point she had bald spots and scratching her arms and legs until they bled. And he claims he didn't know that this was a psychosis until she finally became suicidal. I doubt it.

The thing that creeps me out about him is that he never seemed to be the least bit upset that his children were dead. You always heard him say that he supported his wife, that he still loved her, that he didn't blame her, but he barely mentioned the kids. Then he supported his wife on the day she was sentenced by going to New York to be interviewed by Katie Couric in the morning and then being on Larry King that night, where he took calls from people. Very nice.

My personal opinion is that Andrea Yates should be locked up in a mental institution for the rest of her life. I don't see how she could ever be let out.

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I think the case more than any in the past fifty years needs to be examined in "its own light," which, thank God, our legal system allows.

There is something about this that just sticks in my gut and heart...like many of you, it is obvious the woman WAS psychotic....and her husband realized that she was extremely ill...but did nothing.

I am glad the decision was overturned....I don't think anyone, her family, her lawyers, the woman herself....ever wants her back out living amongst the rest of us. The current system in TX would require that she would eventually move into the tx prison system if she ever made significant mental progress. I don't think this is about getting her out of prison, it seems to me that this is an attempt to do the right thing by an extremely ill woman. Eventually, if she makes any progress, she will not be moved over to a federal penal institution, she will be moved to a mental health facility. In my opinion, state mental health facilities are meant to be housing people such as Andrea Yates. She is genuinely mentally ill....not a criminal trying to beat the system.

Rusty Yates, on the other hand...he should have been held criminally responsible at least in part. He should be serving a life sentence some place.

Radar

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Back when she was first arrested, I read that she had suddenly stopped taking a common anti-depressant (maybe Prozac?). The drug companies don't want that information well known, but if you want to blame anyone....please consider her medical 'team'.

The woman in NC who killed her 2 kids also suddenly stopped her anti-dpressant. In both cases, I have not been able to find out WHY they stopped suddenly - but Prozac, Paxil, Ritalin and others are extremely dangerous to quit suddenly. I believe Yates' actions were drug-induced, and therefore she should be set free with close medical supervision (and education).

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