The Arizona Shooting

[Zat0pek]

Originally Posted by KKreme15

Normal people don't murder people. Every 1st degree murderer has something wrong with them

Never, ever confuse insanity with evil. A highly recommended read on this subject: http://www.amazon.com/People-Lie-Hop.../dp/0684848597

[Zat0pek]

No better illustration of the problem with how we handle the severely psychotic than this: http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...218445,00.html

Monday, Mar. 18, 2002

Andrea Yates: More To The Story

By Timothy Roche


It had come down to the final moment. Andrea Yates, wearing a white sweater, sat next to her lawyers at the defense table in the courtroom. Several rows back, her husband, Rusty, could hardly believe their lives had turned out this way. Their five children were dead, drowned by their mother in a case that shocked their family and stunned the world. His wife, charged with capital murder and convicted two days earlier, could be sentenced to death by lethal injection unless the jury of strangers who found her guilty now spared her life. The jurors had been gone for 35 minutes. Behind closed doors, they were weighing the facts and deliberating her future.

Did she pose a future threat to society? Or was the killing of her own children a redeemable act?
Until his wife's arrest last summer, Rusty had supported the death penalty. He still remembered the times when he and Andrea would sit in their living room discussing the rights and wrongs of execution. His views on capital punishment, like so many others in his life, had been based upon Scripture. It was from Romans 13 that he'd first read to her how God gave the authority to rulers of the land to uphold their laws, for governments to carry out his will against the evil of murderers. Andrea later marked the passage in her Bible. Now, the word of God could come back to haunt her, like the voice of demons that she claimed drove her to kill her own.

In Texas, the law on insanity defenses is among the most restrictive in the nation. So narrow are the nuances of the state's centuries-old law that it was not enough for Yates' defense lawyers to simply prove that she twice attempted suicide, had been hospitalized four times for psychiatric care and nursed a psychosis before the drownings clearly documented in thousands of pages of medical records. No, Andrea's motives may have been delusional, but if she were able to distinguish right from wrong — good from evil — while committing the crime, jurors had little choice but to reject her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and convict her.

To reach their verdict, jurors seemed to rely heavily on the persuasive testimony of a famous forensic psychiatrist, Park Dietz, who was paid $500 an hour by prosecutors to dispute claims that Andrea Yates was insane under the Texas law. Now, TIME has learned, questions are surfacing about the reliability of the state's key witness who has admitted that he mixed up facts that prosecutors wound up emphasizing to the jury. Dietz also has told TIME that he opposes the very law that he helped prosecutors apply to Yates and jurors used to deny her insanity defense.

Inside the Courtroom

The trial had been long and emotional. At times, the evidence was complex and overwhelming. Jurors listened to a taped confession in which Andrea told a detective that she had to kill her five children, whom she home-schooled, because she had failed them as a mother. Jurrors saw police photographs of the bathtub where she drowned them one by one, and the bed where she had laid them side by side. They heard how one boy's fist still held strands of his mother's hair, which he must have yanked out during their struggle. They watched home videos of laughing children and their parents in happier times. At nearly every turn, prosecutors Joe Owmby and Kaylynn Williford reminded jurors that the victims were young and innocent and their deaths were cold and calculated.

While defense lawyers called several expert witnesses who had different opinions about Andrea's actual diagnosis, each told jurors she obviously had been psychotic and delusional at the time. After her arrest, jail psychiatrist Melissa Ferguson testified, Andrea was put on medications that enabled her to finally talk about the visions and voices that she says guided her actions. It was only after she was placed in a jail cell, naked, on suicide watch that Andrea spoke of the Satan inside her and the only was to be rid of him: She had to be executed. And she had to kill the children, as Satan demanded, to get the death penalty.

Andrea tried to explain. "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them they could never be saved," she told the jail psychiatrist. "They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell."

Jurors took notes as Rusty testified about his life with Andrea, whom he had met when they were both 25 years old and living in the same apartment complex in Houston. He told them how their family had grown, and how they had moved from a house in suburbia to a camping trailer to a bus converted into a motor home, where Andrea focused on raising the toddlers. After the birth of their fourth child, Luke, in 1999, Andrea tried twice to commit suicide. She was hospitalized both times and was diagnosed with postpartum depression and psychosis.

The couple and their four sons moved from the bus into their house on Beachcomber Lane in a Houston suburb. She recovered while using Haldol, but eventually stopped taking the medication. Against the advice of her psychiatrist, Andrea soon became pregnant again with their fifth child, Mary. Within months, following the death of her ailing father, her psychosis returned. Instead of taking her back to the same doctor who'd treated her before, Rusty told jurors that he and Andrea went to the Devereux-Texas Treatment Network, where Mohammed Saeed became Andrea's psychiatrist. Rusty testified that he never knew that Andrea had visions and voices; he said he never knew she had considered killing the children. Neither did Dr. Saeed, even though the delusions could have been found in medical records from 1999. Andrea would not talk or eat.

After only slight improvement, Andrea was released from Devereux. A month later, she had another episode. Rusty took her back to Devereux. Again, she was released. Dr. Saeed reluctantly prescribed Haldol, the same drug that worked in a drug cocktail for her in 1999. But after a few weeks, he took her off the drug, citing his concerns about side effects. (For more on Saeed's response, see our previous examination of the Yates trial.) Though Andrea's condition seemed to be worsening two days before the drownings, when her husband drove her to Saeed's office, Rusty testified, the doctor refused to try Haldol longer or return her to the hospital.

Rusty was frustrated, he told the jury, and he didn't know what else to do.

'Satan destroys and leaves'

As the trial continued, the parade of experts included the celebrated psychiatrist Park Dietz, whom the District Attorney's Office paid $500 an hour to analyze Andrea and explain to the jury why she should be convicted despite the insanity law because, by her own admission, she knew her actions were wrong.

Known for his testimony as a prosecution witness in high-profile crimes, Dietz had worked on the cases of John Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan; Susan Smith, who killed her children by driving her car into a pond; and the Unabomber. He also helped proclaim legally sane Jeffrey Dahmer, who kept the heads of his murder victims in his freezer. He had credentials that the Texas prosecutors thought qualified him to review Andrea Yates, though he had limited knowledge of postpartum psychosis.

Dietz's two days of testimony would be riveting and revealing. His polished demeanor captivated the jury; he used a Powerpoint presentation to illustrate how he reached his conclusions and a video to show his interviews with Andrea in the Harris County Jail.

"Before you did it," Dietz asked Andrea during one videotaped session, "did you think it was wrong?"

"No."

Dietz asked, "Why did you not think it wrong?"

Andrea answered without hesitation. "If I didn't do it, they would be tormented by Satan.
"It was a bad choice," she continued. "I shouldn't have done it." She began to sound regretful as the camera recorded the interview. "There was distress, but I still felt I had to do it."

Dietz zeroed in. "As you drowned each one, did you think it was the right thing to be doing?"

Andrea nodded yes. Dietz asked, upon drowning the kids, if she thought about heaven.

"I was praying they would go there."

She said she called the police because she knew the murders would be perceived as bad, despite her higher purpose. Now, Andrea also told Dietz, she believed she was psychotic when she thought the devil had guided her. "He left when I committed my crime," she said.
Dietz asked why Satan would leave her after she had obeyed him.

"He destroys and then leaves," Andrea replied.

On the witness stand, Dietz took the jury through what he had dubbed Andrea's "Homicide Phase" and "Post-Homicide Phase." In both, Dietz testified, she knew right from wrong. The reasons: she had contemplated murdering the kids for two years but stopped herself; she called police and wanted to be arrested; she related the death penalty to a punishment; she believed God would judge her actions as bad; and, he said, guilt caused her to cover the bodies on the bed.

That day of the drownings, June 20, Andrea suffered some psychosis, he said. But her symptoms became more severe the next day in jail. In his testimony designed to persuade jurors that she was not legally insane when killing the children, Dietz stressed that her "extreme sickness" and "gross psychosis" occurred only after the deaths. "There seemed to be new delusions and disorganized thinking on June 21st," he said. George Parnham, the bespectacled Houston defense lawyer who represented Andrea with his longtime friend Wendell Odom, pushed the doctor to explain why, then, did she kill the kids on the 20th?

Dietz told jurors he would be inclined to believe Andrea's fears of Satan, except that her actions spoke louder than words as the mother violently held her precious children underwater. "I would expect her to try and comfort the children, telling them they are going to be with Jesus or with God, but she does not offer words of comfort to the children."

He doubted whether Andrea really felt tormented by demons before she was jailed for killing her children because he would have expected her to talk to a friend or minister about her thoughts. But Dietz did not tell the jury that the religious overtones of her delusions — a mother doomed for the fires of Hell — could be linked to what religious influences she did have in her life. She and Rusty had their own Bible study in their home because Rusty had not found a church he liked. Besides Rusty, her only other spiritual source was her husband's former spiritual mentor, Michael Woroniecki, a renegade minister whose writings fault women for the woes of their children.

But Dietz did attempt to explain that the simple life that Andrea and Rusty sought by living in the bus and home-schooling the kids left her feeling "controlled" by the circumstances of her life. To show jurors how psychosis manipulates reality, fears and thought process, Dietz used the examples of her two suicide attempts in 1999. "This was her way of escaping an intolerable situation," he testified. "Escape is something she couldn't admit she needed."

Describing her methods as part of a "criminal plan" instead of a psychotic state, Dietz said he found contradictions in her logic: "If it's true that she believed that killing the children would save them, then why would she not want it to happen? She would want to talk about it so it came true and the children would be saved. So, I concluded at that point she's keeping it secret, she knows that other people are going to stop her, that it's wrong, that it's a bad idea. She admits that she knows people will stop her."

Dietz told jurors that Andrea got the idea of drowning the children from a recent episode of Law & Order, the TV crime show for which he happens to be a consultant. He had been told that Andrea frequently watched the program, and he testified that he once worked on an episode in which a woman drowns her child in a bathtub.

The videotaped exchanges between Andrea and Dietz were more dramatic than any TV show. At one point, he told jurors, Andrea recounted how she drowned each child before ending with Noah, the oldest. "I'm sorry," Andrea quoted Noah's last words as he struggled in the tub of water.

[Zat0pek]

Rest of the story:

Closing arguments

Throughout the trial, Rusty and other witnesses subpoenaed to testify were not allowed inside the courtroom. He would sit in the hallway, often playing Tetris on his Palm Pilot. Sometimes he paced. He would talk to reporters sent to cover the sensational murder trial, and even allowed ABC-TV researchers to shadow him for a few days until one of them reportedly made a remark that insulted him.

Last week Rusty found a seat in the courtroom to hear closing arguments. He and his family stayed together on one side of the courtroom while Andrea's mother, Karin Kennedy, and her brothers sat on the other. Not even for the sake of a unified front for Andrea's trial could Rusty and his in-laws fake a truce in a relationship that has seemed strained since Rusty and Andrea married. Some in the Kennedy family still criticized Rusty for doing too little to get treatment for her — and at least for failing to hire a nanny or housekeeper. On June 20, Rusty spent the night in a motel with his relatives but did not go see Andrea's elderly mother. The distance between Rusty and her became more evident when Mrs. Kennedy, who had come alone one day, sobbed sadly outside the courtroom. With no other relatives there, a reporter comforted her.

A hush fell over the courtroom when Assistant District Attorney Kaylynn Williford, trying the first capital murder case of her career, began to explain why the state of Texas would prosecute a mother with a history of mental illness. Williford aroused the emotions of the jurors and reminded them that the victims were helpless as Andrea forced them into the water. Noah, she recalled graphically, had died in water containing vomit and feces from the others who died before him. "Is this the act of a loving mother?" She asked. Then, she asked them to take three minutes of silence while they were back in the jury room. That's how long it takes for a child to lose consciousness, she told them. She used Andrea's own words against her, telling jurors to think back to her confession: "I killed my kids," she told both the detective and the first officer on the scene. Andrea did not say, "I saved my kids."

In the end, jurors had to weigh the disputed testimony of the experts — do they believe Dr. Dietz or the array of defense experts who could not agree on Andrea's condition? When the jury finally was escorted to the conference room where they deliberated, nobody could predict whether they would be gone for hours or days or whether they would even be able to reach a decision.

It turned out to be two hours. Jurors sounded a buzzer on the door and walked in quietly. A court clerk announced their verdict: guilty as charged. The conviction was not unexpected under the limitations of Texas' insanity law, yet it seemed unbelievable. Rusty buried his head in his large hands and moaned, "Oh God."

If jurors could reject her insanity plea and convict her, then they could very well vote to execute her since Texas requires jurors to determine the punishment. Family and friends looked for a glimmer of hope. Maybe the jurors cut a deal with themselves — convict her, but don't send her to death row. After all, the law prevented them from knowing that she would be hospitalized if she were found not guilty by insanity. Maybe they had convicted her because they did not want her to just walk free. Maybe the conviction was a compromise. In two days, the jury would return for the penalty phase of the trial.

A question about testimony

But first, the pair of defense lawyers had discovered a flaw in the testimony of Park Dietz, the psychiatrist who had told jurors "as a matter of fact" that the Law & Order episode that inspired Andrea to drown the kids in the bathtub aired shortly before the fatal day. Prosecutors also had emphasized it as proof of premeditation in closing arguments.

As it turns out, the defense lawyers learned, the episode as he described it had never aired and the plot line was different than he recalled. When they prepared to call the show's producers as witnesses to persuade the judge to declare a mistrial, Dietz sent a letter to prosecutors acknowledging his error.

"My memory about the content of the show was incorrect. I was confounding the facts of three filicide cases I worked on — Susan Smith, Amy Grossberg, and Melissa Drexler — and two episodes of Law & Order that were based in part on those cases" Dietz wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by TIME. Additionally, he had been wrong about being told directly that Andrea watched the TV series. In fact, he only had read another doctor's report in which Rusty once said his wife liked to watch every episode of the show. "I also wish to clarify that Mrs. Yates said nothing to me about either episode or about the Law & Order series," he wrote.

Further, Dietz told TIME in an interview at his California office, that while he agreed with the jury's verdict, he disagreed with the law. "I believe we should recognize our sick parents in several ways and handle them differently both during hospitalization and when they commit crimes," he said. For example, British doctors will keep depressed mothers and their newborns together in hospitals to monitor them over a period of weeks or months.

The penalty

Back in Houston, after a one-day, the trial of Andrea Yates resumed for the penalty phase without jurors who convicted her knowing that Dietz, personally, was unsure about the fairness of the law used to reject her insanity defense. Andrea's lawyers, who questioned whether he misled the jury, asked for a mistrial based on his mistaken testimony about the influence of the TV show, a request denied by Judge Belinda Hill.

On Thursday, the jurors began to hear about the softer soft of Andrea. Before deciding whether she should live or die, they heard pleas to spare her life from witnesses who described Andrea as the devoted mom who wanted her children to be curious and bright, the helpful daughter who cared for her ailing father until his death, the remarkable young woman who loved being a nurse and swimming before she got married and had as many children as God would give her before the Devil stole them away.

During the closing statements, prosecutor Joe Owmby stopped shy of telling jurors specifically why the case met the criteria for the death penalty. But Kaylynn Williford, the other prosecutor, did. She pointed to photos of the children, asking jurors to take the pictures with them into the deliberation room. "Everyone is trying to make this a woman's issue or a political issue," she told jurors, "but the issue to me is five dead children."

When defense lawyer George Parnham and Wendell Odom took their turns, they choked back tears as they talked about Andrea and the life of suffering ahead of her, knowing what she has done to her children, to her husband and to herself. Hadn't she been punished enough?

As the four men and eight women returned to the courtroom one last time and took their seats in the jury box, Andrea stared straight ahead, void of emotion. None of the jurors would look at her. Four sheriff's deputies guarded the doors of the courtroom filled with friends, relatives, legal secretaries, reporters and others who came to see the outcome of four weeks of heart-wrenching testimony. Judge Hill warned against outbursts. If you can't control yourself, she said, leave now.

Everyone stayed. Andrea and her lawyers stood as Judge Hill reviewed the jury's paperwork, which was read aloud by a court clerk. At least 10 of the 12 jurors opted for life in prison, not death by lethal injection.

Sitting in a middle row and nodding his head, Rusty showed no other reaction. Neither did Andrea. She did not understand the decision until she saw the reaction of her lawyers. As the deputies ordered everyone to leave the courtroom, she did not glance back at Rusty. The husband who had supported her even though she killed their children walked outside in the afternoon drizzle, standing behind a cluster of microphones and a mob of reporters and cameramen. He had something to say; and he knew the world was watching.

First, he told the crowd, his family had been let down by the mental health system. And even though Andrea would not be executed, the murder conviction alone meant that his family also was let down by the criminal justice system, too. "We were offended that she was even prosecuted," he said. He initially wanted Dr. Saeed charged with a crime for giving his wife inadequate treatment, but he has told TIME that prosecutors laughed, saying, "Fat chance."

Outside the courthouse, Rusty had waited for months to stand before the cameras and talk so publicly about his family's ordeal. But a judge's gag order prevented him and others in the case from talking. Liberated by the verdict against his wife, Rusty answered questions about why he did not find another doctor for her and why he risked the safety of his children by leaving her alone the morning of June 20. "We didn't see her as a danger," he said. "The real question to me is: How could she have been so ill and the medical community not diagnose her, not treat her, and obviously not protect our family from her."

Standing there, Rusty appeared to have no regrets about any of the choices he and Andrea had made in their life together. No regrets about moving into the trailer, then the bus. About having a fifth child, who had been "a blessing." About his own inability to recognize his wife's needs. About his own part in their lack of communication in which she apparently suffered scary visions for years but never told him. About not researching postpartum depression and psychosis in the two years before his wife killed their kids.

Moving on

Rusty still has thousands of dollars donated after the drownings to help pay for the funerals and others costs, and he has used part of the leftover funds to buy a cemetery memorial and start a website dedicated to his children. He hasn't decided what to do with the rest of it. He says he and Mrs. Kennedy are sharing his wife's legal fees.

Rusty has come a long way since the morning of the deaths, when he collapsed in a fetal position and cried as a police officer questioned him in the yard of their house on Beachcomber Lane. He told the officer that he never wanted to see his wife's face; she had killed their babies. He watched as officers led Andrea in handcuffs to a police car and drove away. But later the same afternoon, as crime scene technicians photographed the home and carried away evidence, Rusty stood outside and kept asking himself, "How could she do this? How could she do this?"

Then it hit him. "It wasn't Andrea. It was the illness." He vowed to support her.

Alone in their empty house where he still lives, Rusty has thought about the future of their marriage. He worries about how they will ever be able to look at each other. Will the other person be a constant reminder of their loss? For a while, Rusty told TIME, he had hoped that she might someday return to Beachcomber Lane and they could resume their life together. But he has talked to psychiatrists who say it would be too traumatic for her to come back to the house where the kids died.

After the deaths, it might have been difficult for Rusty to imagine life without her or the kids. He did not doubt that his devotion would remain strong. As the weeks turned into months, however, his perspective changed. Perhaps he will get a divorce. Maybe someday he will have kids again. He will always support her, he says. But he has begun to question what will become of their relationship. And he has begun to wonder what will become of Andrea without him.
"I can't carry her through life," Rusty told TIME. "That's too great a burden to bear. I need her to walk on her own. I can hold her hand, but I can't carry her."

But it is unlikely that Rusty will ever hold her hand again.

Andrea will move from the Harris County Jail in Houston to a state prison known as Mountain View Unit in the scrubby rolling hills of Central Texas. There, she will be kept in protective custody because of her ongoing mental problems and possible threats from other inmates. She will be allowed no visitors.

Unless she needs intensive psychiatric care, the mother who only last year baked chocolate chip cookies and took her sons to ball games in the park will eventually mingle with the general population at the prison known for housing some of the toughest, meanest women in Texas. While inmates can greet and say goodbye to 10 visitors with a kiss and an embrace, prison officials doubt that Andrea will get those privileges when Rusty goes to see her. And, they say, conjugal visits will be strictly forbidden.

— With reporting by Deborah Fowler/Houston, Hilary Hylton/Austin and Anne Berryman/Atlanta

[Zat0pek]

Here we go again . . .

[Equinox2100]

I am unfamiliar with gun uses. Someone please tell me reasons why we should not impose an outright ban on assault/automatic/semi-automatic weapons.

All I know via legal studies on crime is that spree killers usually are 'enraged' or out of their minds for 2 minutes, and that typically when they have less rounds to fire less people die. Someone justify why the negatives of banning these weapons outweighs the cost of life. Obviously I have my biases but I'm open to arguments.