Andrea Yates Again Pleads Not Guilty for Murdering Her Children

Andrea Yates, the Houston woman who killed her five children by drowning them in the bathroom of their home, was convicted of murder during her 2002 trial for killing three of her five children the previous year. During her trial she had pled not guilty by reason of insanity, despite having confessed to the gruesome killings and described them in great detail to investigators. In her confession, she talked extensively about the meticulous planning that she had done for months before the murders. But then when it came time for her to be tried for her crimes, she blamed the murders on post-partum depression. Jurors rejected her insanity defense during that trial and found her guilty in the deaths of three children. She was not charged in the deaths of the other two, although evidence was presented about their murders during the trial. She was sentenced to life in prison.

Last year, Yates' capital murder convictions were overturned by a three-judge state appeals court's ruling that a prosecution expert in her original trial presented false testimony. The so-called false testimony the court cited was given by Park Dietz, a psychiatrist who suggested that Yates might have killed her children because of seeing an episode of the television show "Law and Order," for which he had served as a legal consultant. He said that one episode dealt with a woman whose postpartum depression caused her to drown her children in the bathtub, and afterward she was found to be insane. He told the court that the program had aired shortly before Yates drowned her children.

In his closing arguments during the original trial, the prosecutor told the jury that Yates watched "Law and Order" regularly and may have seen the events of that episode as a "way out." However, there was never an episode aired like the one described by Dietz, and Yates' attorneys used that fact as the basis for their filing an appeal of her conviction. The appeals court agreed with them, saying that the testimony by Dietz could have influenced the jury, and a new trial was ordered.

Harris County Attorney Alan Curry said that Dietz's testimony about the television show didn't surface until he was cross-examined by Yates' defense attorney, and that prior to that there had been three solid weeks of testimony that dealt with Yates' plans to kill her children including her knowledge that doing so was wrong. "Dr. Dietz did not suggest by that testimony or elsewhere that (Yates) used that episode in order to assist her in planning, premeditating, or calculating the killing of her children," Curry wrote. "There was a great deal of other evidence which revealed that (Yates) planned and/or premeditated the killing of her children," such as a tape-recorded interview with police where Yates said that she had thought about killing her children for two years and in the weeks leading up to the drownings she had filled the bathtub with water several times but "didn't do it at that time."

During her time in prison, Yates has undergone constant psychiatric treatment at the Skyview Unit in Rusk, where she has been incarcerated. Her condition has steadily improved and she works in an outdoor flower garden and has janitorial duties. The warden at the prison said Yates is very happy, and that physically and mentally, she's as well as he's ever seen her.