![]() ![]() 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. At times, the evidence was complex and overwhelming. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In Texas, the law on insanity defenses is among the most restrictive in the nation. 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. Andrea later marked the passage in her Bible. 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. His views on capital punishment, like so many others in his life, had been based upon Scripture. He still remembered the times when he and Andrea would sit in their living room discussing the rights and wrongs of execution. Until his wife's arrest last summer, Rusty had supported the death penalty. Did she pose a future threat to society? Or was the killing of her own children a redeemable act? Behind closed doors, they were weighing the facts and deliberating her future. 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. Their five children were dead, drowned by their mother in a case that shocked their family and stunned the world. Several rows back, her husband, Rusty, could hardly believe their lives had turned out this way. Andrea Yates, wearing a white sweater, sat next to her lawyers at the defense table in the courtroom. Follow had come down to the final moment.
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