BY PETER ARENELLA
Andrea Yates drowned her young children in the family bathtub. Her terrible acts demanded an explanation and her trial provided one. She suffered from a well-documented case of severe postpartum depression. While prescribed medications had initially alleviated her symptoms, her therapist inexplicably stopped medicating Yates months before the tragedy. Even the prosecution experts conceded that Yates' symptoms quickly returned: delusional thoughts, feelings and voices, which distorted her sense of reality. Defense experts testified that her illness generated her delusional belief that she was saving her children from the devil by drowning them.
Her case illustrates why the law employs the insanity defense. For centuries, criminal responsibility has required a demonstration of the defendant's moral responsibility for his acts. This "moral culpability" principle explains why the law does not view guilt as a purely factual question about the violation of legal norms. Criminal guilt is a normative concept.
The law presumes that most of us possess the capacity to make a rational, voluntary and moral choice to comply with its prohibitions. We deserve blame and are found culpable when we fail to exercise our moral capacities competently to avoid such violations. Thus, the insanity defense does not exculpate every defendant who can show that he was mentally ill at the time of the crime. Instead, the defense attempts to identify those few severely disabled defendants who lack this minimal capacity for moral choice. Despite the media's false equation of insanity to mental illness, the law holds most mentally ill killers fully accountable for their crimes.
Andrea Yates should have been found insane. Her illness destroyed her capacity to appreciate the moral significance of her actions. Retribution is inappropriate because the insane offender doesn't deserve punishment. Deterrence of others is ill-served by punishing an insane offender with whom law-abiding citizens cannot identify. Nor does community self-defense justify punishment. We deserve protection from the dangerously insane, but we don't need to lock them in a prison to secure it. We can and do confine this group to secure mental hospitals where they can receive the treatment they need. The media have fostered public fear that a successful insanity defense will trigger a short hospitalization followed by premature release of the dangerous offender back into the community to kill again. The facts paint a far less dramatic picture. Those few defendants who successfully raise an insanity defense to a homicide crime will likely spend the rest of their lives in a secure mental hospital.
So why did the Texas jury find her sane? Because they likely shared the same misconceptions about the defense's rational and practical consequences. Texas law prevented jurors from focusing on whether Yates' illness negated her self-control or from finding out that a successful defense would trigger her automatic commitment in a mental hospital. Jurors might well have believed that public safety demanded a guilty verdict to prevent the release of a psychotic killer back into the community.
When you hear someone carp about how the insanity defense erodes notions of personal accountability, remind them of Andrea Yates. Her fate is tragically typical in contested cases because jurors usually reject this most misunderstood defense.
Arenella is professor of law.
