Jury Views Psychiatrist Interview of Yates in Jail

A videotape of a gaunt Andrea Yates explaining in a monotone why she drowned her five children stunned the courtroom Friday in dramatic evidence of the Texas mother’s mental condition after the crime.

The tape, recorded in the Harris County Jail three weeks after the June 20 killings, graphically showed the severity of the former nurse’s mental illness as she stumbled over words and spelled out her twisted vision of reality.

Yates, wearing an orange jail uniform, is seen with dark circles under her eyes, stringy hair hanging over hunched shoulders, her rail-thin body motionless except for the constant clenching of her jaws.

As forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick asks questions, there are long pauses before she answers in terse phrases devoid of emotion.

“Did you love your children?” he asked.

“Yes, not in the right way though,” Yates responded.

Resnick asked Yates if what she did was a good thing.

“Probably a good thing because I wasn’t righteous,” she said.

Yates confessed to drowning Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months, in the family bathtub because of delusions that they were tormented by the devil, but she has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. She could face the death penalty if convicted.

To meet the legal threshold for an insanity defense under Texas law, Yates must prove she was so mentally ill she could not discern right from wrong at the time of the killings.

Resnick, who has rendered similar decisions in several notable U.S. crimes, said Yates was so crazed she thought drowning the children was the right thing because it would save them from the devil and deliver them to heaven.

“She did what she thought was right in her perception of the world through her psychotic eyes,” he testified.

Prosecutors agree that Yates was sick but say she knew the killings were wrong because she immediately called police to their Houston home.

“Andrea Yates believed society would view her actions as bad because society didn’t know what she knew--that is, that Satan was within her, that her children were not righteous, that her children would burn in hell,” Resnick said.

The 12 jurors who will decide Yates’ fate watched the tape attentively as it played on a big screen in the wood-paneled courtroom where the trial has proceeded for two weeks.

It was the first visual evidence they have seen of what several mental health experts have described as one of the worst cases of mental illness they have treated.

After eight months of anti-psychotic drug therapy in jail, Yates appears subdued but relatively normal.

In the interview, Yates said she had been a bad mother and that her children were not “developing right in an academic sense and a righteous sense.”