Yates Case Turns on Trial Error

The capital murder convictions of Andrea Yates were thrown out by an appeals court Thursday, three and a half years after she told investigators that she had methodically drowned her five children in the bathtub to spare them from eternal damnation and to punish herself for being a bad mother.

The court overturned the verdicts because an expert witness for the prosecution mistakenly told the jury that an episode of the television drama “Law & Order” -- in which a woman drowned her children in a bathtub -- aired shortly before the Yates killings. In the purported episode, the mother was acquitted of murder because she was judged insane, according to the witness.

Prosecutors used the testimony to suggest to jurors that Yates was a fan of the show and got the idea from that episode that she could get away with the murders -- and, therefore, understood that it was wrong to kill. Jurors took less than four hours to reject Yates’ insanity defense and convict her.

But there was no such episode. The witness, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, testified that he had served as a consultant for the show, but has since said that he might have confused the story line with one from another television series.

“We conclude that there is a reasonable likelihood that Dr. Dietz’s false testimony could have affected the judgment of the jury,” the judges wrote. “We further conclude that Dr. Dietz’s false testimony affected the substantial rights of appellant.”

The appeals court ruling could mean a new trial for Yates, though prosecutors said they would appeal.

Dietz is a renowned forensic specialist who says he has worked on about 1,000 criminal cases. With rare exception, he has worked as a paid witness for the prosecution -- and he has typically carried to the stand a stern message that the mentally ill can distinguish between right and wrong.

Dietz, in an interview Thursday at his home in Newport Beach, said he had made an “honest mistake” in the Yates case and had exhibited no bias.

Yates’ defense lawyers said they were not seeking her immediate release from the psychiatric prison facility in Rusk, Texas, where she is serving a life sentence. They said they hoped to have her eventually transferred to a mental institution that could provide better care and therapy.

Yates learned of the decision Thursday morning in a conference call with her attorneys while seated in the office of her prison warden, surrounded by her doctors and a therapist.

“She understands what is happening,” said one of her defense lawyers, George Parnham. “She was surprised and not unpleased.... This is an exciting and momentous day.”

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the First Court of Appeals in Houston would seem to be based on an odd technicality that came amid three weeks of testimony from dozens of witnesses. But the testimony about the television show spoke to the heart of the case -- whether Yates understood the difference between right and wrong.

On June 20, 2001, Yates’ husband, Russell, left for work at a nearby NASA facility. Later that morning, Yates called police and told them to come to her home in Clear Lake, south of Houston. She was wearing wet clothes when she answered the door. An officer found four of her children, ages 6 months to 5 years, dead on a bed, covered with sheets. A fifth child -- the oldest, 7-year-old Noah -- was still in the bathtub.

Yates confessed immediately. She was ordered to stand trial in the deaths of three children and was not charged in the deaths of the other two. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and evidence presented during her 2002 trial showed that she suffered from severe postpartum depression and schizophrenia.

Prosecutors, who sought the death penalty, seized on Dietz’s testimony about the show to suggest that Yates had given considerable and sinister thought to the consequences of her actions.

In closing arguments, Harris County prosecutor Joe Owmby reminded jurors of the alleged television show.

“She watches ‘Law & Order’ regularly,” Owmby told the jury. “There is a way out. She tells that to Dr. Dietz. A way out.”

The jury convicted Yates and sentenced her to life in prison. Yates became a national cause among advocates for women and the mentally ill.

Harris County Asst. Dist. Atty. Alan Curry said Thursday that the Dietz testimony was not crucial to the case. He called it a simple mistake.

“This is not something the state knew about or orchestrated,” he said.

But Yates’ lawyers argued that the reference to the television show was only one episode in a pervasive attempt to paint Yates as a calculating murderer who had hatched a plan to find a way “out of a trapped marriage,” Parnham said.

Doubts about the testimony appear to have been raised first by an investigative journalist who was in the courtroom -- who also had written for “Law & Order.” The journalist contacted show producers, who contacted Dietz, who soon became convinced that he had made a mistake. Dietz sent an e-mail to prosecutors immediately, he said.

Defense attorneys learned of the discrepancy after jurors had begun deliberation. Their request for a mistrial was denied.

After the conviction, the same jury gathered to determine Yates’ sentence. At that point the jury was alerted to the mistake. Dietz also wrote a letter to prosecutors, saying that watching “Law & Order” did not play “any causal role in Mrs. Yates’ drowning of her five children.”

But some believe that the case had already been tainted. One juror later wrote a letter to the judge expressing his dismay at learning of the mistake after the case was decided -- evidence, Parnham said, that jurors took the testimony about the television show seriously.

Gerald Treece, a law professor and the associate dean of the South Texas College of Law in Houston, pointed out that five other mental health experts testified that Yates was insane -- even under the legal definition in Texas, which has perhaps the narrowest interpretation of insanity in the nation.

“Dietz was the only one who testified differently. If the only expert saying she’s not insane gives false testimony, how do you justify that?” Treece said.

Prosecutors argued in an appeals hearing last month that there was no evidence Dietz intentionally misled the jury, and Thursday’s ruling suggested that the judges agreed.

Dietz, in a statement e-mailed to reporters Thursday night, said he is angered by the suggestion that he lied on the witness stand. “I take with the utmost seriousness the importance of an expert witness thoroughly preparing for trial,” he wrote, “and giving absolutely honest testimony as accurately as possible.”

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Times staff writer Jeff Gottlieb in Newport Beach and staff researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this report.