Texas Mother Found Guilty of Capital Murder
Tue Mar 12, 6:39 PM ET
By Jeff Franks
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A Texas jury on Tuesday took less than four hours to find Andrea Yates guilty of capital murder in the drowning deaths of her five young children last summer.
The verdict means that on Thursday Yates, 37, faces a new phase of the trial in which jurors will decide whether she will be sentenced to die by lethal injection or sent to prison for life. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in a county that leads the nation in executions.
Yates, who has been on anti-psychotic medication throughout the trial, appeared impassive as State District Judge Belinda Hill read the verdicts. Lawyer George Parnham put his arm around his client.
Yates' husband, NASA (news - web sites) engineer Rusty Yates, dropped his head into his hands after the verdict was read, while his mother sat beside him and hugged him. Yates' mother, Jutta Kennedy, sat stoically, her eyes reddening with tears.
The former nurse confessed to drowning the children, who ranged in age from 6 months to 7 years, in the bathtub of their Houston home on June 20, 2001, but said she did it to protect them from Satan. 
She had been mentally ill for at least two years before the murders, twice attempting suicide and four times being treated in a mental hospital, experts testified.
Defense lawyers George Parnham and Wendell Odom argued Yates was a loving mother who spiraled into a severe, psychotic form of postpartum depression that started after her fourth pregnancy and worsened after her last.
Prosecutors sought a guilty verdict on the grounds that she was sick, but sane enough to know the crime was wrong, the standard for legal sanity in Texas.
The jury, which has been sequestered throughout a trial that is now in its fourth week, took just 3 hours and 40 minutes to decide Yates' guilt. In doing so, they rejected the defense's plea that their verdict could serve as a "springboard" for improved women's mental health care.
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