Judging Insanity

JIM LEHRER:

The Andrea Yates case in Houston brought new and intense focus to the insanity defense. Kwame Holman begins our coverage.

JURY FOREMAN:

The jury has reached a verdict.

KWAME HOLMAN:

The jury that found her guilty of murder took less than an hour today to choose a sentence of life in prison for Andrea Pia Yates. The Yates case has drawn national attention not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it renewed longstanding questions about how the mentally ill are handled in the criminal justice system. On June 20, Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub in her Houston home. The 37-year-old homemaker then called her husband at work.

RUSTY YATES:

I said, "What's wrong, Andrea?" And she said, "You need to come home." And I said, "Is anyone hurt?" And she said, "yes." And I said, "Who?" And she said, "The children, all of them." And my heart just sunk.

KWAME HOLMAN:

Yates also called police, telling them she drowned her children to save them from eternal damnation. Yates had a long history of mental illness, according to testimony. She suffered episodes of postpartum depression, occasional psychosis and attempted suicide more than once. The trial began last month with Yates pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. She never took the stand. Her lawyers pointed to the testimony of psychiatrists, who said Yates was one of the most severely mentally ill people they had ever seen.

GEORGE PARNHAM:

We can get caught up in legality and we can get caught up in these concepts, and we can get caught up in experts' testimony about what they think is right and wrong. But if this woman doesn't meet the test of insanity in this state, then nobody does. Zero. We might as well wipe it from the books.

KWAME HOLMAN:

Yates' lawyers said doctors had prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for her, but that she stopped taking them several weeks before the killings. Prosecutors argued that Texas law requires that the only way Yates could be found not guilty was if her insanity prevented her from distinguishing between right and wrong.

KAYLYNN WILLIFORD:

She made the choice to fill the tub. She made the choice to kill those five children. She knew it was wrong. She called the police. She told what she did.

JOE OWNBY:

Organized behavior, that's common sense. Most people think that's sanity. That's what I think. If you make me say it, if you make me give an opinion that the jury is charged to give, I'll give it to you. She's sane.

KWAME HOLMAN:

On Tuesday, the jury took less than four hours to return a verdict of guilty of murder.

SPOKESPERSON:

We the jury, find the defendant Andrea Pia Yates guilty of capital murder as charged in the indictment.

KWAME HOLMAN:

After today's sentencing, both sides reacted.

JOE OWNBY:

We took no pleasure in prosecuting Mrs. Yates and we take no joy in this result or any result that may have occurred. In a perfect world, the Yates children would be alive and thriving in the midst of a loving family. But in this imperfect world, the best we could do was to see that justice was done for them as victims of a horrendous crime. Justice was done today.

PATRICK KENNEDY:

We don't, as a family, believe that justice was accomplished here because we believe a sick person has been sent to prison for 40 years.

RUSSELL YATES:

None of us wanted her to be found guilty. All of us– in fact most of us were offended that she was even prosecuted. Obviously we're, you know, it could be worse. I mean if she had been given the death penalty, but it wouldn't have been that much worse.

KWAME HOLMAN:

Andrea Yates will get psychiatric treatment during her life term in prison. She will not be eligible for parole for 40 years.

MARGARET WARNER:

The Texas standard for an insanity defense, that the defendant didn't know right from wrong at the time of the crime, has been adopted by half the states. Is it the right standard, or does the Yates case suggest it's too strict?

To explore that, we turn to Jennifer Bard. She's a lawyer and professor at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. And John Bradley, district attorney for Williamson County in Georgetown, Texas. Welcome to you both.

John Bradley, even the prosecutors acknowledged that Andrea Yates was severely mentally ill. Did the jury do the right thing in nonetheless rejecting her insanity defense?

JOHN BRADLEY:

Well, the jury is the only one that heard all of the evidence, and so I can only respect their verdict and applying it to the law in Texas, they must have determined that, in fact, she knew that what she was doing was wrong. I'm going to assume that they also conceded that she did have a severe mental disease or defect.

MARGARET WARNER:

Jennifer Bard, your view of this decision in this case?

JENNIFER BARD:

My view is that it is a wrong decision. And what happened is not so much that the jury made a wrong decision based on Texas law. It's just that the law in Texas and a lot of other states is simply too strict, and lets– and lets out a lot of people who are really mentally ill and makes them criminally responsible.

MARGARET WARNER:

All right. What's wrong? Expand on that.

JENNIFER BARD:

Well, what's wrong with the law is that it is a strict knowledge-based law. And the other states that don't have a strict knowledge-based law have something called a conforming your behavior to the standards of the law requirement.

And what that means is can you — you might know what you're doing is wrong, but can you do any differently? And I think if the Andrea Yates jury had been given the option of considering whether she could have done differently or whether she had an irresistible impulse based on the feeling that the devil was after her children, they would not have found her guilty.

MARGARET WARNER:

John Bradley, what is your view of that — that the question of whether the defendant has free will, essentially, to make the right choice — even if he or she knows the difference between right and wrong, that there should be some provision made for the ability or inability of that defendant to make the right choice?

JOHN BRADLEY:

Well, a couple of years ago the Northwestern University School of Law completed a fairly complex study. They looked at the penal codes in all 50 states and in the federal government and in Washington, D.C. And they evaluated whether those codes in these criminal cases were working effectively and had quality decision-making coming out of them.

They looked at whether you had reasonable definitions that people could rely upon, whether it was understandable. Texas, as a result of that study had the number one best criminal code in the United States. And I think it's because of the way that we define things like the insanity defense.

To define it in a subjective way so that it becomes, you know, did the devil make you do it sort of test, would allow expert opinions to rule the court of law, would allow loopholes for people who were truly criminally responsible. It is why the standard that was adopted and used in this case is so strict. It is based upon looking at whether the person can be held morally culpable.

Did they know that what they did was wrong? There is a lot of very sympathetic things that happen in these types of cases, but it is a mistake to confuse what the punishment should be with whether they can be held morally responsible as to the offense.

MARGARET WARNER:

Jennifer Bard, what about that point, that at least there was behavior even out of the Yates case — let's just say there is behavior that indicates that the person knows that what they did was legally wrong, why shouldn't that person be held morally responsible, even if they are mentally ill, severely mentally ill?

JENNIFER BARD:

Well, there are two things. One is I think that this country as a whole and certainly the state laws don't appreciate the complexity of mental illness. Mental illness is a thought disorder and it is pervasive and we just don't know to what extent, we as laymen don't know to what extent a person is affected.

And that's why we need experts. I think that she couldn't be found not guilty without the jury having a much deeper appreciation of what the mental health laws are.

MARGARET WARNER:

Explain to us why, staying with you, Jennifer Bard, why this, the more generous standard that you described earlier, that would let the jury take into account whether the defendant actually had power or the ability to do the right thing, why that has been eliminated by so much states.

JENNIFER BARD:

It's been eliminated as a backlash against the Hinckley verdict. When John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan and killed a DC police officer and he was acquitted by reason of insanity, there was a backlash across the country and everybody thought the problem is the insanity defense. And a lot of states, Texas included, went back from a more wider standard for insanity to the narrower knowledge-based one.

MARGARET WARNER:

And, in fact, John Bradley, it is not used very often. It is not either raised as a defense nor very successful very often, is it?

JOHN BRADLEY:

I think that's an accurate statement. The defense itself is intentionally defined to be narrow. It is intentionally defined to have only those very narrow situations where someone is not morally responsible for their crime to be released from criminal responsibility. But the debate is not new.

In the 1800s, in England, someone tried to assassinate the queen and that person got off on the standard that they had at that time, Daniel McNaughtin, so they changed the rule to one that was stricter. We got away from it and got back to the in the 1980s.

MARGARET WARNER:

Mr. Bradley, let me ask you, you mentioned several times the idea that the defendant has to be morally responsible. And without asking you to comment on the Yates case particularly, let me use it as an example, that even if she knew that it was legally wrong, that she told the police she did this because she thought other– she was saving them from the devil. In other words, the implication was that she thought what she was doing was morally right. Should the law make any distinction for that?

JOHN BRADLEY:

Well, the current law makes a distinction for that. If the jury had interpreted those statements to mean that she did not think that drowning those children was wrong, then they would have found her not guilty by reason of insanity. But they did interpret the circumstances around that crime to mean that.

They looked at whether she called the police. She didn't call the local library. She called the police, the organization that investigates crimes. She called her husband and she didn't report that there was a devil in the room. She reported that she had caused harm to her children. And these things indicated to the jury along with lots of other circumstantial and direct evidence, that she knew that what she was doing was wrong.

Now there is an entire bit of evidence that talks about whether or not she was able to prevent that. But psychiatric science, and I hesitate to use the word science there because it is not nearly as exact a science as the other medical sciences, does not have a reliable and predictable way for telling us which people cannot conform their conduct based upon a mental illness. And what happens is that have you very unreliable results and you have people who get through that loophole who shouldn't have.

MARGARET WARNER:

Miss Bard?

JENNIFER BARD:

Well, I don't think it is a loophole. I think it is something we have to think of as citizens of the United States and our duty as a society not to hold criminally responsible people who are mentally ill. And I think that psychiatry is the best we have at the moment in order to tell whether a person is mentally ill.

And I agree they can't make pinpoint distinctions but they can look at the evidence, they can draw upon their experience and they can give testimony as to whether when a person committed a crime, they were actually mentally ill to the extent that they could not have prevented themselves from committing the crime.

MARGARET WARNER:

Mr. Bradley, as you said, this is not a new debate and every so often we have a case like this that sparks a lot of national debate. Are there any changes in this kind of a standard, which as we pointed out at the top of the program, is used in half of the states, that you might recommend?

JOHN BRADLEY:

Well, it's interesting that our legislature in Texas currently has an interim assignment. Our legislature meets every two years, so they'll meet sometime next year. And one of their assignments is to look at the manner in which we appoint psychiatric experts to go into cases like this and to evaluate the people and try to come up with some more uniformed method for evaluating competency to stand trial and sanity.

And I think that would be a pretty good step. As it is, both sides go hire someone, we can go get two different opinions. And what the juries end up doing is not listening to the experts but looking at the facts of the case.

MARGARET WARNER:

Miss Bard, some states have another standard that they call, you can find someone guilty but insane. Can you briefly explain that and do you think that's a good idea — where it recognizes the issues that you're concerned about but it also meets Mr. Bradley's test of recognizing a moral responsibility?

JENNIFER BARD:

That's a compromise a lot of states have come up with and I don't agree with it. I think it really is shirking the issue of whether we're going to hold somebody who is mentally ill responsible for a crime. I think to say that somebody is guilty, but insane, is skirting the question of whether or not they were responsible. I don't think it's a good alternative, and I don't think that it would advance much if more of the states came up with that language.

MARGARET WARNER:

Mr. Bradley?

JOHN BRADLEY:

I completely agree. In fact, I would state that a little stronger. I think it's dishonest to say that someone can be guilty and insane, because the whole question and the American system of justice depends upon is: Are we able to examine this person and determine that they can be held morally responsible for what they did?

And if a person truly is insane, then it's reprehensible to say that we're going to hold them criminally responsible and punish them when they had no ability to recognize that what they did was wrong.

MARGARET WARNER:

All right. John Bradley, Jennifer Bard, thank you both.