There’s been an incredible amount of hatred directed at Andrea Yates, and it scares me. I think it reflects a deep misunderstanding of what it means to be mentally ill. Douglas Cruickshank wrote a pretty good piece on this for Salon – good enough that I’m lifting my self-imposed ban on linking to them. (Other interesting stuff on MetaFilter.)
I understand that people would feel shock and horror at what she did to her own children. But just the act itself, with no motive other than her extreme illness, should prove that she had absolutely no ability to choose her own actions. Transferring the shock and horror we feel into hatred for Andrea Yates (and cries for her death or torture) is destructive both to our society and to any real understanding of mental illness.
On the other hand, I’m not at all convinced that the events leading up to the murders were nonvolitional on her part. She started to have disturbing feelings — feelings she told her husband and other people about — long before she had her fifth child, at which point she could have been a responsible person and attended to her own mental health before expanding her family. She was *told* that she wasn’t healthy and shouldn’t have more children, for crying out loud, and they went ahead and did it anyway.
We treat drunk drivers harshly because they can anticipate unpleasant consequences when they begin drinking, even if their judgment is badly impaired by the time they have to face those consequences. Insofar as Yates was capable of exercising her own judgment, she was a negligent parent and not a great human being. (For that matter, her husband must have been aware that this was not a safe situation for the children to be in.)
That said:
1) I’m more horrified than ever that people are allowed to live with substandard health care when (mentally and physically) sick people pose such a threat to healthy oens.
2) Even if we put a good deal of culpability on Yates, prison is not the right place to send her given that she is still clearly very ill. We have no trouble throwing untreated drug addicts into the general prison population, of course, but that doesn’t make it less repulsive.
3) Carelessness is not a capital offense. Her mental state is by no means an excuse for her actions, but as she did not specifically and lucidly anticipate what would happen to the children, she should not be treated as a mass murderer might be. A lengthy but not lifelong prison stay is in order. (One for her husband, too. I have even less sympathy for him than for her.)