Jeana (DP)
Former Member
THIS IS AN ARTICLE ABOUT YATES AND THE DEATH PENALTY. AFTER THAT, I’VE POSTED INFORMATION ABOUT TWO WOMEN AND ONE MAN WHO MURDERED THEIR CHILDREN AND WERE FOUND NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF INSANITY. I CANNOT SEE ANY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE WOMEN AND ANDREA YATES. (Sorry for the all caps, but I was trying to differentiate my post from the material copied and pasted)!!!
I. Misconceptions muddle insanity defense debate, law lecturer says
The debate over the insanity defense in the United States is clouded by public misconceptions -- about mental illness itself, and about what happens to defendants acquitted by reason of insanity, according to attorney and University of Texas professor Jennifer S. Bard.
"Jurors tend to imagine that such defendants will simply walk away" -- which is understandable, given that juries in many states are not told what will happen to people acquitted by reason of insanity, Bard said during an Oct. 17 lecture at Pitt's law school.
In fact, "the actual statistics show that defendants who were found not guilty by reason of insanity actually spent more time confined to institutions than people who were convicted of crimes and served sentences," she said.
Bard, an assistant professor and research director at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas, delivered the third Mark A. Nordenberg Lecture in Law and Psychiatry. The law school and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law presented the lecture.
Bard cited three other common myths about the insanity defense:
* Such defenses are common. Fact: A "big body of research" shows that the insanity defense is raised in just 5-14 percent of homicide cases, she said.
* Insanity defense criteria are so complicated that defense attorneys easily can fool juries into acquitting clients. "Actually, there is some really interesting research showing that the vast majority of successful insanity defenses come in bench trials. It's primarily judges who are most sympathetic to insanity defenses," Bard pointed out.
* The insanity defense usually is used in murder trials. Fact: Murder cases account for fewer than one-third of insanity defenses, Bard said. More often, Bard said, the insanity defense figures into trials for minor offenses such as shoplifting and assaulting a police officer -- unfortunate but predictable occurrences when mentally ill offenders are repeatedly convicted and released, rather than being treated for the root causes of their anti-social behavior, argued Bard.
* * *
Ironically, she noted, prison inmates are the only Americans who enjoy a Constitutional right (under the Eighth Amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment) to health care -- not that mentally ill prisoners necessarily receive appropriate care, Bard said.
The key question in the insanity defense controversy, according to Bard, is this: Do Americans believe that individuals can be so mentally ill that they are not responsible for their actions?
Her answer: Not entirely, and certainly not in Texas.
Bard recounted the case of Andrea Yates, the Texas woman convicted of murder (but spared the death penalty) last March for drowning her five children.
Yates "was suffering from schizophrenia and depression well before she had any children. Having children just exacerbated a bad situation," Bard said.
Two weeks before the killings, Yates's husband Rusty desperately sought treatment for his wife. Recognizing Andrea's symptoms of severe postpartum depression from previous pregnancies, he pleaded unsuccessfully with Andrea's doctors to put her back on anti-depressants following the birth of their fifth child.
On the day that she drowned her children one by one in a bathtub, Andrea Yates was not taking any medications, nor had she been prescribed any since her previous bouts with depression and schizophrenia.
* * *
"Research has shown that once you get a panel of jurors qualified as death penalty jurors -- that is, jurors who say they would be willing to consider the death penalty -- you automatically have a group of jurors who are highly suspicious of the insanity defense," said Bard.
For Yates's attorneys to mount a successful insanity defense under Texas's strict "knowledge-based" criteria, they had to convince the jury either that Yates did not know what she was doing when she killed her children, or that she didn't know that it was wrong. "Irresistible impulse" because of mental illness is not an accepted defense in Texas and many other states.
* * *
Bard argued: "I think it would be an important change to the insanity defense for there to be an acknowledgement that it is possible to have knowledge but not to be able to do anything about it. And that it is possible, just as it is possible to have degrees of kidney disease or heart disease, to have degrees of mental illness that affect the thought process and [that] should be taken into consideration while assessing criminal responsibility."
* * *
But a majority of states, including Pennsylvania, have replaced the strict "knowledge-based" criteria for insanity defenses with the hybrid standard of "guilty but mentally ill."
"This standard is very satisfactory to jurors because it acknowledges that a person committed a crime, but it also recognizes that they were mentally ill when they did it," Bard said.
However, the standard defies logic, according to Bard. "If we believe as a society that there are people who, because of mental illness, are not responsible for their actions, then it doesn't make sense to create a category of people who are mentally ill but are responsible for their actions anyway," she said.
* * *
-- Bruce Steele
http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/35/021024/10.html
Woman not guilty by reason of insanity in drowning deaths of kids
Lisa Ann Diaz, 33, charged with capital murder, had pleaded innocent by reason of insanity in the deaths of daughters Kamryn, 3, and Briana, 5, in the family's home last September. She faced a mandatory life prison sentence if convicted.
The jury deliberated seven hours over two days before returning a verdict.
Lisa Ann Diaz's husband told jurors that she would never have harmed her children out of spite -- the argument submitted by prosecutors.
"If Lisa had been in her right mind," Angel Diaz testified, "this would never have happened."
Angel Diaz called police minutes after coming home from work to find the two girls naked on a bed in his three-bedroom house. He testified that he found his wife in the garage "rather pale, and a glazed look on her face."
He told authorities his wife said "something bad happened to the kids" and that she "didn't want them to suffer."
Diaz said his wife's list of physical problems grew dramatically after a flu shot in 2002, including fears of having a thyroid condition, ringworm, diabetes, lupus and tuberculosis. Defense attorney Darlina Crowder documented 180 doctor visits by the woman to her physician and specialists over five years.
Diaz said he eventually became fed up when his wife's health fears spread to belief that her daughters were experiencing the same troubles.
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/state/081204_APstate_drowningdeaths.html
Mom who said she killed on God's orders acquitted
Jury rules she was insane when she bludgeoned her 3 children
(CNN) -- A jury acquitted a Texas mother of killing two of her sons and seriously injuring the third after determining she was insane at the time.
As the verdicts were read, Deanna Laney's face quivered, but the 39-year-old shed no tears.
Laney would have received an automatic life sentence had she been convicted of capital murder.
Instead, she will immediately be taken for evaluation to a maximum security state psychiatric hospital, where she could stay as long as 40 years.
Laney admitted bashing her three children in the heads with rocks. She said God told her to do so.
Laney was charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Luke, and a single count of injury to a child for 15-month old Aaron, who survived the attacks on Mother's Day 2003.
Prosecutor Matt Bingham has said Aaron's vision is impaired and he will never be able to live on his own.
Bingham chose not to seek the death penalty in the case.
"I don't think anybody in this room or anybody in that courtroom wasn't touched by the evidence in this case," the Smith County district attorney told reporters after the verdicts.
"For the rest of my life I'll remember Aaron, I'll remember Joshua, I'll remember Luke. I'll never forget what happened to them that day," he said.
"We have believed as strongly as we could believe that our client was insane at the time of the events," Files said.
Files said in court that Laney believed God had told her the world was going to end and "she had to get her house in order," which included killing her children.
"The dilemma she faced is a terrible one for a mother," Files told the jury. "Does she follow what she believes to be God's will, or does she turn her back on God?"
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/04/03/children.slain/
Texas woman finds son, 5, dead in oven
BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) — The body of a 5-year-old boy was found in an oven at his home Friday, and his mother's boyfriend was charged with capital murder. The suspect, Kenneth Pierott, 27, previously had been found not guilty by reason of insanity in the 1996 slaying of his handicapped sister.
Pierott was arraigned and jailed Friday night in the death of Tre-Deven Odoms.
The child's mother, Kathy Jo Odoms, found her son's body in the oven Friday morning, Justice of the Peace Paul Brown said. The burners on the stovetop were turned on, the oven was not, he said.
The boy had no visible injuries, Brown said. Autopsy results were expected Monday.
Odoms told police she woke up Friday morning because she was hot and smelled gas, The Beaumont Enterprise reported in its online edition Friday. She found the burners were on and turned them off. She discovered the boy's body after Pierott left the house.
Pierott spent six months in state mental hospitals beginning in 1998, after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the December 1996 beating death of his 25-year-old sister, who had cerebral palsy.
Court documents obtained by the Enterprise show Pierott hit his sister in the head with a metal dumbbell. He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1119302/posts
I. Misconceptions muddle insanity defense debate, law lecturer says
The debate over the insanity defense in the United States is clouded by public misconceptions -- about mental illness itself, and about what happens to defendants acquitted by reason of insanity, according to attorney and University of Texas professor Jennifer S. Bard.
"Jurors tend to imagine that such defendants will simply walk away" -- which is understandable, given that juries in many states are not told what will happen to people acquitted by reason of insanity, Bard said during an Oct. 17 lecture at Pitt's law school.
In fact, "the actual statistics show that defendants who were found not guilty by reason of insanity actually spent more time confined to institutions than people who were convicted of crimes and served sentences," she said.
Bard, an assistant professor and research director at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas, delivered the third Mark A. Nordenberg Lecture in Law and Psychiatry. The law school and the Center for Bioethics and Health Law presented the lecture.
Bard cited three other common myths about the insanity defense:
* Such defenses are common. Fact: A "big body of research" shows that the insanity defense is raised in just 5-14 percent of homicide cases, she said.
* Insanity defense criteria are so complicated that defense attorneys easily can fool juries into acquitting clients. "Actually, there is some really interesting research showing that the vast majority of successful insanity defenses come in bench trials. It's primarily judges who are most sympathetic to insanity defenses," Bard pointed out.
* The insanity defense usually is used in murder trials. Fact: Murder cases account for fewer than one-third of insanity defenses, Bard said. More often, Bard said, the insanity defense figures into trials for minor offenses such as shoplifting and assaulting a police officer -- unfortunate but predictable occurrences when mentally ill offenders are repeatedly convicted and released, rather than being treated for the root causes of their anti-social behavior, argued Bard.
* * *
Ironically, she noted, prison inmates are the only Americans who enjoy a Constitutional right (under the Eighth Amendment forbidding cruel and unusual punishment) to health care -- not that mentally ill prisoners necessarily receive appropriate care, Bard said.
The key question in the insanity defense controversy, according to Bard, is this: Do Americans believe that individuals can be so mentally ill that they are not responsible for their actions?
Her answer: Not entirely, and certainly not in Texas.
Bard recounted the case of Andrea Yates, the Texas woman convicted of murder (but spared the death penalty) last March for drowning her five children.
Yates "was suffering from schizophrenia and depression well before she had any children. Having children just exacerbated a bad situation," Bard said.
Two weeks before the killings, Yates's husband Rusty desperately sought treatment for his wife. Recognizing Andrea's symptoms of severe postpartum depression from previous pregnancies, he pleaded unsuccessfully with Andrea's doctors to put her back on anti-depressants following the birth of their fifth child.
On the day that she drowned her children one by one in a bathtub, Andrea Yates was not taking any medications, nor had she been prescribed any since her previous bouts with depression and schizophrenia.
* * *
"Research has shown that once you get a panel of jurors qualified as death penalty jurors -- that is, jurors who say they would be willing to consider the death penalty -- you automatically have a group of jurors who are highly suspicious of the insanity defense," said Bard.
For Yates's attorneys to mount a successful insanity defense under Texas's strict "knowledge-based" criteria, they had to convince the jury either that Yates did not know what she was doing when she killed her children, or that she didn't know that it was wrong. "Irresistible impulse" because of mental illness is not an accepted defense in Texas and many other states.
* * *
Bard argued: "I think it would be an important change to the insanity defense for there to be an acknowledgement that it is possible to have knowledge but not to be able to do anything about it. And that it is possible, just as it is possible to have degrees of kidney disease or heart disease, to have degrees of mental illness that affect the thought process and [that] should be taken into consideration while assessing criminal responsibility."
* * *
But a majority of states, including Pennsylvania, have replaced the strict "knowledge-based" criteria for insanity defenses with the hybrid standard of "guilty but mentally ill."
"This standard is very satisfactory to jurors because it acknowledges that a person committed a crime, but it also recognizes that they were mentally ill when they did it," Bard said.
However, the standard defies logic, according to Bard. "If we believe as a society that there are people who, because of mental illness, are not responsible for their actions, then it doesn't make sense to create a category of people who are mentally ill but are responsible for their actions anyway," she said.
* * *
-- Bruce Steele
http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/35/021024/10.html
Woman not guilty by reason of insanity in drowning deaths of kids
Lisa Ann Diaz, 33, charged with capital murder, had pleaded innocent by reason of insanity in the deaths of daughters Kamryn, 3, and Briana, 5, in the family's home last September. She faced a mandatory life prison sentence if convicted.
The jury deliberated seven hours over two days before returning a verdict.
Lisa Ann Diaz's husband told jurors that she would never have harmed her children out of spite -- the argument submitted by prosecutors.
"If Lisa had been in her right mind," Angel Diaz testified, "this would never have happened."
Angel Diaz called police minutes after coming home from work to find the two girls naked on a bed in his three-bedroom house. He testified that he found his wife in the garage "rather pale, and a glazed look on her face."
He told authorities his wife said "something bad happened to the kids" and that she "didn't want them to suffer."
Diaz said his wife's list of physical problems grew dramatically after a flu shot in 2002, including fears of having a thyroid condition, ringworm, diabetes, lupus and tuberculosis. Defense attorney Darlina Crowder documented 180 doctor visits by the woman to her physician and specialists over five years.
Diaz said he eventually became fed up when his wife's health fears spread to belief that her daughters were experiencing the same troubles.
http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/state/081204_APstate_drowningdeaths.html
Mom who said she killed on God's orders acquitted
Jury rules she was insane when she bludgeoned her 3 children
(CNN) -- A jury acquitted a Texas mother of killing two of her sons and seriously injuring the third after determining she was insane at the time.
As the verdicts were read, Deanna Laney's face quivered, but the 39-year-old shed no tears.
Laney would have received an automatic life sentence had she been convicted of capital murder.
Instead, she will immediately be taken for evaluation to a maximum security state psychiatric hospital, where she could stay as long as 40 years.
Laney admitted bashing her three children in the heads with rocks. She said God told her to do so.
Laney was charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Luke, and a single count of injury to a child for 15-month old Aaron, who survived the attacks on Mother's Day 2003.
Prosecutor Matt Bingham has said Aaron's vision is impaired and he will never be able to live on his own.
Bingham chose not to seek the death penalty in the case.
"I don't think anybody in this room or anybody in that courtroom wasn't touched by the evidence in this case," the Smith County district attorney told reporters after the verdicts.
"For the rest of my life I'll remember Aaron, I'll remember Joshua, I'll remember Luke. I'll never forget what happened to them that day," he said.
"We have believed as strongly as we could believe that our client was insane at the time of the events," Files said.
Files said in court that Laney believed God had told her the world was going to end and "she had to get her house in order," which included killing her children.
"The dilemma she faced is a terrible one for a mother," Files told the jury. "Does she follow what she believes to be God's will, or does she turn her back on God?"
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/04/03/children.slain/
Texas woman finds son, 5, dead in oven
BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) — The body of a 5-year-old boy was found in an oven at his home Friday, and his mother's boyfriend was charged with capital murder. The suspect, Kenneth Pierott, 27, previously had been found not guilty by reason of insanity in the 1996 slaying of his handicapped sister.
Pierott was arraigned and jailed Friday night in the death of Tre-Deven Odoms.
The child's mother, Kathy Jo Odoms, found her son's body in the oven Friday morning, Justice of the Peace Paul Brown said. The burners on the stovetop were turned on, the oven was not, he said.
The boy had no visible injuries, Brown said. Autopsy results were expected Monday.
Odoms told police she woke up Friday morning because she was hot and smelled gas, The Beaumont Enterprise reported in its online edition Friday. She found the burners were on and turned them off. She discovered the boy's body after Pierott left the house.
Pierott spent six months in state mental hospitals beginning in 1998, after he was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the December 1996 beating death of his 25-year-old sister, who had cerebral palsy.
Court documents obtained by the Enterprise show Pierott hit his sister in the head with a metal dumbbell. He was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1119302/posts
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