Now that she is not going to be executed but will have to spend 40 (?) years in prison, in the sigh of relief, people may forget how barbaric that is too. Have her actions not punished her enough already? Isn't the danger that she will commit suicide?
So I was interested to read this admirably restrained item in the British Medical Journal about efforts even in the home state of your president, to introduce more humanity and subtlety into your penal system.
Chris Burford
London
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Mentally ill mother escapes death penalty but faces life imprisonment
Fred Charatan, Florida
A Texas jury of eight women and four men decided in only 35 minutes to spare Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in the family bath (16 March, p 634), from the death penalty and sentenced her instead to life in prison.
State district judge Belinda Hill sentenced Yates on 18 March. Yates's defence lawyer, George Parnham, said she would appeal her conviction.
The Yates case has set off criticism of insanity defence laws nationwide and particularly in Texas. Dr Lucy Puryear, a Houston psychiatrist who testified in Yates's defence, said, "The way the Texas statute is written makes it almost impossible to give anyone an insanity defence." The debate could shift to the Texas legislature next year.
Representative Garnet Coleman, who has bipolar disorder, plans to introduce a bill to refine the statute on insanity as a defence. Coleman, a Houston Democrat, said, "The standard isn't correct for the way mental illness works. The criminal statutes haven't caught up with the science. They are too strict. What the appropriate standard is requires a great deal more thought."