Yates Not Guilty

[Capitalist Lawyer]

There is no justice.



Yates Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity
Jul 26 1:13 PM US/Eastern
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By ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press Writer

HOUSTON

A jury found Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning deaths of her young children in the bathtub of their suburban home.

Yates will be committed to a state mental hospital, with periodic hearings before a judge to determine whether she should be released. If convicted, she would have faced life in prison.

Yates' attorneys never disputed that she drowned 6-month-old Mary, 2- year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah in their Houston-area home in June 2001. But they said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and, in a delusional state, thought Satan was inside her and was trying to save them from hell.

This is the second trial for the 42-year-old suburban mother.

The jury had spent 11 hours Monday and Tuesday trying to determine if Yates was legally insane. Wednesday morning, they reviewed the state's definition of insanity and then asked to see a family photo and candid pictures of the five smiling youngsters. After about an hour of deliberations, they said they had reached a verdict.

In Yates' first murder trial, in 2002, the jury deliberated about four hours before finding her guilty. That conviction was overturned on appeal.

[MrDoom]

Not in the Capitalist system, no.

[B.E. Jones]

I think we can all come together and agree.


That's fucked up.

[which doctor]

Everyone who commits crimes like that for no apparent reason has some sort of mental "problem. It's probaly caused by alienation due to capitalism and current American society.

[Capitalist Lawyer]

It's probaly caused by alienation due to capitalism and current American society.

I knew this was going to come up! How predictable.

And I'm sure that there are millions of others that are "alienated" due to capitalism and maybe even moreso than this woman. So why aren't they murdering their loved ones?

Typical communist, always quick to blame "the system" rather than the individual perpetrator.

[Delta]

Originally posted by Fist of [email protected] 26 2006, 09:20 PM
Everyone who commits crimes like that for no apparent reason has some sort of mental "problem. It's probaly caused by alienation due to capitalism and current American society.
You may be right. Alienation can lead to very strange beliefs and can lead to increased religiosity, which seems like it helped enable her commit these horrendous crimes.


always quick to blame "the system" rather than the individual perpetrator

People aren't born "evil". People are a product of their environment, and so looking at the environment that someone was in is a very rational thing to do.

[BuyOurEverything]

Meanwhile, 30,000 people die in car accidents every year just in the states... Did I hear someone say talking points?

[Severian]

Yates is crazy? ......ya think?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

LOL... I know right? These blood thirsty fuckers never cease to amaze me. She's obviously insane.. and the law allows for a non-guilty ruling on account of that.. so that's what happened.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Whether or not she is sane, she's a demonstrated danger to society and should be hanged.

Her pastor should be hung along with her.

[Capitalist Lawyer]

You may be right. Alienation can lead to very strange beliefs and can lead to increased religiosity, which seems like it helped enable her commit these horrendous crimes.

Horrendous crimes existed long before capitalism. And what about all of the other millions who are "alienated" by capitalism? How come they're not murdering their loved ones?

If alienated people automatically equals murder and crime; then there would be millions of people dead right now in this country as a result of murder.

She knew what she was doing and this was something that was planned and calculated with precision.


People aren't born "evil". People are a product of their environment, and so looking at the environment that someone was in is a very rational thing to do.

But people are born suspectible to certain mental diseases.


Whether or not she is sane, she's a demonstrated danger to society and should be hanged.

Her pastor should be hung along with her.

The pastor's demeanor is a result of alienation and capitalism!

And I'm surprised that none of you have yet to condemn the husband for being neglectful? Don't you think he should have done something to alleviate her wife's depressed state?

How reactionary of you all?

[Publius]

Not in the Capitalist system, no.

I guess getting rid of mental illness is a high priority after destroying capitalist oppression? That next on the list?

"First we'll smash the state, then we'll smash post-partem depression!"

[Publius]

Everyone who commits crimes like that for no apparent reason has some sort of mental "problem.

The hell you say.


It's probaly caused by alienation due to capitalism and current American society.

What's sad is, you think you're 'more rational' then those who would ascribe this to 'spirits' or 'devils'.

What a sad, hollow shell of a belief system.

[Publius]

You may be right. Alienation can lead to very strange beliefs and can lead to increased religiosity, which seems like it helped enable her commit these horrendous crimes.

Yeah, 'religiosity' and not the deep-seated psychological and physiological issues.



People aren't born "evil". People are a product of their environment, and so looking at the environment that someone was in is a very rational thing to do.

Her 'environment' was one of depression and mental illness.

Look at that.

Not that you'd know anything about how people are 'born'. You're not a scientist, or even likely a reasonably intelligent person given your diagnosis.

[Janus]

Perhaps she had some dormant mental problems that were triggered by stress,etc.

You can't blame everything on capitalism. Of course, her religion played a role in it as well.

[KC]

Yeah, I have to say that some people here that blame her killing her kids on capitalism are a little loony.

[Janus]

If she worked, I could say that it may have played a role though I think she was just a housewife.

Her explanations for her murder of her children go hand in hand with what her religion preached and connected with cases of familial mental illness and you have a very bad combination.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2006, 04:09 AM
Whether or not she is sane, she's a demonstrated danger to society
That's why there are high-security mental hospitals.


and should be hanged.

There are reasons why calls for super-draconian punishments, and "law and order" generally, are characteristic of the political right.

Janus wrote:

If she worked, I could say that it may have played a role though I think she was just a housewife.

Which probably had a lot to do with her mental problems. She's stuck in the house constantly with her umpteen kids and no adult company most of the time. It's like solitary confinement.

But that has nothing to do with capitalism, right?

[General Patton]

What a piece of dung, both her and the judge that heard her appeal. How could somebody do something like that to their own kids? It's time for a constitutional amendment stating that it is not cruel and unusual to give the death penalty to people who commit heinous acts of murder, even if they are deemed to be mentally ill. Hopefully, her justice is poetic and she gets run down by a bus and puts her out of all of our misery. Hopefully, this happens on the day that she is released from whatever mental institution they end up placing her in.

[Tigerman]

Mental illness is a myth.


Behaviors are not diseases.


All behavior has reason even if the reason is important only to the actor.



Psychaitry is pseudo-science. Psychaitry is social control method.


Psychaitry is the secular state religion!


These are exculpations of responsibility.


All of the above can be credited to Dr. Thomas Szasz, a lead libertarian thinker and master iconoclast of our time.

Here is what you should know about the insanity defence.

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freema...le.asp?aid=1744 (http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=1744)



From Solution to Problem

The insanity defense, as we know it, is a relatively new cultural invention. I believe it is not possible to understand the problems it causes unless we understand the problems it solved in the past and solves today.

The “crime” that led to the creation of the insanity defense was not murder, but a deed long considered even more heinous, namely self-murder, or suicide, punished by both ecclesiastic and secular penalties: the suicide was denied religious burial and his estate was forfeited to the Crown’s Almoner.

Because punishing suicide required doing grave harm to innocent parties—that is, to the suicide’s children and spouse—men sitting on coroner’s juries eventually found the task to be a burden they were unwilling to bear. However, prevailing religious beliefs precluded repealing the laws punishing the crime. The law now came to the rescue of the would-be punishers, offering them the option of finding the self- killer non compos mentis and hence not responsible for his deed. In the eighteenth century, it became a matter of routine for juries to arrive at the posthumous diagnosis that the suicide was insane at the moment he killed himself. (The criminal law against suicide was repealed only in the nineteenth century, by which time it had been replaced by mental health laws.)

The celebrated English jurist William Blackstone (1723-1780) recognized the subterfuge and warned against it: “But this excuse [of finding the offender to be non compos mentis] ought not to be strained to the length to which our coroner’s juries are apt to carry it, viz., that every act of suicide is an evidence of insanity; as if every man who acts contrary to reason had no reason at all; for the same argument would prove every other criminal non compos, as well as the self-murderer.” It was too late. By validating the fiction that suicides could, post facto, be found to have been non compos mentis, the law had crafted a mechanism for rejecting responsibility—the criminal’s for his deed, the jury’s for its duty—and, aided by the medical profession, wrapped the deception and self-deception in the mantle of healing and science.

We must keep in mind that the impetus for excusing self-murder did not come from its ostensible beneficiaries, the victims of the law against suicide. Clearly, it could not have come from them: the self- killer was dead; his family, bereft of means and reputation, was powerless. Instead, the impetus came from those who needed it and had the political clout to make law and medicine embrace it—judges and lawyers, coroners and mad-doctors. Coroner’s juries and judges could thus evade the burden of having to impose harsh penalties on the corpses of suicides and the widows and children they left behind; and physicians could pride themselves for saving innocent persons from suffering for the sin-crimes of “insane” self- killers.

The result of the practice of routinely excusing suicides of their sin-crimes by viewing them as insane was that persons suspected of being suicidal began to be incarcerated in insane asylums. Soon that, too, became a routine practice and reinforced the belief that persons who kill themselves or others are insane, and that the insane are likely to kill themselves or others.

[Janus]

Which probably had a lot to do with her mental problems. She's stuck in the house constantly with her umpteen kids and no adult company most of the time. It's like solitary confinement.

But that has nothing to do with capitalism, right?
Of course, capitalism has something to do with it because it is the type of society in which we live in. I am just saying that the murders themselves were more or less triggered by her mental problems and her religious beliefs.

[RevMARKSman]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28 2006, 02:19 AM
Mental illness is a myth.


Behaviors are not diseases.


All behavior has reason even if the reason is important only to the actor.



Psychaitry is pseudo-science. Psychaitry is social control method.


Psychaitry is the secular state religion!


These are exculpations of responsibility.


All of the above can be credited to Dr. Thomas Szasz, a lead libertarian thinker and master iconoclast of our time.

Here is what you should know about the insanity defence.

http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freema...le.asp?aid=1744 (http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=1744)



From Solution to Problem

The insanity defense, as we know it, is a relatively new cultural invention. I believe it is not possible to understand the problems it causes unless we understand the problems it solved in the past and solves today.

The “crime” that led to the creation of the insanity defense was not murder, but a deed long considered even more heinous, namely self-murder, or suicide, punished by both ecclesiastic and secular penalties: the suicide was denied religious burial and his estate was forfeited to the Crown’s Almoner.

Because punishing suicide required doing grave harm to innocent parties—that is, to the suicide’s children and spouse—men sitting on coroner’s juries eventually found the task to be a burden they were unwilling to bear. However, prevailing religious beliefs precluded repealing the laws punishing the crime. The law now came to the rescue of the would-be punishers, offering them the option of finding the self- killer non compos mentis and hence not responsible for his deed. In the eighteenth century, it became a matter of routine for juries to arrive at the posthumous diagnosis that the suicide was insane at the moment he killed himself. (The criminal law against suicide was repealed only in the nineteenth century, by which time it had been replaced by mental health laws.)

The celebrated English jurist William Blackstone (1723-1780) recognized the subterfuge and warned against it: “But this excuse [of finding the offender to be non compos mentis] ought not to be strained to the length to which our coroner’s juries are apt to carry it, viz., that every act of suicide is an evidence of insanity; as if every man who acts contrary to reason had no reason at all; for the same argument would prove every other criminal non compos, as well as the self-murderer.” It was too late. By validating the fiction that suicides could, post facto, be found to have been non compos mentis, the law had crafted a mechanism for rejecting responsibility—the criminal’s for his deed, the jury’s for its duty—and, aided by the medical profession, wrapped the deception and self-deception in the mantle of healing and science.

We must keep in mind that the impetus for excusing self-murder did not come from its ostensible beneficiaries, the victims of the law against suicide. Clearly, it could not have come from them: the self- killer was dead; his family, bereft of means and reputation, was powerless. Instead, the impetus came from those who needed it and had the political clout to make law and medicine embrace it—judges and lawyers, coroners and mad-doctors. Coroner’s juries and judges could thus evade the burden of having to impose harsh penalties on the corpses of suicides and the widows and children they left behind; and physicians could pride themselves for saving innocent persons from suffering for the sin-crimes of “insane” self- killers.

The result of the practice of routinely excusing suicides of their sin-crimes by viewing them as insane was that persons suspected of being suicidal began to be incarcerated in insane asylums. Soon that, too, became a routine practice and reinforced the belief that persons who kill themselves or others are insane, and that the insane are likely to kill themselves or others.


*AHEM*

Please, tell that to me again. I was diagnosed with OCD last fall and felt like crap the whole time I had it.

[tecumseh]

Yates is not to blame, she has a mental disease that was diagnosed by clinical psychologists.

She belongs right now in a mental hopsital, I hope she can recover so she in time may be released back into society. May she find peace in her life...

The right wingery of some of the members and commie members is apalling, do you find it odd at all that you are in the same league as the restricted members?

[Delta]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2006, 09:18 AM
You're not a scientist
Oh shit are you wrong :P