Time to Stop the Madness

Cohen: Andrea Yates Belongs In Mental Hospital, Not Prison

(CBS) 
And that's perhaps the best reason to avoid a trial. Whether prosecutors get a conviction or not, Yates will be confined and heavily medicated for the rest of her life. She will not in either case be free to enjoy the life she knew before her illness took hold. She will not in either case be writing any books or taunting her jailors or initiating frivolous litigation.

So why spend the time and the money and the effort -- why put so many people through the pain of that particularly painful trial -- just to ensure that Yates becomes a convict? When you consider that a conviction at trial is no sure thing, a new trial just doesn't make legal sense.

You wouldn't know it from listening to prosecutors Wednesday in the wake of the appellate court action. They were defiant. "Several witnesses, ours and there's, testified that Andrea Yates knew precisely what she was doing," said Harris County District Attorney Alan Curry. Yates, he said, "knew that it was wrong under God's law, under man's law under society's expectations, her family's beliefs. We would anticipate that a jury would come to the same conclusion with regard to her insanity."

This is not the language of solemn and judicious thought. It is the language of conflict and ego. Harris County prosecutors now have a rare second chance in the law to do the right thing. Andrea Yates never should have been tried in the first place. And she should never be tried again. Her place is not in a Texas prison. Her place is in a mental health hospital, where she can be treated for her illness and studied as a test case so that women in the future may be spared her pain and the pain she caused so many others.

Sometimes good people do terrible things for reasons the rest of us cannot fathom. Sometimes those things constitute a crime, for which severe punishment is appropriate, and sometimes they don't, in which case our society offers other options. This is one of those times. Prosecutors should back off Yates and let the doctors take over. She was a loving mother who in a moment of madness killed those she loved the most. That is the epitome of madness and it has no place in our court systems or in our prisons.

Prosecutors always talk about crime and punishment and remind us of how one should fit the other. But even if you stipulate that Yates committed the "crime" of murder there is no fit "punishment" for her. Yates herself is uniquely situated. She is the killer of her children but also one of the few most deeply affected by their deaths. No matter where she spends the rest of her days, she will have to live with the memory of what she did on the morning of June 20, 2001 to the five little souls she loved most in the world.

That is more punishment than any prosecutor or jailor ever could mete out. It is more punishment than most of us ever could take. And if you ask me it is punishment enough.