This is a farce (I wish). Convicted, jailed Houston-area mom Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in a bathtub at home in 2001, then called police and confessed, will get a new trial because a witness cited as a partial causal factor a "Law and Order" TV drama episode that didn't exist.

That Yates - who suffered from schizophrenia and post-partum depression - may or may not have been partially motivated by a TV episode that showed a mom drowning her child in a bathtub, is just about entirely beside the point. Yates killed her five children and admitted it. The debate, such as it is, has really been about a provision of Texas law which allows the mentally ill to still be given hefty sentences if they know the difference between right and wrong.

I know that to bleeding heart liberals and social workers, the concepts of "right" and "wrong" are fraught with epistemological peril, but really: tough macadamias. Ms. Yates, what you did was wholly monstrous. And a society unwilling to punish you, or at least - as now - willing to waste more taxpayer dollars for a new trial based on an ultimately meaningless technicality, is not a prudent or moral society.

The debate over Texas law really gets me here. Imagine your own children the victim(s) of a killer. And then imagine the court or jury decides: "oh, doesn't really count, the perp is sick, see. But here's a treatment program for him, and a grief counsellor for you."

Every now and then, something just, and right, happens in an appeals court. But the new trial for Yates will produce no such revelations.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 6, 2005 09:25 AM

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