Recently in the news there has been plenty of coverage on the Andrea Yates case. For those of you who do not know whom Andrea Yates is, she is the woman last summer who drowned her five children in her own bathtub.
This past week, a jury in Texas sentenced her to life in prison. The jury had an option to sentence her to lethal injection, but could not do so because they believed that she was not a threat to society.
You are probably asking yourself what kind of mother would drown her five kids. Well, a sick mother would. Yates was battling postpartum depression and psychosis.
When the police questioned her about the deaths of her children, she said that Satan was inside of her and she was killing her children to save them from hellfire and damnation.
This sounds sick to me. If a mother believes that Satan is inside her and killing her kids is the solution, there is definitely a sickness.
Obviously the jury felt the same way because deliberation for her sentence only took 35 minutes. Does she still deserve the death penalty considering she knowingly killed her five children? She killed them one by one and then lined them up on her bed. She was not insane and knew what she was doing, so does this constitute the death penalty, if anything?
I am a person who never believed in the death penalty until I heard about this case. Yates knowingly killed her five children. And with her life sentence she will be eligible for parole in the year 2041. That is ridiculous.
She may have had depression, but she still knew right from wrong. It seems that a life in prison is not going to make her feel remorse considering when the court read the verdict she showed hardly any emotion.
I believe what she did is so grotesque and terrible and she does deserve to die, but in the end I have the same belief that the government does not have the right to decide life or death.
Although Andrea Yates was suffering from depression, I do not believe that they should keep in her the hospital like her lawyers are trying to do. She should be kept in a maximum security prison and feel the terror of prison that all the other cold blooded killers feel. And she should definitely not have parole. She should never be able to see the world from the outside of prison again. God only knows her children will never see anything again.