'Insane' woman who drowned children faces death penalty

Texas prosecutors faced fresh criticism for their gung-ho approach to capital punishment on Thursday after they filed papers seeking the death penalty for Andrea Yates, the suburban Houston housewife who drowned her five children in the bathtub six weeks ago.

Despite evidence that Mrs Yates has a long history of severe mental illness, and despite agreement on all sides that she posed no further threat to society, the district attorney's office in Houston said that a jury "ought to be able to consider the full range of punishment in this case, including the death penalty".

Harris County, the jurisdiction around Houston, has sent more people on to Death Row than any other county in the United States, despite growing concerns about the fairness of capital prosecutions and the adequacy of defence counsel.

The decision prompted an immediate wave of revulsion from opponents of capital punishment, as well as several Texas legal experts, who said there was no precedent for executing a mother who kills her children. "How does that serve society?" Richard Frankoff, a criminal lawyer, told the Houston Chronicle. "I think it's outrageous. It's inhumane."

Mrs Yates made headlines around the world when she drowned her children, aged six months to seven years, on 20 June. She had suffered severe post-natal depression after the births of her youngest two children, but had no help in the house and was expected to "home school" the older children. Her husband, a computer engineer at Nasa's Johnson Space Center, belongs to an obscure fundamentalist Christian church based in the Pacific North-west that encourages procreation and denounces Roman Catholics as the devil incarnate. Mrs Yates was raised a Catholic.

Since being arrested and confined to the psychiatric wing of Harris County jail, Mrs Yates has been described as near-catatonic. But in a court hearing on Wednesday, prosecutors argued that she was competent to stand trial, citing a report by a county psychologist saying she suffers "from a serious mental disease, not a severe mental disease".

The district attorney's office refused to elaborate on its reasons for seeking the death penalty, but several were offered by legal experts familiar with its thinking. David Dow of the University of Houston said the county was sensitive to criticism that it had condemned too many poor black men and wanted to show that it could be equally determined with a white woman.

The defence lawyer, Stanley Schneider, suggested the prosecution was less interested in putting Mrs Yates to death than it was in getting a pro-death penalty jury. That, he argued, would increase the county's chances of rejecting the defendant's plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.

Before a trial can start, the judge has to rule whether Mrs Yates is mentally competent to understand courtroom proceedings. The consensus yesterday was she would find it near-impossible to avoid trial.

Even if she is found incompetent the first time, she can be treated with psychiatric drugs and re-evaluated, lawyers familiar with Texas practice said. George Dix, of the University of Texas law school, said: "Those medicines are great things."