Andrea Yates

Who is Andrea Yates?

Andrea Yates is a former Houston, Texas resident who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. She had been suffering for some time with very severe postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Yates was represented by Houston criminal defense attorney George Parnham. The then-Harris County Texas District Attorney asked for the death penalty in Yates' 2002 trial. Her case placed the M'Naghten Rules with the Irresistible Impulse Test, a legal test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States. Yates was convicted of capital murder. After the guilty verdict, but before sentencing, the State abandoned its request for the death penalty in light of false testimony by one of its expert psychiatric witnesses. Yates was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal.

On July 26, 2006, the Texas jury in her retrial found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity.