Friday, May 26, 2006
(3:45 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
The Endless Fascination of Andrea Yates
Late in June, Andrea Yates will be retried for murder in the drowning deaths of her five children. Yates' case has, and will continue to be, endlessly fascinating. So many of the most salient, structurally productive contradictions of American culture are constantly aswirl.For starters, Yates' situation is easy picking from any number of feminist perspectives suggesting either that the real villian in the situation is Andrea's husband who badgered her into having five kids and then forbade her from having any contact with other adults, especially women, or that Andrea is just the most notable example of the phenomenon produced by a patriarchal culture and pointed to in Desperate Housewives, a show initially inspired by the hype around the first trial. At one point, there were rumors that Yates husband would stand trial for his role in driving her crazy.
In response, some on the religious right have been livid at such suggestions and have brought out tired old odes to individual responsibility, expressing scepticism that there is even such a thing as post-partum depression or mental illness (the most notable instance of this came in World Magazine, a mouthpiece of Chuck Colson et al). Others such as James Dobson have tried to stick more closely to a sort of standard medicalized psychiatry perspective.
Within the field of medicalized psychiatry there have been all manner of attempts to sort out just what went wrong: How do we make sure people take their medications? Why wasn't she hospitalized at the time? Should someone like Andrea have children? That many children? Should her children have been taken away from her? Should women with as severe of problems as Andrea had long displayed be permanently institutionalized?
Then there is the long history of legal development that allowed Yates to become the poster child for a new form of criminal finding enacted in Texas in the wake of conservative outrage at John Hinckley's not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity after shooting Reagan in order to win Jodie Foster's love. Yates was found 'insane but guilty.' This category of guilt completely guts the traditional legal meaning of insanity in allowing a jury to put aside everything else that matters in a defendant's life and simply ask itself whether or not a defendant knew right from wrong at the precise moment, in the precise situation of the crime.
On this note, reference should be made to one of the more intriguing characters in the charade: Park Dietz. Dietz is the reason for the retrial. Apparently, he had consulted with Law and Order for an episode remarkably similar to the situation and testified in court that Yates almost certainly saw the show and copied the crime, thus premeditation, thus no insanity defense. The show never aired; hence, retrial. Dietz has testified himself at the trials of John Hinckley, Jeffrey Dahmer, and, perhaps soon, the D.C. Sniper trial. Together with his associates, Dietz and co. have testified in just about every significant U.S. case that could possibily involve psychological testimony in the last couple of decades. As one interviewer (fascinating interview) summarized, Andrea believed in Satan and therefore believed in right and wrong, hence she wasn't insane under Texas law.
Actually, however, cases such as Yates' are the very hardest for Dietz, and I'm quite sure that a damn good defense attorney could flip Dietz testimony against into a strong argument for at least 'reasonable doubt.' Another intriguing article on Dietz, which includes the following bit relevant to our sporadic returns to Agamben's The Open and perhaps also the current Chimp Fest at I Cite and Infinite Thought,
The earliest documented acquittal for insanity occurred in 1505, and the concept
was around at least as early as the 13th century, when the jurist Bracton wrote,
"For a crime is not committed unless the will to harm be present." People look at someone like Joel Rifkin, who killed 16 women in New York and sometimes drove around in his truck with the naked corpse of one of his victims straddling him, and they want to believe only a psychopath could do such a thing. Dietz offers the parallel of villagers centuries ago who find a horribly mutilated corpse, with human tracks in the snow around it. "Do they conclude a man did this?" Dietz asks. "No. It had to be a man-beast. Hence the vampire. Hence the werewolf. Other times and places: Would a man do this? No. Only a witch. Only Satan. In our time: Would a man do this? No. Only an insane person would do this." He recalls successive classes at Virginia in which his students observed interviews with two killers. One, who had murdered his mother with a hatchet, laughed throughout the interview; he kept staring at the ceiling and rubbing his crotch. He was clearly crazy and the students seemed jovial and unconcerned after the interview. The second session, though, was with a man who had raped, sodomized, and strangled a 12-year-old girl, leaving her body with a stick jammed into the vagina. This killer seemed rational and composed. He was the students' age, and he dressed like them and looked like them. The students emerged from that interview, Dietz says, badly shaken: "If it looks too much like us, it's intolerable."
So, Yates: pop culture, feminism, law, madness, politics, the religious right, werewolfs - geez, our corner of the blogosphere should be all over this.
J. has written a paper dealing with madness in Thomas Aquinas in which she references the Yates trial. Most importantly, J. discovered that Aquinas may not completely buy the 'evil as privation' only line of Augustine and all theology since. Aquinas suggests at one point that madness can result from an excess of love. Evil as excess. I like it. For a few years, J. and I had discussed how we were loathe to buy into the privation only theory, but hadn't thought of a way out until that discovery.
