Andrea Yates

Andrea Pia Yates (née Kennedy; born July 3, 1964) is an American woman from Houston, Texas, who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. The case of Yates—who had exhibited severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia in the years leading up to the murders—placed the M'Naghten rules, along with the irresistible impulse test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States.

At Yates's 2002 trial, Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney for Harris County, asked for the death penalty. Yates was convicted of capital murder, but the jury refused the death penalty option. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after forty years. The verdict was overturned on appeal, in light of false testimony by a prosecution witness, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz.

On July 26, 2006, a Texas jury in her retrial found that Yates was not guilty by reason of insanity. She was consequently committed by the court to the high-security North Texas State Hospital in Vernon, where she received medical treatment and was a roommate of Dena Schlosser, another woman who committed infanticide by killing her infant daughter. In January 2007, Yates was moved to Kerrville State Hospital, a low-security state mental hospital in Kerrville, Texas.