For the week of August 15 - 21, 2001

Getting into the 
mind of a criminal

Commentary by ADAM TANOUS

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In future years, Andrea Yates will be associated with one word: infanticide. It is a term that is attached to a few, infamous others such as Juana Leija, Susan Smith and Christina Riggs. While the act can be described by a single word, the Yates case brings to the fore a much more complicated picture.

For those unfamiliar with the case, Yates lived in the Clear Lake section of Houston, Texas, with her husband and five children: Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months. In June of this year, she called the Houston 911 dispatcher and said she had drowned all of her children in a bathtub. The responding police officers found all five bodies in the house.

The first question that comes to mind, of course, is how could someone possibly do that?

Parents will likely have a more complicated reaction to that question than those who haven’t been bewitched by children. To a parent who knows the overwhelming joy and sense of purpose children bring into their lives, the thought of losing a child, in any way, is so horrifying that it can hardly be contemplated. It is a thought that sits in the back corner of every parent’s mind but one never acknowledged for fear of disturbing the precarious equilibrium of life.

At the same time, I am sure that every parent—whether sleep deprived or under stress financially or emotionally or for other reasons—has felt a flash of anger towards his or her child. It is a sensation that, moments later, fills a parent with fear like no other. It is fear, because for those few seconds, what you know of yourself, is not the person in the room. And perhaps the difference between a normal parent and a child abuser or even murderer simply resides in the intensity and length of time that surge of anger lasts. For most it is a momentary spike, for others it might be a sustained rage. But with true anger, in either situation, rational thought and morality—intertwined as they are—may get pushed aside.

Last week Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to counts of capital murder against her. In the past Yates has suffered from postpartum depression and has attempted suicide twice. A court ordered psychiatric evaluation is said to deem her competent to stand trial, meaning she understands the court proceedings, but that she suffers from severe mental illness.

The public reaction to this plea is predictable enough. There has long been a societal bias against depression, namely that it is a cop out. Everyone gets knocked down in life, the argument goes; you just have to pick yourself up and get through it. That attitude is changing, of course, as people learn that there are real chemical abnormalities that take place in the brains of those suffering from the illness. The old "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" argument is akin to telling someone with a cold to get with it and stop sneezing.

But, is depression a form of insanity, in so far as the law goes? Generally, a person is not criminally responsible if at the time of the crime he was "laboring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, he did not know he was doing what was wrong" (the M’Naghten Rule). Could depression becomes so severe that one breaks completely from reality, becomes divorced from the accepted norms of right and wrong? Talk to anyone who has suffered through serious depression and they will tell you it seems entirely possible.

Two themes of William Styron’s "Darkness Visible," a memoir of his struggle with depression, are the indescribable nature of the pain of depression and the loss of rational thought. That people will take their lives to end the pain is proof enough that depression is a wholly different and real phenomenon. Suicide is a thought that seems inconceivable to me until I consider the analogous situation in the realm of physical pain.

I can imagine suffering from a terminal disease and extreme pain, so much so that I would opt out of the picture. I’ve seen others go through it, and I have had the normal experiences with physical pain so that the scenario is, at least, conceivable. The point is we tend to be accepting of seemingly irrational behavior in the case of physical pain but not so with mental pain.

So if Andrea Yates could get to the point of wanting to kill herself to end the pain, could she also get to the point of killing her children if she perceived them, "through defect of reason," to be the source of her pain? For those of us in the rational world that extrapolation seems like a big one. But again, we are trying to examine something on the other side of a great divide.

Trying to evaluate whether a criminal action is understandable is not an attempt at forgiving the action. It is only important in determining what to do with these people. We have always seen a distinction between a crimes committed out of malice and those out of sickness. The latter is a mitigating circumstance only because it implies a less than absolute free will on the part of the offender.

The prosecutors in the case are seeking the death penalty for Yates, which underscores the arbitrary nature of the punishment. Under the 14^th Amendment, every citizen is guaranteed the "equal protection of the laws." Susan Smith killed her two children in South Carolina, lied about it for days, then was spared the death penalty and sent to prison for life. Juana Leija drowned her children, supposedly to free them of their father’s sexual and physical abuse, and received probation. Christina Riggs smothered her two boys in Arkansas and was executed. Depending on what state a person lives in or the political climate at the given moment or the perceived mental state of the offender, the punishment for the same crime can vary dramatically.

The basic question cases like the Yates case raises is: To what extent do conditions or situations in the offenders’ life mitigate their culpability for their actions? The question speaks to our ambivalence as to what is the relevant issue with crime: the frame of mind during the crime or the act itself. To what do we give more weight as a society: the level of malice in the heart or the body count that results from it?

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.