yates verdict

yesterday, andrea yates was convicted of capital murder for the drowning of 3 of her 5 children. (the prosecution only charged her with 3 of the 5 deaths to protect themselves against double jeopardy in the case of an acquittal. they could have charged her again with the deaths of her other 2 children.)

this case is one of the saddest things i have ever heard about. there is NO good outcome. five small children are dead. one man has lost his children and his wife. one woman has lost her children and her freedom. two parents have lost their daughter.

soon, the jurors will decide whether she deserves to die for her crime, or whether spending the rest of her life in prison is punishment enough.

there is no question that what she did was wrong. unforgivable. there is no question that she knows (at least, now) that what she did was wrong. i suspect that she does not have a waking moment during which she is not haunted by her children.

but, andrea yates was not well. she had suffered for years with depression, severe post-partum depression after the births of each of her children, hallucinations, and attempts at suicide. everyone around her knew that she wasn't well. she had been taking anti-depressants and anti-hallucinagens. they weren't working. whether her husband or parents or doctor should have known that she was dangerous is unclear. what if...?

i am firmly against the death penalty. for anyone, for any crime. but even if i did believe in the death penalty, i wouldn't think it was justified in this case. andrea yates does not deserve to die. her family does not deserve to be punished more. she was not capable of rationality or morality when she drowned her children. she will be punished far more for her crime by having to live with herself for the rest of her life.

infanticide is, if you can step away from the horror of this (and similar) cases, an interesting phenomenon. do you remember that article that steven pinker, respected mit psycholinguist and evolutionary psychologist, wrote on the subject?

pinker writes, and most everyone agrees, that infanticide is inexcusable. even if you want to get into the debate of when a human becomes a person (conception? viable-outside-the-womb? birth?) there does need to be a (perhaps arbitrary, perhaps not) boundary, and birth is certainly an obvious choice. that said, infanticide occurs regularly in the animal kingdom, and we take it in stride as natural selection. competition. survival of the fittest. a male lion, newly installed as the head of a pride, kills all the cubs of the previous male, thus bringing the females into heat and ensuring a crop of young that bear his genes. both fish and rats regularly eat their young.

i'm not saying that human infanticide is natural or even excusable, or that what andrea yates did could even be classified as infanticide (her oldest child was 7). i'm just pointing out that the fact that it occurs, and our not-quite-as-horrified reaction to it, is partially explainable by evolution. something to think about.