A jury in Texas, a state that all but worships at the altar of capital punishment, has decided that the time has come for mercy. The crime was certainly heinous — five small children are dead — but the killer did not fit the profile that most Texans and a majority of Americans see as appropriate for imposition of the death penalty. So the executioners of the great state of Texas will not be plunging a poison needle into Andrea Yates.
The essential point is that many middle-class Americans have been able to identify, and thus empathize, with Ms. Yates. She was a suburban middle-class woman struggling with mental illness and the enormous stress of raising five kids under the age of 8.
The accumulating pressures exploded into barbarism on June 20, 2001, when Ms. Yates, in a homicidal rampage that has been exhaustively covered, began rounding up her kids and dragging them into the bathroom, where she drowned them one at a time in the family tub.
Here was a white, middle-class woman who went off. Suddenly it was important to find out why, to probe for explanations. Newsweek all but cradled the woman in its initial coverage, declaring: "Most mass killers are sociopaths, utterly alienated from other human beings. They are callous or sadistic. Andrea was the opposite: if anything, she apparently cared too much."
Root causes, disdained for decades by the tough-on-crime crowd, were suddenly back in flower. The defendant couldn't have been in her right mind. The act itself proclaimed her craziness. She had to be insane to do something like that.
But it wasn't just the act that proclaimed her craziness. It was also her status. The gut reactions throughout Texas and across the country would have been far different if Andrea Yates had been a crackhead, or a welfare mother, or some crazy guy with a gun who opened fire on a classroom full of children.
There wouldn't have been much patience for a search for root causes in any of those instances. And, with five children dead, the imposition of the death penalty would have been all but automatic in Harris County, Texas, which has sentenced more people to death than any other county in the U.S.
Harris County prosecutors charged Ms. Yates with capital murder but never really pushed for the death penalty. They could track the winds of public opinion as well as anyone. During the penalty phase of the trial, they offered no witnesses and no evidence to support a decision to execute Ms. Yates.
The jury took just 35 minutes to decide that life in prison, not death, was the appropriate sentence.
I happen to agree with the decision not to execute Ms. Yates. But I think it's appalling that in so many other cases of capital murder, in Texas and elsewhere, defendants are moved through the system as if on an assembly line, with little or no serious consideration given to possible extenuating circumstances, including mental retardation and severe mental illness.
I've written before about Mario Marquez, whose case was one of many in Texas in which the background and mental state of the defendant was not sufficiently considered. Mr. Marquez had an I.Q. of 65 and was savagely abused as a child. At times his father would beat him with a horsewhip until he passed out. His parents abandoned him to the streets when he was 12.
Mr. Marquez was too limited mentally to talk with his lawyer about his case. They talked about animals and the things Mr. Marquez liked to draw.
He was executed in 1995.
The death penalty can never be administered consistently with any reasonable degree of fairness and equity. Too many prejudices and preconceived notions are held by the inherently fallible humans who operate the system. And there are too many unknowns when complex issues of culpability arise: Who's insane, or not insane? Who's mentally retarded?
Who's lying and who's not? Was it self-defense? Was it an accident?
In the court of public opinion, there's no agreement on whether Andrea Yates should even have been convicted. Some conservative commentators, ordinarily hot for the death penalty, have joined others in arguing that she should have been acquitted by reason of insanity.
In criminal cases, unanswered and unanswerable questions abound. You can never achieve the kind of certainty that should be required if you're sending defendants to their doom. It is past time to set the death penalty aside.