Anyway, back to the original question.

Cases like this will never be able to have 'justice seen to be done' there is always a counter argument to whichever verdict is posted. All that can be done is to try to make sure that the woman involved is not able to carry out such an act again. That is for the medical world to sort out not the legal one.

Lilith,

I think justice was served, if very expensively, in this case. The facts of the case were examined twice, and the error in law that the first trial judge made was corrected by the appeals court. It seems to me that it would have been a miscarriage of justice to imprison for life a woman who was legally insane when she committed the crime.

Regardless of whether Tom Cruise wants to admit it or not, post partum depression is a very, very real and serious mental disease. The woman had 5 children in seven years, and apparantly very little help taking care of them. A woman's body can't heal properly under those conditions, so yes, I think if nothing else she went crazy from the stress of it all. It's just sad to me that no one paid enough attention to see the signs...I'm sure this wasn't her only "bizarre" action.



LAW

I think justice was served in this case as well. However, I certainly don't want to hear in say 3 to 5 years that Andrea was released from the mental facility, declared sane, and gets pregnant again. The thought of her ever having children is hideous to me. :boohoo:

So in this case, would you be a proponent of government ordered sterilization?

*Discliamer: Not trying to be a smartass, but genuinely curious as to people's thoughts on it.

I had that same question. Having had close friends who had a mentally handicapped child who became an adult and repeatedly had children who had to be taken away due to her inability to care for them, I have always walked the line on sterilization. Such a hard choice.

From what I have seen I do not think she will ever be let free. They(?) said that when she started to recover from the depression she is in that she realized what she had done to her childern and it sent her back into a deeper depression. I heard this on one of the 24hr news channels while surfing the web, so I did not get any sources.

lonelyarmywife,

Tough question! While I am a firm believer that there is an exception to every rule, and that Andrea Yates is as good a candidate as I can think of for forced sterilization, eugenics is a dangerous, slippery slope.

Forced sterilization is about as absolute as the death penalty. I’d think long and hard before authorizing the State to do that to its citizens.