July 27, 2006

Religious Insanity In Action

Tuesday, 30 Promise

Here's what happens when you think those voices in your head are the Invisible Sky Fairy, and you do morally repugnant stuff because of it:

Jury finds Yates not guilty in drownings

HOUSTON - After being acquitted by reason of religious insanity in her children's bathtub drowning deaths, Andrea Yates won't spend her life in prison — but she will be committed to a state mental hospital.

[snip]

Yates' ex-husband, Russell Yates (R - Religiously Insane [but I repeat myself]), called the verdict "a miracle."

"This means that you can claim the voices in your head are satan, and get away with murder." "This means a woman who we perceive to be also a victim in all this, just like our children are, is going to get a better quality of life for herself for the balance of her life," Yates said outside the courthouse.

Four years ago, another jury convicted Yates of the 2001 murders, but an appeals court overturned the conviction last year because of erroneous testimony from a prosecution witness.

Yates' attorneys said she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and, in a delusional state of religious fervor, believed Satan was inside her and was trying to save the children from hell by drowning 6-month-old Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah.

"It's this simple: This lady never did anything, anything wrong in her whole life, except murder her own children" defense attorney Wendell Odom said. "She's religiously insane mentally ill. She wakes up one morning. She drowns her five kids. Come on — we all know she's religiously insane, and it's a shame that it took us this long to finally get the right verdict."

[snip]

Yates "made a decision that what she did was what the Invisible Sky Fairy told her to do right," said prosecutor Joe Owmby. "That is an untenable position."

[snip]

Yates did not testify. Her lawyers presented much of the same evidence as in the first trial, including half a dozen psychiatrists who testified that Yates thought it was okay to murder others if her Invisible Cloud Being told her to didn't know the drownings were wrong.

[snip]

You know, it's funny - I see no mention here whatsoever about how Andrea Yates was taking medication for the voices in her head and that her husband was so religiously insane that he took her off the meds so she could pop out another kid. Or of how he got a preacher to try and convince her that it was Koresh' will that she stop taking the medication that was keeping her sane so that she could breed some more. Or how any time Andrea Yates wanted something that her husband didn't think she should have, he and his religiously insane accomplices would tell her that it was Satan trying to influence her. Do any of the dozens who read these words think that if these people were Wiccans or Muslims or Buddhists or a member of any of the other less respected religions here in the Ewe Ess, and this sort of thing happened, that the juries would be as forgiving of this kind of horrendous behavior? Do you think that the news stories in those case would say that in the weeks before the drownings, "for some inexplicable reason," a doctor had told her to stop taking her medication?

It is my sincere wish that, as soon as someone brought up their religious beliefs in a court of law in order to justify their criminal behavior (not to explain it, but to try and get away with it because it's what their deity told them to do), they get put away for religious insanity. And that goes double for rabid anti-choice people who think it is okay to murder abortion doctors.

Posted by (: Tom :) at July 27, 2006 11:59 PM