HOUSTON — A slumped, blank-faced Andrea Pia Yates was sentenced to life in prison Friday after a jury agreed in half an hour to spare the life of the mentally ill housewife, who drowned her five children in the bathtub.
The panel of four men and eight women had deliberated just 35 minutes when the jury buzzer rang. Yates' family came running, the audience rustled in their seats and Judge Belinda Hill rushed in the side door and raced to the bench so fast nobody had time to stand. "Verdict, verdict, verdict, verdict," Yates' husband, Russell "Rusty" Yates, chanted to himself, twitching his legs and twining his fingers.
As Hill read Yates her fate, the convicted woman turned to her attorneys and asked what the legal language meant. Defense lawyer Wendell Odom spoke into her ear, and Yates nodded. A few minutes later, she shuffled from the courtroom, giving a sidelong glance toward her mother, brothers and sister.
Yates, 37, a former nurse who struggled with mental illness for years, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Earlier this week, the jury rejected her insanity claim after just a few hours of deliberation and found her guilty on two counts of capital murder. The panel had to decide between life in prison and death by injection. But the jury decided Yates doesn't pose a future threat to society. She will be 77 before she is eligible for parole.
Yates was tried in Harris County, in a court system that accounts for roughly one-third of the convicts awaiting execution on the state's death row. But in a radically uncharacteristic move from the Houston district attorney's office, prosecutors passed up the chance to present evidence in the punishment phase and stopped short of asking for a death sentence.
"Nothing I can do will restore their lives; the death penalty can't restore them," prosecutor Joseph Owmby told the jury in his closing statement. "If you want to sentence her to life rather than a death sentence, you will have done the right thing."
Afterward, Owmby said he wanted the jury to pick a punishment. "I didn't think the facts in this case warranted me recommending the death penalty."
The other prosecutor, Kaylynn Williford, avoided asking for death outright but insinuated in her closing argument that she considered execution an acceptable punishment. "Those children never had a chance," Williford said. "You need to think about the pain those children endured, and the terror and fear. . . . Mrs. Yates had the benefit of friends and family and the health system, and she turned her back on that."
