The court system gets it right, for once
Andrea Yates found not guilty by reason of insanity-------------
You know, I've heard some of the most ignorant statements from people since this verdict has come down. I know you've all heard them too.
"What's wrong with our legal system?"
"She's getting off easy."
"How can we let a murderer just walk away?"
The irony of it all is that I think this is the first time I've heard a court award a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict CORRECTLY.
If anyone was ever insane, it was this woman. Before this incident, Andrea Yates had been hospitalized several times for mental reasons and had tried to commit suicide twice. She told her psychiatrist that she did not feel her children were maturing properly due to her inability to be a good mother, and reportedly she was haunted by visions that her son would eventually become a gay prostitute. An extremely religious woman, Yates was extremely disturbed by the idea that her parenting skills could (in her mind) ruin her children's lives, and she apparently believed that if she drowned her children at this young age, in their innocence, they would all be sent to heaven.
No sane person calmly fills a bathtub and methodically drowns their five children, one by one. In fact, if I remember the early reports of the incident correctly, I believe she enlisted her oldest son to
help her complete the task. How can anyone say she
wasn't insane?
If you want my honest opinion, I believe the husband was at least partly responsible for this even happening. No "loving husband" is unaware of his wife's psychosis and doesn't help her through such a hard time. Yates was reportedly suffering from postpartum psychosis, and seeing as how her youngest child was 6 months old, I would think Mr. Russell Yates had plenty of time to recognize his wife's problem.
Aside from all that, in the past five years since this incident occurred, Russell has divorced Andrea and remarried! Hey Rusty, could you have moved any faster? What happened to sticking by your wife during such a difficult time? And I was of the impression that he was a nice Christian man. Didn't Jesus preach
against divorce? Maybe this is another one of those cases where we're picking and choosing what parts of the Bible to follow. I love that.
In all honestly, I cannot personally blame Mr. Yates for divorcing his wife, but his decision to do so and then turn around and remarry so quickly proves to me that he was not nearly as devoted to her as he would have us believe. I would go so far as to say that he contributed to her psychosis by the way he treated her during those last few months. From the day this incident occurred, I knew I didn't like that man, and that was before I ever dreamed I would one day be referred to as a "feminazi".
But in regards to Andrea Yate, I finally have to commend our legal system for doing the right thing. She is not getting off easy, nor are we letting her walk. She needs to be in treatment, and I doubt that she will ever recover from her disease and what she did. If revenge is what you're looking for, you're looking for it in the wrong place. I don't think this woman even truly understands what she did; how can you expect her to pay for it?
To say that she really wasn't insane is to completely disregard the physical, mental, and emotional ordeal a woman goes through during and after pregnancy. The feeling of emptiness and unfitness right after birth, and the realization that these children's lives are in ones hands is just too much for some woman. And more woman go through these issues that you can even imagine; not all of them kill their children, but in some cases their disease can drive them to do so.
Kudos to the jury for having the ability to look at this case in terms of understand, not just black and white issues like the first jury. And while I don't think Yates will ever fully recover, I hope she is at least better off where she is now then where she was 5 years ago.
Bush to Alzheimer's Patients: Maybe You Should Have Stayed Embryos
Bush Vetos Stem Cell BillWASHINGTON - President Bush cast the first veto of his presidency Wednesday, saying legislation easing limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research "crosses a moral boundary."
"This bill would support the taking of innocent human life in the hope of finding medical benefits for others," Bush said at a White House event where he was surrounded by 18 families who "adopted" frozen embryos not used by other couples, and then used those leftover embryos to have children.------------------
I never know what to say about this issue. Bush's position just seems so...
wrong. I mean, how can he claim that this research is "taking... innocent human life", when it could potentially save the lives of so many. And how is THIS crossing a moral boundary when abortion has already been legal for so many years?
There are certain types of birth control that routinely flush out cells with the potential of becoming a fetus. These birth controls are hardly even controversial. Why then is stem cell research such an evil thing?
Voting Rights: Not Such a Black and White Issue
"House Renews Voting Rights Act provisions"The House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act for 25 years, rejecting contentious efforts by Southern Republicans to dilute the landmark law.
Three provisions of the act are set to expire next year: requirements that states and counties with a history of discrimination clear any changes to their election process with federal authorities, that federal observers be present if there is evidence that voters have been intimidated, and that counties with significant non-English-speaking populations provide bilingual ballots.
....
Conservatives introduced four amendments to weaken the act, and all were rejected by large bipartisan majorities. One proposed eliminating the requirement for foreign-language ballots. Another would have created an easier method for states to escape federal oversight.
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga. (Blog author's note: No relation)
, argued that his state has overcome its documented history of discrimination and asked the House to amend the act to ease requirements for states that must have all voting changes cleared in advance by the Department of Justice. He said Georgia still is being punished for racist practices that it has eliminated.
....
Before the amendments were rejected, a number of Democrats said they would not pass the legislation if it was changed in any way.
"Do not accept any of these amendments, I beg you," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. "We cannot afford to go back at this point."
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said "any one of (the amendments) would be a weakening of the Voting Rights Act."
....
"We are fed up and the nation should be fed up," Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said during a recent conference call. "This handful of shameful retrogrades tried to strike at the heart of American democracy.
"We have well-documented testimony regarding discrimination and a continuing need for the protections."
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., gave an emotional speech on the House floor Thursday about discrimination he experienced and held up photos of several black men, including himself as a young man, being beaten by Alabama state troopers in 1965 while marching for voting rights.
"We've made some progress; we have come a distance," Lewis said. "The sad truth is that discrimination still exists. That's why we still need the Voting Rights Act, and we must not go back to the dark past." -------------------
I have to admit at this point that I have only been lightly keeping up with this issue over the past week. I recently began my first full-time job with a downtown Greensboro law firm, and I've been attempting to get my schedule at least semi-regulated.
But one thing about this whole ordeal baffles me: If the Southern Republicans are concerned that they are being "punished" by being forced to clear all changes with the Department of Justice, and if the Democrats (and other Republicans, as is surely the case) are concerned that not renewing this act would set civil rights back several decades, why was an obvious compromise not even discussed in this article? Why was there no proposed amendment
by either side to make all states run changes through the Department of Justice?
This is something I asked in my Election Laws class a few months ago while studying the Voting Rights Act. It seemed odd to me that only states with a history of discrimination should have federal oversight when changing their election procedures. In fact, as much as I am for smaller government, I also realize that a huge part of the Florida fiasco in 2000 was due to a discrepancy between the Florida statutes and the federal regulations. I understand that the federal government has many important things to do already, but do we really want to cut corners with the procedure that chooses our leaders?
Anywhere there are humans involved, corruption is inevitable. This means regardless of what color they are, how much money they make, what area they live in, or what history they may have as a people. Thirty years ago, Southern states were blatantly disenfranchising people on the basis of their skin. Thirty years from now, a state with no history of doing such a thing may suddenly develop a discriminatory voting procedure.
Representative Westmoreland is right: Until this act applies to everyone, Southern states are being punished for the sins of their ancestors. But Representative Conyers is just as right: Any dismissal of this act would result in our country's civil rights "go[ing] back". So why not move forward instead? Moving forward would be to realize that all humans will make mistakes, whether those mistakes be subconscious or vicious in nature.
Moving forward would be to pass an amendment applying all provisions of the Voting Rights Act to all states in America. I'm rather shocked that our partisan-minded Congress couldn't even compromise enough to see that.
