Wrong channel? Wrong verdict?

• Author: Lannan, Brian

On June 20, 2001, a desperately disturbed mother of five systematically drowned her children in the bathtub of the family home on the outskirts of Houston, carefully laying out their bodies on a bed before phoning, first, the police, and then her husband. An endless dark night of torment for Andrea Pia Yates had started long before, but for a riveted international audience, the horror had just begun, and it compounded. A ferociously efficient killing machine of a legal -- note I do not say justice -- system seemingly largely unfettered by the niggling humane considerations afflicting other, less resolute such systems, set out to put Yates, (who seemingly never, throughout the trial, escaped the catatonic agony which had blighted her for years), out of her misery.

In the course of doing their level best to maintain an execution batting average for the metropolitan area proudly held up as a model for the rest of the State of Texas, the prosecution called, among an impressive posse of witnesses, a true lone star, a forensic psychiatrist whose hefty CV included frequent guest appearances in criminal cases and regular work as a consultant for the television drama Law and Order. And here, something, perhaps a number of things, got muddled. The hired gun testified at trial that his program had done an episode featuring a very similar scenario, apparently culminating in the accused having been found not guilty by reason of insanity, and expressed the expert opinion that Yates might well have been influenced by it. (His report prepared for the trial quoted Yates' husband to the effect that she never missed the show.) A prosecution theory was put to the jury accordingly.

But, it turned out there had never been such an episode. Mighty publicity engines thrown into full throttle by the program's producers made this explicitly and abundantly clear. A resulting defence motion for a mistrial was dismissed, defence attorneys confirming that this would constitute grounds of appeal "big time". The expert helpfully wrote prosecutors advising he had "confound (ed) the facts" of three other similar cases and of two Law and Order episodes based on them, which he had worked on. It was not apparent that any distinction was made between the facts of the cases and the facts of the dramatizations.

On March 15, 2002, in a resolution of a desolate, despairing redundancy, Andrea Pia Yates was sentenced to life in prison.

It appears the Law and Order powers that be did...