Andrea Yates Biography

Andrea Pia Yates (née Kennedy; born July 2, 1964) is a former resident of Houston, Texas, who confessed to drowning her five children in their bathtub on June 20, 2001. She had been suffering for some time with very severe postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. She was represented by Houston criminal defense attorney George Parnham. Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney in Harris County, asked for the death penalty in her 2002 trial. Her case placed the M'Naghten Rules, along with the Irresistible Impulse Test, a legal test for sanity, under close public scrutiny in the United States. She was convicted of capital murder. After the guilty verdict, but before sentencing, the State abandoned its request for the death penalty in light of false testimony by one of its expert psychiatric witnesses. She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal.