"Unnatural Deeds"

Foul whisperings are abroad; unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.
More needs she the divine than the physician.

-William Shakespeare
Macbeth
V.ii.75-78

AP: Andrea Yates Again Pleads Not Guilty---

HOUSTON - Andrea Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the drowning deaths of her children Monday as she made her first court appearance since her 2002 capital murder convictions were overturned.

State District Judge Belinda Hill set a March 20 trial date.
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During her original trial, jurors rejected Yates' insanity defense and found her guilty for the 2001 deaths of three of the children drowned in the family bathtub: 7-year-old Noah, 5-year-old John and the youngest, 6-month-old Mary.

Evidence was presented about the drownings of the other two children — Paul, 3, and Luke, 2 — but Yates was not charged in their deaths.

Yates was sentenced to life in prison.

Her convictions were overturned last January by a state appeals court because of testimony by the state's expert witness, forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz. He testified that, shortly before Yates killed her five children, television's "Law and Order" series broadcast an episode about a woman with postpartum depression who drowned her children. No such episode ever existed.

What a wicked, horrible woman. She ought to be locked up forever, to listen to the screams of her children and she plunged them into the bathtub and held them under.