Bob Barr

Yates Jury Plays To Audience

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

August 2, 2006

If the verdict in the Andrea Yates multiple murder trial last week were a bad soap opera, one could shake one’s head in disbelief and simply change the channel. The problem is, the six men and six women who found this evil woman not guilty of murdering three small children (she was not charged in this trial with the murder of her two other children) because they decided she was insane were not actors and actresses in a bad TV show.

These 12 citizens did not merely decide the fate of a fellow citizen charged with the most heinous of crimes. They sent a message to current and future generations of Americans that a person deemed to know that her actions in murdering a fellow human being were wrong should nonetheless be forgiven.

Judged by the post-verdict behavior and statements of the jurors, it is clear that we have a serious problem: jurors who consider it their job to psychoanalyze themselves and the accused so as to bring peace and closure to a troubling situation.

Jurors take an oath at the start of the trial to set aside their personal views and prejudices, and objectively consider the evidence to be presented to them at the trial. They are then to render their decision on guilt or innocence based on that evidence and—importantly—on the law as they will be given it by the judge. They are not instructed to apply the law as they might like it to be, or how they think it should be. Jurors are to apply the law as it is. That includes the law concerning insanity.

As to this question—taking the definition of whether a person is insane at the time he or she commits the alleged offense and applying it to the facts adduced at the trial—the Yates jurors failed miserably. In an unbelievable display of either stupidity or hubris, Todd Frank, the 33-year-old jury foreman, told a TV show right after the case concluded that even though he and his fellow jurors concluded that Yates understood that what she’d done was wrong—which meant she did not fit the legal definition of “insane”—the jurors decided they would find her insane anyway and therefore “not guilty.”

This decision by the jurors was squarely at odds with what the jurors were told was the law they were required to apply to the facts of the case. Their decision seems to have been based at least in part on the presence in the jury room of a 13th juror: Dr. Phil.

After the jurors’ verdict was announced in open court, the foreman could hardly wait to start giving interviews about their deliberations. His explanations delivered in those interviews reflect a striking misunderstanding of the role of the jurors in a criminal case. Rather than simply carry out the job they were sworn to fulfill, foreman Frank and his soap opera compatriots apparently used their time psychoanalyzing themselves, trying to heal wounds to their psyches.

Babbling on about “their” (the jurors’) emotional difficulties, and holding wakes for the murdered children during the deliberations, the ex-jury foreman seemed more concerned with soothing his own emotional feelings than in carrying out his oath as a juror to take the law as the judge gave it to him and apply it to the facts as he determined them at the trial.

Frank emotionally told anyone who would listen to his post-verdict bloviating that he and his fellow jurors had grown to “love each other” as a result of their time together. He went on to tell the whole world, which apparently in his mind was waiting breathlessly to learn of his redemption, that the jurors had all made it through the trauma OK.

Isn’t that sweet? Jurors—charged with determining whether an obviously disturbed (but clearly guilty) mother knew that what she was doing was wrong when she drowned her five children—find group love and healing as a result of their judicially sanctioned field trip together.

Rusty Yates, the former husband of Andrea Yates and the father of the five murdered children—who at times throughout the five years since the murders seemed nearly as weird as his former spouse—wept after the verdict and called it a “miracle.” In fact, it wasn’t a miracle at all. It was nonsense; gobbledygook; psychobabble. But then again, that does make for good TV.

Mr. Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.