He So Crazy!

A few hours ago, a Houston jury ruled that Andrea Yates--the crazy housewife who drowed her five kids in the bathtub four years ago--is not guilty of the crime because she's nuts. You might remember that after her first trial, back in 2002, it took a jury only four hours to find her guilty. The highlight of the trial was when Park Dietz, the Newport Beach forensic psychiatrist (and technical advisor to the TV show Law & Order) told the jury that Yates wasn't crazy. In fact, Dietz claimed, Yates was simply pretending to be nuts after watching an episode of the show in which a depressed mother drowes her kids in a bathtub, and is found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Turns out there was no such Law & Order episode, or at least not one that ever aired on TV. That means Yates never watched it and might actually have killed her kids because she had totally lost her mind. Here's my profile of Dietz from January 2005 in which I pretty much predicted the conviction would be overturned and detailed Dietz' long career of arguing that psycho killers aren't really psycho, just mean. That's crazy talk! Isn't it?