Jury finds Andrea Yates not guilty by reason of insanity

Jurors on Wednesday reached a verdict ofnot guiltyby reason of insanity in the retrial of a Houston mother accused of drowning her five children in 2001 in a bathtub in her Texas home.

Andrea Yates, 42, pleaded innocent by reason of insanity in the deaths of three of her children. She has not yet been tried in the deaths of the other two.

Rusty Yates, the accused's ex-husband and the children's father, said the jury had reached the right decision.

"The jury looked past what happened and looked at why it happened,"he told reporters outside the courthouse. "Prosecutors had the truth [on] the first day and stopped there. Yes, she was psychotic. That's the whole truth."

Yates will be committed to a state mental hospital. She will have periodic hearings before a judge to determine whether she should be released. If Yates had been convicted, she would have faced life in prison.

Under Texas law, a person may be found insane if, because of a severe mental illness, he or she does not understand the crime is wrong.

Yates's lawyers argued she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis. They saidthat she believed she was saving her children from hell by drowning them.

"I'm very disappointed," prosecutor Kaylynn Williford said. "For five years, we've tried to seek justice for these children."

At her first murder trial in 2002, Yates confessed to drowning her five children: Mary, six months; Luke, 2; Paul, 3;John, 5;Noah, 7.Psychiatrists testifiedshe suffered from schizophrenia and postpartum depression. She pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

The jury rejected her defence andYates was sentencedto life in prison.

But her conviction was overturned on appeal when her lawyers argued that an expert state witness, psychiatrist Park Dietz, falsely claimed to have consulted an episode of the television show Law & Order that centred on a woman found not guilty by reason of insanity after drowning her children.

Dietz testified that Yates based her defence on what she saw on the episode. Lawyers and the jury later learned no such episode existed.