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CNN Live At Daybreak

Testimony Resumes Today in Yates Trial

Aired February 19, 2002 - 06:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Testimony is scheduled to resume five hours from now in the trial of a Houston mother accused of drowning her five children.

CNN's David Mattingly looks at the crux of the case.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DAVID MATTINGLY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Sitting silently and almost motionless, Andrea Yates listened in court as the prosecution delivered an unflinching account of her crime.

JOSEPH OWMBY, PROSECUTOR: She called Noah into the bathroom and put him in the water with Mary and drowned him. Then carried Mary and put Mary on the bed with the other three children that she had already drowned.

MATTINGLY: Facing execution or life in prison if convicted, Yates' future rests on one question: Did she know that what she was doing was wrong when one by one she drowned her children in the family bathtub?

OWMBY: The carpet was soaked. The water, it's still standing nine inches, I believe, in the bathtub.

MATTINGLY: For the first time since her arrest last June, Andrea Yates appeared in court not in scrubs or a t-shirt, but a dark gray outfit, looking more like the nurturing and loving mother that defense attorneys hope to portray. A mother tragically psychotic, driven by extreme mental illness to kill her five children. The defense revealing Yates is on daily doses of anti-psychotic medication.

GEORGE PARNHAM, DEFENSE ATTORNEY: This woman on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the most severe, that she was off the chart.

MATTINGLY: Outside Houston's Harris Country courthouse, a crush of cameras as husband Rusty Yates and Andrea's family enter for opening statements, inside a full courtroom. Potentially damaging testimony to come from 911 dispatchers. Why did Yates call for police unless she knew her actions were wrong? Also a confession in which Yates details how she killed her children.

OWMBY: She told him that she wasn't mad at the children, that she killed them because they weren't developing correctly and she was a bad mother.

MATTINGLY: The key to Yates' defense, hundreds of pages of medical documents and expert testimony chronicle in years of severe mental illness. Two suicide attempts, delusions, postpartum depression, and psychosis called by the defense the cruelest and most severe of mental illnesses.

PARNHAM: It takes the very nature and essence of motherhood to nurture, protect the love and changes the reality.

MATTINGLY: David Mattingly, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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