Interview: Dr. Park Dietz

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From his offices in California, Dr. Park Dietz talked at length about the conviction of Andrea Yates, the notion of excusable homicides and the need for revised laws dealing with distinctions between the mentally ill and the legally insane, particularly among mothers who harm their children.

In the Yates case, Dietz told TIME, Andrea's thought process still allowed her to appreciate the difference between right and wrong. Her mind recognized murder as wrong or she would not have sought the death penalty to get rid of her inner demons and protect her children from falling into his grasp because she had not properly raised them. By wanting to dispose of Satan, she had to believe Satan had evil ideas. Therefore, she still comprehended evil to be wrong. She also "knew that society and God would condemn her actions," Dietz said.

His testimony was viewed as crucial in prosecutors winning a conviction. On the witness stand, an analysis of his testimony shows, Dietz had emphasized facts and assessments that favored prosecutors. He also minimized the findings of doctors who earlier treated Andrea and noted as far back as 1999 that she suffered from delusions of being a bad mother, voices of unknown origin telling her "get a knife" and visions of violent acts. Instead, Dietz told jurors that "there was no hallucination prior to the crime" and whatever she suffered was nothing more than "obsessional intrusive thoughts."

Despite the emphasis prosecutors later put on his determination that Andrea did not become severely psychotic until the day after the drownings, Dietz told TIME he never denied or doubted that Andrea was indeed sick on June 20, the day of the killings. Some of her psychotic symptoms — such as believing that cameras were planted in her ceiling and TV characters were sending messages to her — were indisputable as much as two weeks prior to the deaths, he said.

He agreed with the jury's guilty verdict based on the current insanity law in Texas. Although he expects to be paid about $50,000 for time spent researching the Yates case and testifying on behalf of prosecutors trying to prove she deserved to be convicted under the state's insanity law, Dietz says the law, which has similar variations in two dozen states, allows a psychotic person's own disordered thoughts to be used against them.

"Even I disagree with this law for this case," said Dietz. "I believe we should recognize our sick parents in several ways and handle them differently both during hospitalization and when they commit crimes." For example, British doctors will keep depressed mothers and their newborns together in hospitals to monitor them over a period of weeks or months.

Already, insanity laws differ from state to state, some allowing jurors to find defendants "guilty but mentally ill" or "guilty but insane," which usually requires them to receive treatment for their mental illness in a state hospital, then transfer to a prison to serve out their sentence. Legislators surely would have difficulty trying to adopt laws that address the special circumstances of postpartum cases.

The country needs "someone like Mrs. Yates to be held responsible for an action that she knew was wrong, but be treated and confined until infertile, whether through natural biological effects or electively," Dietz said. "What's wrong with that analysis in the eyes of American legal scholars is that it would pressure women convicted of such crimes to have themselves sterilized in order to gain freedom. And that would not be true consent."