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Article: Beyond accommodation: reconstructing the insanity defense to provide an adequate remedy for postpartum psychotic women.
- Article from:
- Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Northwestern University, School of Law. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I. INTRODUCTION
Victorian psychologist Dr. Henry Maudsley wrote in 1892 when questioning why mothers kill their children: "[a] mother, worn down by anxiety and ill-health," can become "very low-spirited and desponding" and "imagin[ing] perhaps that her soul is lost, or that her family are coming to poverty," might "one day, in a paroxysm of despair, kill[] her children in order to save them from misery on earth, or because she is so miserable that she knows not what she does." (1)
On the morning of June 20, 2001 Andrea Pia Yates was feeding her children cereal for breakfast when her husband Rusty left for work in Clearwater, Texas. (2) However, the ...