In April, 2001, my wife and I were house-hunting. We drove through one neighborhood, about 10 minutes from our apatment and about 20 minutes from wehre we eventually bought, looking at the available houses. It seemed like a nice family neighborhood -- especially when we saw the guy about our age in the yard of one of the neighboring houses with his four boys, and the somewhat odd-looking mom holding a little baby.

Two months later we saw them again, on the news. The mother had murdered the children. Her name would become a household word -- Andrea Yates.

Her retrial begins today.

Five years to the day after Andrea Yates systematically drowned her five children in a bathtub, a new panel of potential jurors will be summoned to downtown Houston on Tuesday in preparation for her new trial.

The first half of a 120-person panel will begin answering questionnaires intended to help attorneys gauge who can fairly and impartially decide whether Yates knew right from wrong when she killed her children in their Clear Lake-area home.

The remaining panelists will go through the process Wednesday, with jury selection to begin the following day. The trial, which is expected to last about a month, will begin June 26.

Few, if any, of those involved in the case might have imagined they would have to repeat this laborious task when Yates first went on trial four years ago. But everything changed when the state's sole mental health expert testified mistakenly about a TV program he claimed had been broadcast just before the drownings.

Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz — a consultant to the Law & Order TV series — told jurors in Yates' first trial about an episode portraying a woman who drowned her children and was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

After Yates' conviction, it was discovered that no such episode existed.

As a result, an appeals court threw out Yates' capital murder conviction last year, citing concerns that Dietz's error may have swayed the jury's judgment. With recent plea negotiations going nowhere, a new trial was inevitable.

"This is a classic case that probably has to be tried," said Gerald Treece, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law. "The government's doing its job and the defense is doing its job. And there's no compromise."

I don't think the Dietz error made a big diffeence -- not with five little kids dead. But justice seems to require that the reset button be pressed and the case be submitted to a jury again. So be it.

May justice be done on behalf of her murdered children.

Posted by: Greg at 10:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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