An earlier jury was right to have found her guilty of murder, but that verdict was overturned mistakenly on appeal. Five days ago, the justice system failed these innocent children: baby Mary, 2-year-old Luke, 3-year-old Paul, 5-year-old John and 7-year-old Noah, when Yates was basically sentenced to a state mental hospital with periodic hearings for release.

How could those jurors overlook the calculated plan of Yates to kill her children? She had plotted and schemed about the heinous acts in her mind weeks before actually carrying them out. She waited for her husband to leave. She knew exactly what she was doing when she held her children down under water and the result that would occur. The story about Satan making her do it didn’t even come about until after she’d been taken into custody, leaving plenty of time for her to fabricate a reason for her monstrous behavior.

What is also infuriating is those children’s deaths are not Yates' fault alone. She obviously had some mental and emotional issues from repeated suicide attempts and a stay in a mental hospital for about two weeks in April and 10 days in May 2001. Psychiatrists testified that she was catatonic and wouldn't eat and that her postpartum condition from Mary's birth in November worsened after her father died in March.

What did these so-called mental health professionals do? What did her husband do? They abandoned her to care for herself with psychotropic drugs she chose not to take. As volatile as she was, and as isolated as her condition, she was of sound mind to know that not taking her medication would inflict the psychological distress she’d experienced previously. So her postpartum depression became exacerbated and sent her into a psychosis less than a month later in June 2001 that her defense council said caused her to take her own children’s lives.

I have a hard time swallowing that. Not all mentally ill people kill. That was her choice. Unfortunately, she isn’t being held accountable for her subsequent choices and neither are her medical providers or her husband. They’re all contributors to the senseless deaths of those beautiful children — and the children yet to be victimized because the Yates’ case now has set a precedent for others to claim insanity when they kill.