Peter: Are you acquainted with anyone who's been diagnosed with a mental illness? Anyone who's been medicated or hospitalized for treatment of a mental illness? Anyone who's attempted suicide? Anyone who's been indoctrinated into a religious cult? Anyone who's been made subservient to his or her spouse? If not, I can understand that you would not "get it."

I, for one, certainly do not feel sorry for every murderer. Even the case of death-row inmate Tracy Housel, who claims to be mentally ill, doesn't evoke the same emotions in me as this case does. In Housel's case, the defense consulted two mental-health experts who could not come up with strong enough evidence of a brain injury or of mental illness for the issue to be brought up at trial as a defense. Also, his motive was quite different from Yates's: he took the cars and credit cards of his victims in order to go on a cross-country killing-and-spending spree, and was apprehended with ample evidence to attest to that (in fact, he was caught when he tried to use his latest victim's credit card to buy a country-and-western outfit in another state). Even so, he tried to portray himself at sentencing as a devoted family man, by displaying his live-in girlfriend and his out-of-wedlock son, but then had another girlfriend plead for his life, so he didn't exactly concern himself with family responsibilities to the point of being overwhelmed by them and aggravating any mental illness he might have had. However, he did abuse alcohol and illegal drugs, so it's questionable whether that abuse aggravated a mental illness or whether he simply got high without being mentally ill.

But in Yates's case, there is no question that she had a serious problem for years, for which she was receiving sporadic and inadequate treatment, and about which her husband had been warned by doctors that it would worsen under certain conditions which her husband then decided to impose on her anyway!!!! So yeah, I feel differently about this case than about some other murder cases.