POSTED: 9:12 pm CST March 30, 2004 UPDATED: 9:24 pm CST March 30, 2004 Posted on 03/31/2004 8:10:57 AM PST by chance33_98
Tyler Mother Thought She Was Chosen By God Psychiatrist: Mother Was Legally Insane During Stoning Of Children
POSTED: 9:12 pm CST March 30, 2004 UPDATED: 9:24 pm CST March 30, 2004
TYLER, Texas -- A woman who says God told her to kill her sons with rocks had grandiose delusions that she and Andrea Yates, the Houston woman who drowned her children, were chosen by God to be witnesses after the world ends, renowned psychiatrist Park Dietz told a jury Tuesday.
Deanna Laney (pictured) believed Yates had been ordered by God to kill her five children in the family's bathtub and that the two would survive the end of the world to teach others about God, Dietz said.
"She thought she would be one of the two witnesses described in the book of Revelations," said Dietz, who also testified in the Yates case.
Yates was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and was sentenced to life in prison after jurors rejected prosecutors' recommendation for the death penalty. She was tried in the deaths of three of her five children.
Dietz, who concluded Yates knew right from wrong when she killed her children in 2001, testified Tuesday that Laney did not know right from wrong. Under Texas law, Dietz's conclusion means Laney would be legally insane at the time of the killings.
All five mental health experts consulted in the case, including Dietz and the other hired by the prosecution, have reached the same conclusion. But prosecutors wanted a jury to decide, saying expert opinions aren't facts and other evidence suggests Laney knew right from wrong.
Laney, a 39-year-old stay-at-home mother who home-schooled her children, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to charges of capital murder and serious injury to a child in the deaths of 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Luke and severe injury to then-14-month-old Aaron on Mother's Day weekend.
Another revelation Tuesday came when Smith County District Attorney Matt Bingham alluded to the deeply religious Pentecostal woman having had an affair. Bingham asked Dietz whether he knew Laney had failed to mention the affair to another doctor who evaluated her.
Laney's attorney, F.R. "Buck Files, objected to the mention of the affair. When the jury left the room, Files told the judge that Laney had sex once with a co-worker 15 years ago and that she and her husband had worked through it. He argued the affair was irrelevant and he had a gentleman's agreement with prosecutors not to use it as evidence.
"The problem is that we are in a good, faithful Bible Belt community where the allegation that she's out having an affair might be more damning to this jury than anything else that might be offered," Files said.
Bingham argued that a window had been opened to mention the affair and that it was relevant.
"It's a large event in her life that was disclosed to some doctors but not others," Bingham said.
The judge said she didn't know what relief she could offer Laney's defense, but said allowing Files to explain the affair might make matters worse. She ordered that the subject not be brought up again in front of the jury.
Deanna Laney called 911 after midnight May 10 and told a dispatcher, "I just killed my boys."
Earlier Tuesday, her husband, Keith Laney, who slept through the attacks, told a jury that he asks every day why his wife of 19 years attacked their children.
"I don't understand it," said Laney, 47, adding that there were no clues, no mood change, to indicate there was anything wrong.
Keith Laney, who has supported his wife, looked to her and smiled when prosecutors asked what year they were married. When they brought out a poster-sized photo of the three smiling boys taken months before the killings, Keith Laney saw his crying wife and his face lost composure for a moment.
Earlier Tuesday, jurors saw a crime scene video of Joshua and Luke with their skulls smashed, lying in a yard where garden signs read "Mom's Love Grows Here" and "Thank God for Mothers."
They were found in their underwear with heavy rocks on their chests. The video also showed a large spot of blood in a baby bed, where Laney beat Aaron.
To show the severity of the attack on Joshua, a prosecutor hammered a 16-pound rock into the floor of the courtroom eight times. Vibrations could be felt throughout the courthouse.
Gary Bell, Deanna Laney's pastor and brother-in-law, said some time before the killings Laney had shared with his congregation an internal prompting from God that the world would end soon.
"She said that God had been dealing with her heart, had been communicating to her that she needed to get her affairs in order because God was coming," Bell said. "What she had to say was not out of the ordinary ... We live constantly with this belief that we should be ready."
Laney had at least one other psychotic experience several years earlier, in which she had hallucinations of smelling sulfur she believed was God's way of alerting her the devil was near. She prayed on it and it stopped, Dietz said.
But in jail after killing her children, she smelled sulfur again. She finally agreed to medication and the smell went away, which Dietz said was Laney's first indication that perhaps it was an illness, and not God, influencing her behavior.
Laney had both delusions of "foreboding and dread" and others where she read everyday events or objects as messages from the Lord. When her baby would have abnormal bowel movements, for example, should thought it was a message from God that she wasn't properly "digesting" God's word, Dietz said.
"To interpret what a baby leaves in his diaper reflects a mentally ill person," Dietz said.
I'll probably get flamed for this but there truly are insane people in this world. They can't help what they're doing any more than Ronald Reagan, who has Alzheimer's, can help from drooling. Both are serious brain diseases.I don't know enough about this Laney person to give an opinion on her, but if she truly is insane, then she needs to be locked away in a mental institution, not a jail.
Maybe she converted to Islam and considered her children to be infidels?
Then why the call to 911? Truly insane don't look all that normal to normal people, they lack control --- those who kill for the thrill of killing often are in full control --- like waiting until the husband is sound asleep before they murder.
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