The mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy murder case brought back memories of Andrea Yates, the Clear Lake mother who drowned her five children in the family's bathtub 25 years ago.
Long before I started Covering Katy, I spent years reporting news in Houston television. I covered the Yates case from the crime scene through both trials — from jury selection to verdict and punishment. I heard the testimony and saw the evidence, not once but twice.
After spending two trials immersed in the details of what happened to the Yates children, I've had little desire to immerse myself in another case like it.
But the similarities are difficult to ignore.
Both women had worked as nurses. Both were in their 30s when they killed their children. Both had documented histories of serious mental illness, and in both cases their lawyers argued that postpartum psychosis affected their criminal responsibility.
I remember the anger surrounding the Yates case. I remember the five small white caskets.
And I remember the question so many people were asking:
How could a mother kill her own children?
There is another parallel: Yates was tried twice, and Clancy could be too. But for very different reasons. Yates was convicted of capital murder in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison. Prosecution psychiatrist Park Dietz testified that an episode of “Law & Order” had aired shortly before the killings involving a woman who drowned her children and was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Prosecutors referenced the supposed episode in closing arguments, putting before jurors the possibility that Yates had seen it and gotten the idea for the killings from the show.
There was one major problem: The episode did not exist.
Yates' conviction was overturned because of Dietz's false testimony. At her second trial in 2006, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Clancy's first trial ended without a verdict when jurors could not agree, leaving open the possibility that she, too, could be tried again.
Nearly 25 years separate the cases.
And that's what interests me.
The question isn't simply how much Clancy's case resembles Yates'. It's what we've learned about severe mental illness in the 25 years between them — and what we've done with that knowledge.
As the Yates case progressed, we learned about her long history of severe mental illness and postpartum psychosis, a condition many Americans had probably never heard of before her case.
The horror of what happened to her five children didn't change. What began to change was our understanding of how the criminal justice system should deal with people suffering from profound mental illness.
That doesn't mean going easy on them. Andrea Yates is proof of that.
She didn't walk out of the courthouse after her 2006 verdict and go home. She was committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where she remains 20 years later.
Yates is still confined — just not in a prison.
And that distinction matters.
Too mentally ill for trial, but still sitting in jail
So what have we done with what we learned?
Texas has made progress. The state's competency-restoration waitlist peaked at 2,711 people in December 2022. By June of this year, it had fallen to about 1,626 — a roughly 40% reduction.
That's a significant improvement.
But those needing maximum-security beds still faced an average wait of seven months
These weren't simply defendants claiming to have a mental illness. Courts had determined they were incompetent to stand trial.
Some defendants charged with relatively minor offenses can reach the legal limit on how long they may be confined for competency restoration before they ever get a psychiatric bed. Then they can be released without receiving the treatment they were waiting for.
That's not just a mental-health problem. It's a public-safety problem.
A federal judge ruled this summer that Texas' practice of making incompetent defendants wait months for treatment is unconstitutional and ordered the state to eventually reduce waits to no more than 21 days. Texas is appealing.
Texas has spent billions
It would be wrong to suggest Texas hasn't tried to address the problem.
Since 2017, state leaders have committed more than $2.5 billion to replace, renovate and expand psychiatric hospitals. Texas has also developed jail-based and outpatient competency-restoration programs.
The shrinking waitlist shows progress. But people with severe mental illness are still spending months in county jails waiting for treatment courts have determined they need.
What did we learn?
Twenty-five years after Andrea Yates killed her children, a lot has changed. We understand severe mental illness better, and Texas has invested billions trying to address it.
But understanding mental illness doesn't mean excusing horrific acts.
Five children were dead. Nothing could change that.
The lesson from Andrea Yates isn't that people who commit horrific acts should be treated leniently because they are mentally ill. It's that severe mental illness sometimes requires a different kind of confinement — one that provides treatment while still protecting the public.
We have gotten much better at recognizing severe mental illness.
The harder question is whether we've done enough with what we learned.