Psychiatrist Testifies in Texas Slaying Case

[emad]

Wednesday March 31, 2004 1:16 PM
By LISA FALKENBERG
Associated Press Writer

TYLER, Texas (AP) - A psychiatrist for the prosecution testified that a mother did not know right from wrong when she crushed her sons' skulls with rocks. In a setback for the state's murder case against the East Texas woman, Park Dietz told the jury Tuesday that Deanna Laney had delusions she and Andrea Yates, who drowned her children in 2001, were chosen by God to be witnesses after the world ends. ``She thought she would be one of the two witnesses described in the book of Revelations,'' Dietz said.

Prosecutors contend that Laney did know right from wrong when she killed her children in the little town of New Chapel Hill, 100 miles southeast of Dallas. Laney, a deeply religious stay-at-home mother who home-schooled her children, has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity to charges of murder and causing serious injury to a child. She has said God told her to kill her children. Dietz, who testified for the prosecution in Yates' trial, said Laney had a severe mental disease that caused a psychotic episode last Mother's Day weekend. He said Laney didn't realize her actions were wrong, meaning she was legally insane.

Despite Dietz' testimony and similar conclusions by other psychiatric experts, prosecutors want a jury to decide whether Laney should be held responsible, saying expert opinions aren't facts and other evidence suggests she was not insane. They are not seeking the death penalty. Two psychiatric experts for the defense, two for the prosecution and one for the judge all have said Laney was insane according to the legal definition. The defense was set to question Dietz when testimony resumed Wednesday. Laney had delusions in which she would read everyday events or objects as messages from God. When her baby had abnormal bowel movements, for example, she thought it was a message from God that she was not properly ``digesting'' God's word, Dietz said. ``To interpret what a baby leaves in his diaper reflects a mentally ill person,'' Dietz said.

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, he said. Earlier Tuesday, Laney's husband testified that he saw no change in his wife's mood before the attack and no clue that she was capable of killing the boys. ``I don't understand it,'' said Keith Laney, who has stood by his wife in court. Keith Laney, 47, smiled at his wife when prosecutors asked what year they were married but briefly lost his composure at the sight of a poster-sized photograph of the three smiling boys, taken months before the killings. The jury on Tuesday also saw a crime-scene video of 8-year-old Joshua and 6-year-old Luke, lying dead in a yard, near garden signs that read, ``Mom's Love Grows Here'' and ``Thank God for Mothers.'' The boys 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 Deanna Laney severely injured the couple's youngest son, Aaron, 14 months old at the time. Laney, 39, lowered her head during the testimony and wept as graphic autopsy photos were shown to the jury of eight men and four women.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3923583,00.html

[Cooley Hurd]

1. Good morning emad aisat sana

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