EDITORIAL - A jury recently found Andrea Yates, the mother who admittedly suffocated the life out of her five children in a bathtub, not guilty by reason of insanity. Her husband called the verdict "a miracle".

I am growing quite tired of lawyers using the insanity defense to get some of our country's most vicious killers out of jail and, with proper "rehabilitation", back out on the street. But, I cannot blame the lawyers as much as our incredibly lopsided justice system.

Of course Andrea Yates is insane. Anyone who claims that Satan compelled them to murder children in a bathtub full of water must be insane. Our justice system, however, is supposed to keep exactly these kinds of dangerous people off the street. Instead of spending the rest of her life in jail, Yates will visit a mental hospital where she will receive the kind, compassionate care that she deserves. She will be released back into society when doctors find her "competent".

If our justice system is going to succeed in keeping criminals off the streets, our current insanity statutes must be pushed aside. Any person who intentionally and viciously takes the life of another person has willingly forgone their right to live in society.

Spending time in a mental institution is no punishment for taking a life. The victim(s) do not get another chance. Why, then, should the killer?

If the killer in a crime truly is insane and does not know right from wrong, that is all the more reason to make absolutely sure that that person never has the opportunity to take another life again. A person so void of basic morality and human decency is not the kind of person I want walking the streets and certainly not one that I want a mental hospital to magically "fix".

This issue is not about compassion. It is about life and death. It is about removing someone from society who was vicious and cold-hearted enough to take the lives of young, innocent children. It is the mark of a justice system that demands personal responsibility from society's criminals and one that does not play foolish games with the lives of its citizenry.

What makes a person insane in the minds of jury members? What if Yates only killed 4 of her children? Would she still be insane? What if Satan had not compelled her to drown her children; instead, she decided to take her children's lives herself? Would she then be "sane" enough to spend the rest of her life removed from society?

Part of the problem may be that jury members are far removed from the crime. What if Yates happened to kill the child of one of the jury members? Do you think that Yates would still be not guilty by reason of insanity? Of course not. The difference is simple -- it did not happen to them.

The Yates verdict was no justice for those five children. Those kids are dead, and their killer gets "rehabilitated" and set free. I am embarrassed for our nation's justice system. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to spread "civility" to nations abroad when we do not seem to have a grasp of that concept ourselves, at least within our justice system.