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Andrea Yates case: Expert says children suffered 'slow death'

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Editor's Note: As part of CNN.com's new Crime section, we are archiving some of the most interesting content from CourtTVNews.com. This story was first published in 2006.

(Court TV) -- Prosecutors rested their case against Andrea Yates Wednesday after a medical expert testified that the deep bruising and waterlogged internal organs observed during the autopsies of Yates' children indicated they struggled for several minutes as she drowned them one by one.

"It was a slow death," said Harris County Chief Medical Examiner Luis Sanchez. "It was not quick."

An autopsy photograph of the pale hand of Yates' 5-year-old son, John, showed that he was still clutching a long strand of his mother's dark hair.

Yates' 7-year-old son, Noah, had been floating face down in nine inches of bathtub water when medical examiners pulled him out and laid his stiff, 50-pound body face-up on a plastic sheet on the bathroom floor.

In photographs shown to jurors, Noah's small fists were clenched, his arms were raised above his head, and his lifeless knees were bent, defying gravity.

"The entire body was very stiff, almost like a board," Sanchez told jurors.

Noah's extreme rigidity was due to intense muscular exertion in the last minutes of life, Sanchez said. He catalogued a list of injuries on Noah's head and body: deep internal bruising, abrasions, nail scratches, round focal bruises around his joints indicating squeezing fingertip pressure.

Prosecutors say Noah, the eldest of Yates' five children, fought the hardest to stay alive, but that she chased him down and dragged him into the bathroom, where she had just finished drowning his four siblings: first Paul, 3, then Luke, 2, John, and Mary, 6 months.

She laid all except Noah on her bed.

Noah was the last to die before Yates called police to turn herself in, and then called her husband to tell him to come home.

Yates, 41, remained quiet during the disturbing testimony Wednesday. She did not appear to cry, as she did during the viewing of chilling crime-scene footage on Tuesday, but she blinked, looked down and exhibited small, absent-minded jaw movements.

Sanchez was only allowed to testify about the autopsy results of the three children  Noah, John and Mary  whom Yates is accused of murdering.

Prosecutors have not brought charges for the deaths of Paul and Luke.

Sanchez also referred to a chart showing the typical weight of a 7-year-old's brain: 1,200 grams. He said that Noah's brain weighed 1,675 grams. John and Mary's brains were also inordinately weighted with fluid.

"These brains were significantly heavy," Sanchez said. "They were full of fluid, to the point where they were almost the size of an adult brain."

He told jurors they were among the most significant cases of edema he had seen, the likely cause being forcefully held under the bath tub water for minutes, not seconds.

The infant Mary, who weighed just 20 pounds, had less external bruising than her brothers, Sanchez said, but her head and the back of her neck showed contusions consistent with being forcibly submerged.

Autopsy results showed that Mary had a stomach full of milk, while the two boys had eaten corn puffs, Sanchez said. The family ate breakfast at the kitchen table on the morning of June 20, 2001.

Yates waited until about 9 a.m., when her husband Rusty left for work, before she drew the bath, brought her infant daughter into the bathroom, and then called her children, one after another, into the bath.

This is the second trial for the former nurse and Texas housewife.

Yates has twice pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jurors in Yates' first trial found her guilty of capital murder in March 2002, but the conviction was overturned in 2005 because of the erroneous testimony of a prosecution witness.

If she is found not guilty the second time around, Yates will be sent to a psychiatric hospital for an undetermined period of time.

If she is found guilty, she faces life in prison.

Prosecutors say that Yates may be mentally ill, but she knew right from wrong when she killed her five children, and therefore is not legally insane.

Defense attorneys point to Yates' troubling history with postpartum depression, suicide attempts and psychotic behavior. Yates' defense team will call medical experts who are expected to testify that Yates believed when she killed her children that it was the right thing to do.

For at the time, Yates believed she was possessed by Satan, according to attorneys. And in order to save her children from her own bad mothering, she believed she had to kill them.

The defense will call its first witness Thursday morning. E-mail to a friend E-mail to a friend

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