SICK: Via The Corner comes the story of a male Andrea Yates, who of course gets no debate concerning his sanity in the press and no diagnosis either --because he's a guy. Thus we get no deeper insight into his character or his wife's, unlike the Yates case where we can kind of tell that her husband was nutty too. The article brings in an academic to explain it all:

Michelle Oberman, a law professor at DePaul University in New Jersey, argues in her recent book Mothers Who Kill Their Children that juries rarely assign murder convictions to mothers accused of killing their own offspring, or request tough sentences such as the death penalty. This, she speculates, is because these cases are almost always matters of deep clinical depression, generating considerable sympathy rather than rage.

"Throughout common-law history, juries and judges have tended to agree on one thing: When a mother kills her child, it is generally different from other forms of homicide," Prof. Oberman wrote in an opinion article on the Yates case this week. "Different because these cases are not only about the horror of dead children, but also about desperate and deeply troubled women."