Opportunity Knocks

So ... Andrea Yates, who drowned her children one-by-one to save them from an imaginary boogieman (i.e. "the devil"), has been acquitted of murder and will instead be indefinitely stuck in a Texas loony bin at taxpayer expense. Never underestimate the hallowed position of superstition in this country.

Since, however, this is the USA -- the most litigious country in the world -- I see a potential lawsuit here that I'd file in a heartbeat if I knew how to do it. If there's a motivated lawyer out there, here's your chance to get famous.

Back in 1990, in the case of Berhanu vs. Metzger, a jury awarded $12.5 million to the family of an Ethiopian student killed by skinhead members of Tom Metzger's racist group White Aryan Resistance (WAR). Despite the fact that neither Metzger nor his son actually had any direct role in the killing, the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully convinced the jury that Metzger, who ran WAR and "trained" the skinheads in white supremacist thinking, was as responsible for the killings as the skinheads who actually committed the murder.

Now -- regardless of whether or not you accept the reasoning in this case, it has indeed established a legal precedent, and I propose that this precedent be extended to the case of Andrea Yates. She obviously didn't get this notion in her head that "Satan" was on the loose out of thin air. I'd bet everything I own that some individual or group of individuals in some whack-job fundamentalist church were responsible for brainwashing her to live in her own personal demon- and spirit-haunted world. I strongly suggest that based upon Berhanu vs. Metzger, these superstitious bozos ought to be hauled into court and forced to pay for their folly. At the very least they should pay court costs and whatever it costs to keep this whacko locked up.

Where's the SPLC or ACLU when we need them??