One of the finest moments in American film history was in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” when Anthony Perkins (as Norman Bates) defends his mother, saying “She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?” One of the worst moments in film history is when Vince Vaughn (also as Bates) says the same thing in Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho,” but my point is that the line has a great deal of truth in it.

Everyone has problems, and everyone has times when things just don’t go right. There are times when nearly everyone wonders if their life has a meaning or a purpose.

You know what the best thing is to do during those times? Neither do I, but I do know what won’t help: killing five people.

Andrea Yates, were you taking notes? I sure hope so.

Andrea Yates is a killer. She is, as you probably know, the mother who drowned her five children, children ranging in age from infancy to seven years old. She pled not guilty to the charge of their murders, by the ever-popular reason of temporary insanity.

Texas is seeking the death penalty in the case, which should come as no big surprise. To say that Texas is seeking the death penalty is like saying that it’s a windy day in Ames.

Legally speaking, temporary insanity is as close to a cop-out as you get. It suggests that though at the time of trial, the person is entirely within their mental faculties, when the crime was committed they were insane. While less likely to work than the standard insanity defense, it doesn’t carry the unpleasant sentence of a successful insanity defense. You see, the temporarily insane don’t get sentenced to mental facilities, they just get to go home.

It seems that there’s nothing insane about being temporarily insane. In fact, if you know you’ll get caught in the end, it seems pretty darn practical to be insane while you’re committing crimes.

Just imagine if this would work in the legal arena. If I come in to work feeling depressed because of a chemical imbalance, would I get away with libeling celebrities? Sorry, folks. O.J. Simpson isn’t actually a serial killer who goes by the name of “The Juicer.” I was just depressed.

Maybe on my final exams, I happen to just blank on the author of Federalist No. 78. Do I get to do it again? It would appear to be temporary insanity, because the real Tim Kearns knows the difference between Alexander Hamilton’s and John Jay’s theories of politics. I just simply couldn’t control myself, because of hormonal changes from the loss of sleep and increased stress level.

Somehow I doubt my grade would be changed. Nor should it be. To claim that Yates is not guilty because of temporary insanity is equivalent to saying that John Wilkes Booth isn’t a presidential assassin. After all, he only did it once. It’s not like he made a habit of it. The defense of temporary insanity is a confession. Nothing more.

I don’t understand Yates’ case, and I wasn’t meant to. I haven’t suffered postpartum depression, nor will I ever experience it. Then again, there are thousands if not millions of the women in the world that have suffered it, and they’ve managed to keep themselves restrained. She probably wasn’t in control of herself when she committed those murders. But then again, what murderers are? Only the most cold-blooded of killers could kill five people and just say “It’s time. I finally did it.”

Andrea Yates is one of those killers.

The sheer fact that there are moments in her life where she not only considered doing this, but actually carried it out, indicates that she may not be as good as the average person at dealing with moments of madness. For that reason alone, she should be put in prison for at least the standard 30-year murder rap. Unlike the parade of minorities and men sent to the lethal injection table each year in Texas, she’s going to convince someone to feel sympathetic for her.

We all go a little mad sometimes. R.E.M. said it best. Everybody hurts. But not everybody kills her children.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a person on death row who doesn’t have a great reason why he became a murderer. Most prisoners were born into poverty, maybe abused by their parents, rejected by their high school sweetheart, or just couldn’t control themselves. They’ll still die. I accept their explanations more than some regular old depressed person. Most of the depressed people I’ve met at least keep their destructive behavior to themselves. That’s tragic enough.

Andrea Yates will live, and convince more people to think she was the real victim, as her husband is happy to tell.

Andrea Yates is a killer, a murderer in the purest sense of the word. But unlike men and women who don’t have the resources or publicity for a good defense, she’ll probably get a minimal sentence while the others are paraded unjustly to death row. Now that’s depressing.

Tim Kearns is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.