Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Nation in brief

Convicted mom may be retried in deaths

By wire services
Published November 10, 2005

HOUSTON - Andrea Yates, the Texas woman who drowned her five children in a bathtub, likely will be retried next year after the state's highest criminal court on Wednesday upheld a lower court's decision to throw out the murder convictions against her.

Harris County Assistant District Attorney Alan Curry said the case will be retried or a plea bargain considered. Jurors rejected Yates' insanity defense in 2002 and found her guilty of two capital murder charges for the deaths of three of her five children.

A lower court ruling in January had thrown out the convictions because of erroneous testimony prosecutors used to suggest Yates had gotten the idea for the killings from an episode of the television show Law & Order. The episode was found later not to exist.

Curry said if the case goes back to trial, he is confident Yates will be convicted again. She was sentenced to life in prison.

On June 20, 2001, Yates drowned her five children, then called police to her Houston home and showed them the bodies.

JACKSBORO, Tenn. - A 15-year-old accused of shooting an assistant principal to death and wounding two other administrators should be tried as an adult, the district attorney said Wednesday.

Ken Bartley Jr. was being held without bail in a juvenile detention facility in Knoxville, Tenn., and could have an initial court appearance in the next few days. A judge will decide whether he should be tried as a juvenile or an adult.

"It is appropriate that he be tried as an adult and subject to adult penalties," District Attorney Paul Phillips said.

Authorities said the shooting Tuesday at the 1,400-student Campbell County Comprehensive High School began after Bartley, a freshman, was called to the office because other students had seen him with a gun on campus.

Assistant principal Ken Bruce, 48, was shot in the chest and died at a hospital.

LOUDON, Tenn. - A house fire early Wednesday killed four people, including two children, just four days after an even deadlier blaze about 20 miles away.

A 10-year-old girl suffered serious burns in Wednesday's east Tennessee house fire, while four other people escaped without injury, said Bob Pollard of the state fire marshal's office.

The cause of the fire remained under investigation, but officials found no evidence of foul play or electrical problems, Brubaker said. He said the fire appeared to have started on the front porch.

Investigators identified the dead as Connie Torres, 32, her boyfriend, Rafael Pena, 25, and her daughters Karlissa Torres, 8, and Samantha Stephens, 12.

Three weeks after an editorial in a prestigious American medical journal declared an expensive new cancer drug to be revolutionary and a possible cure for some hard-to-treat breast cancers, its conclusions were challenged by a prominent medical journal in Britain.

"The available evidence is insufficient to make reliable judgments," wrote the editors of the British journal Lancet. "It is profoundly misleading to suggest, even rhetorically, that the published data may be indicative of a cure for breast cancer."

Lancet's chief editor, Dr. Richard Horton, said he was "quite angry" that Herceptin had been portrayed as such a wonder drug in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Study results are preliminary, inconsistent and raise extremely serious concerns about safety," he said.

The drug, Herceptin, is intended to treat women with breast tumors that bear a protein marker associated with aggressive disease and that respond poorly to conventional treatments.

[Last modified November 10, 2005, 01:22:04]