In the hours before the courthouse in Houston, Texas, opens, hundreds of women clad in pink have been massing outside. They've come to support Andrea Yates, the mother on trial for killing her three young children, ages 5, 3 and 8 months. In almost any other case, it would be an odd declaration of allegiance.

But Andrea Yates is not a typical murder suspect. She attempted for months after the birth of her third child to get treatment for what she reported was her increasing postpartum derangement. Then she killed her children, she has admitted, in what she says was a state of psychosis.

Closing arguments begin tomorrow. Should she be treated like an ordinary killer? That question is a Rorschach test for Americans fascinated by this case. Some say Andrea Yates was failed by a system that doesn't take postpartum mental illness seriously enough. "It should not take tragedy for people to pay attention to mental health," said Melissa Moore, the organizer of the courthouse demonstration.

Other people are horrified by arguments like that, saying they ignore the facts of this incomprehensible crime. "I don't look at her and feel sorry for her," said the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. "Three kids are dead!".