HOUSTON (AP) — Calling the Andrea Yates they know a wonderful person, tearful relatives begged a jury not to impose the death sentence for drowning her five children.

"I'm here pleading for her life," Yates' 73-year-old mother, Jutta Karin Kennedy, told jurors as she cried.

"I've lost seven people in one year," said Kennedy, referring to the slaying of her five grandchildren, the death of her husband and the conviction of her daughter in the children's deaths.

Defense attorneys called Yates' family, friends and a psychiatrist to testify Thursday in an attempt to save her life.

"She is just a beautiful person inside," said Yates' mother-in-law, Dora Yates. "The children loved her. We all love her."

Prosecutors offered no witnesses or evidence. All of the evidence was admitted during the trial, assistant district attorney Joe Owmby said.

Yates, 37, was convicted Tuesday of two capital murder charges for killing three of the children. She is now in the penalty phase of her trial and could be sentenced to life in prison or death by injection.

District Judge Belinda Hill said deliberations would begin Friday after closing arguments.

Jurors began hearing evidence Thursday about whether Yates is a future danger and if there is mitigating evidence to keep her from being executed, the two questions they must answer under Texas law in the punishment phase.

The decision by prosecutors not to offer additional evidence was in line with their strategy, legal experts said.

"Their strategy in this case has been just to hammer away at the enormity of what she did," Baylor University Law School professor Brian Serr said Thursday. "That evidence is already there."

"There are times when less is more and this may be one of those times," Southern Methodist University law professor Dan Shuman said.

Neil McCabe, a professor at South Texas College of Law, said he believes prosecutors aren't presenting additional evidence because they can't prove Yates is a future danger.

"They don't have the evidence, so they are not putting it on," he said. "She won't be dangerous in the future because there won't be any children in the future for her to kill."

Defense attorney George Parnham called a representative of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, who told jurors that Yates would not get conjugal visits in jail and would receive psychiatric medication on a voluntary basis.

Joe Lovelace, who has worked with legislators to increase funding to care for mentally ill prisoners, said if Yates were to become pregnant while in jail her child would be taken from her upon its birth.

"There would be no opportunity to raise a family in the prison system," he said.

Yates had pleaded innocent by reason of insanity, contending it was severe psychosis from postpartum depression that drove her to kill 7-year-old Noah, 5-year-old John and 6-month-old Mary. Charges have not been filed in the deaths of Paul, 3, and Luke, 2.

A human rights group has filed a complaint with state regulators over Yates' psychiatric treatment, contending that she received "shoddy" mental health care before drowning her children.

Yates was in a psychotic state caused by premature release from care, use of inappropriate drugs and overmedication, according to CCHR Texas' complaint filed with the state Board of Medical Examiners.

Jurors must be unanimous in determining that Yates is a danger and there are no mitigating circumstances in order for a death sentence to be imposed. Anything less than a unanimous vote means a life term.

If Yates receives life, she would have to serve at least 40 years before becoming eligible for parole. If sentenced to die, she would become the ninth woman on Texas' death row.

"Her life is over, one way or another," Parnham said. "Her children are gone and she sits here through her lawyers asking that she be spared."