HOUSTON — Andrea Yates sobbed uncontrollably in court Tuesday morning as prosecutors played a horrific crime-scene video depicting the lifeless, drowned bodies of her five small children.

Yates broke down as she watched the camera pan from a wet, white-tiled bathroom floor toward the first body, 7-year-old Noah Yates, floating face-down in a tub filled with murky water, wearing only his pajama shorts and a T-shirt pushed up to his pale shoulders.

Several jurors held their hands to their faces, but none looked away during the 20-minute video presentation, except to glance occasionally at Yates.

The video ended with a shot of Noah's four dead, wet siblings, laying side-by-side on Yates' bed, their heads resting on pillows, and their drenched bodies outlined by seeping water that had soaked through the burgundy bed sheets.

"Let's give the jury a break," the judge said.

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Yates left the courtroom in tears. When the jury returned from the brief recess, the 41-year-old former housewife and nurse stood to face them, but would not make eye contact.

Yates was found guilty of the capital murder of three of her five children on March 12, 2002, but the conviction was overturned in 2005 by an appeals court due to the erroneous testimony of a prosecution witness.

Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity for a second time when testimony began in her retrial Monday.

Yates knew right from wrong when she killed her five children, prosecutors contend, and therefore is not legally insane.

They point to the defendant's calm demeanor after the killings, her admission to police that she had filled up the tub two months earlier but didn't go through with it, and her ability to answer simple questions.

But defense attorneys point to Yates' troubling history with postpartum depression, suicide attempts and psychotic behavior that led her to kill Noah, John, 5, Paul, 3, Luke, 2, and Mary, 6 months, on the morning of June 20, 2001.

Yates believed that she was inhabited by Satan himself, a defense medical expert will testify, and the only way to save her children was to kill them. The courts, Yates believed, would mete out her punishment.

"I realized it was time to be punished," Yates told a detective in an audiotaped interview played for jurors Tuesday.

"What do you think you need to be punished for?" the investigator asked.

"Not being a good mother," Yates replied. The majority of the interview was punctuated by Yates' flat, monotone, yes-or-no responses.

Yates had only one question, according to the detective: "She wanted to know when her trial would be."

If jurors find Yates not guilty by reason of insanity, she will be sent to a psychiatric hospital for an undetermined period of time. If she is found guilty, she faces life in prison.

Her first jury rejected the death penalty, sparing her from a potential death sentence in the retrial.