Opposing Sides in Massip Trial Point to Symbolic Effect of Verdict

In the final days of Sheryl Lynn Massip’s long and emotional murder trial, the competing attorneys are arguing that the jury’s verdict will have a symbolic importance extending beyond the guilt or innocence of the Anaheim woman accused of killing her child.

On Wednesday, prosecutor Tom Borris suggested to jurors that if they acquit Massip of murdering her newborn son 18 months ago, they would, in effect, be giving other frustrated young mothers “a license to kill.”

And on Thursday, defense attorney Milton C. Grimes countered, as he began his closing argument, that Borris holds a frighteningly narrow view of the human state of mind.

Grimes, who is trying to prove that Massip was suffering from insanity caused by postpartum psychosis at the time she ran over her 6-week-old son with the family car, asserted that Borris has taken a piecemeal approach to evaluating Massip’s sanity and ignored much of modern medical thinking.

If others took Borris’ approach to examining new issues, Grimes told the jury, “we would be still thinking that the Earth is flat. . . . We’d all be in caves because we’d be afraid to venture out and look at the total picture.”

Massip is the first woman in Southern California to use postpartum psychosis as a defense to a murder charge, and the case is being watched closely by medical and legal experts elsewhere.

Postpartum psychosis, a relatively unexplored disorder that may be hormonally based, is thought to afflict about 3 in every 1,000 new mothers, causing tremendous anxiety, hallucinations and, in some cases, violence.

Massip claims that she was suffering from the disease when she ran over her son in April, 1987, then dumped his battered body in a trash can and told police that the baby had been kidnaped. She testified earlier this month that voices told her to put the child, who cried much of the time because of colic, out of its misery.

“No mother in her right mind would have done what she did,” Grimes asserted in his closing argument.

The defense attorney said that Massip had no history of violence or aggression and was “an innocent young woman, young mother, young wife, trying to do the best” she could.

Grimes argued that, had the death of Massip’s child been deliberate and calculated, as Borris maintains, there were easier and less risky ways to kill the child than running over him with a car.

Were she sane, Grimes said, Massip could have “put a pillow over his head, walked out of the room and done the dishes . . . and we wouldn’t be sitting here and everyone would still feel sorry for the mother losing her child to crib death.”

Closing arguments are to conclude early next week.