Massip Ruling Seen as Boost for Postpartum Education

Postpartum psychosis specialists said Saturday that a Santa Ana judge’s dramatic reversal of an Anaheim woman’s murder conviction bolsters their calls for a statewide program to increase public understanding of a disease that some women claim led them to kill their babies.

Legislation drafted this month by state Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), who in late 1987 created a task force of specialists to study the disorder, would provide money for public education programs on postpartum psychosis and for the training of law enforcement and correctional officials in spotting women who may have suffered from it.

Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald ruled Friday that the disorder was responsible for Sheryl Lynn Massip’s killing of her infant son. In an extraordinary decision that appears to have no legal precedent, the judge overturned her murder conviction, handed down by a jury last month.

Expert psychiatric testimony during Massip’s 2-month trial and the first-time mother’s own bizarre behavior showed overwhelmingly that she was “bonkers” when she ran over her 6-week-old son with the family car in April, 1987, Fitzgerald said after the ruling.

“The judge’s decision was an enlightened one that is going to help make people understand this disorder and help us treat it,” said Susan Hickman, a San Diego psychologist who operates a postpartum disorder clinic and served on Presley’s advisory task force.

“Now that this illness is gaining legitimacy in the public mind, I expect women to come out of the woodwork and say, ‘Hey, I went through that same thing,’ ” Hickman said.

Massip, 23, who now faces court-ordered psychiatric care but no time in prison, was believed to be the first woman in Southern California to use the postpartum defense. About 15 other defendants nationwide have tried the defense in recent years, with mixed results with judges and juries.

Task force members said Saturday that Fitzgerald, by taking the strong stand that he did in what was essentially a test case for the postpartum defense in California, helps give credibility to a disorder that is still viewed skeptically by some of the public.

And that credibility, task force members said, could prove crucial in building support for public policy changes to aid recognition and treatment of the disease.

An extreme form of the far more common “baby blues,” postpartum psychosis is thought to prompt severe anxiety, delusions and even outbursts of violence in one to three of every 1,000 new mothers. Most of the sufferers have no history of mental illness or overly aggressive behavior. The disorder may be hormonally rooted, although medical experts are divided over the question.

By some medical estimates, as many as 24 infant deaths in California each year may be caused by women suffering from postpartum psychosis. But most of these deaths may be mistakenly attributed to infant crib death or willful child abuse, these estimates suggest.

That was the case in the tragic story of Anne Green, a New York City pediatric nurse. The deaths of her first two children were written off to natural causes. It was not until Green tried to suffocate her third child that she was charged with murder. But in October, a jury found Green to be not guilty by reason of insanity in the killings because of postpartum psychosis.

The bill introduced by Presley would try to better equip both the public and criminal justice system personnel to spot and treat people like Anne Green.

Presley, alarmed by a disorder that recently has gained increasing exposure from several highly publicized cases, formed a panel of 11 people in fields of medicine, law and government to study the illness and its implications for public policy.

Presley could not be reached Saturday. But in a letter earlier this year to task force members, he told them that he wanted the law to ensure that postpartum disorder victims who are charged with crimes “are treated consistently and appropriately by our criminal justice system.”

Presley’s bill would provide money to train law enforcement officers in how to detect telltale signs of postpartum illness. It would also fund further study of the largely unexplored disorder by University of California researchers.

And it would institute changes in the state penal code to ensure proper screening, analysis and treatment of women charged with crimes who may have the illness.

Michael L. Pinkerton, a deputy attorney general with the state Justice Department who served on Presley’s commission, said Saturday that the commission intentionally focused its proposed remedies on the corrections system, rather than on the courts.

England has a half-century-old Infanticide Act that, recognizing the postpartum disorder, bars some women who have killed their infants from being prosecuted on murder charges.

But Pinkerton said of task force members: “We weren’t about to carve out a special kind of law just for the postpartum defense. I believe that current laws can adequately handle the issue--under our insanity and diminished capacity defenses--if people understand the disorder.”

Instead, Pinkerton said, the commission was concerned with the correction system.

“If even one woman in dire psychological straits from this disease has to be housed with your average jail inmate, that’s one too many,” he said.

The task force also wants to educate the public about the disorder to fill an urgent need that was best shown by the jury’s guilty verdict in the Massip case, said Angela Thompson of Sacramento, a consultant to the group.

Thompson drowned her second child in 1983. She said she thought the 9-month-old son was the devil and her husband was Christ. Initially charged with murder, she was acquitted on the grounds of insanity.

Thompson, who testified at Massip’s sentencing hearing in her behalf, said Massip’s case “shows the great discrepancy between the public’s misconception of postpartum--as we see in the jury’s guilty verdict--and the judge’s rational, just decision in overruling it.”

“That the jury could have found her guilty of second-degree murder is unconscionable. That just accentuates the enormity of what we still have to do in educating the public.”