For the Defense : Massip Trial Bolsters Reputation of a Top Defense Attorney

Counseling a client awaiting trial for murder two years ago, Milton C. Grimes sat stunned as the young white defendant across from him in the jail holding cell suddenly became enraged, spat in his face and called him a racial epithet. For the Milt Grimes of 15 or 20 years ago--an intensely emotional Southern native who led black student demonstrations, proudly gave his son an African name and early in his career introduced virulent courtroom arguments about racial bias and the Constitution into even the most mundane proceeding--the response to such an incident would no doubt have been extreme.

“I would never have thought back then that I could let a white man spit on me and call me a nigger and not tear that guy apart,” Grimes says now.

But on that day two years ago, the normally fiery Grimes quietly wiped his face off with a handkerchief and said in a soft voice to the defendant: “Now just calm down. Tell me why you did that.”

And he went on with the business at hand.

Grimes, 44, chuckles as he tells the story of that still-pending murder case, even now seemingly amazed that he did not “take the guy out in the parking lot and let him have it.”

For the grandson of a North Carolina sharecropper, the altercation marked “a true test of the maturing, the growth” of a man who once angrily saw the world in schemes of only black and white, he says now.

If high-profile cases and public recognition are any yardstick of that maturation process, Grimes seems to have passed the test.

Still proud and intensely conscious of his position as one of just a handful of prominent black lawyers in a county with a black population estimated at 2%, the Milt Grimes of today has become an integral part of a county community that he once saw as inherently hostile and inaccessible to minorities.

And in the process, defending people of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds, he has earned an expanding and profitable reputation as one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the county: He has worked his way into the inner circle of about a dozen defense lawyers who handle death-penalty cases.

It is a reputation that Grimes now focuses increasingly in the area of mental-illness defenses, fueled by the success and attention he gained in defending Sheryl Lynn Massip, the former Anaheim woman who ran over her son with a car, then said she had been suffering from postpartum psychosis.

And it is a reputation that he will again put to the test in coming months in another emotional case that promises intense local coverage: his defense of Richard Lucio DeHoyos, accused of abducting, sexually molesting, then killing 9-year-old Nadia Puente of Santa Ana in March.

As Grimes has continued his ascent in the legal ranks, becoming a popular speaker at conferences around the country as a result of the Massip case, he has also become a target for some in the legal community who privately criticize what they see as a tendency toward legal “theatrics”--a flare for emotional appeals, expensive clothes and courtroom showmanship.

But increasingly more common is the view held by such fixtures in the legal community as Myron S. Brown, presiding criminal judge in the Superior Court: “He’s a charismatic personality and one of the attorneys for whom I have the greatest respect and one of the ones I like best.”

If there is one key to his growing success, Grimes said, it has been his ability to come to terms with his race, a subject that he seems inevitably to introduce into conversations on myriad topics.

The pictures of Martin Luther King and African art that adorn his Santa Ana office and Costa Mesa home, the works of such black writers as Toni Morrison and James Baldwin that line his shelves, the attention to racial issues that he is still quick to introduce into his legal arguments, the mocking impressions of blacks whom he criticizes for “disguising” their roots--all speak to Grimes’ continued sensitivity to matters of race.

But that focus, he says, is now diminished. “I am a black man, but I am also a professional black man, and I want to be a professional first,” Grimes says. “I think I’ve only now gotten comfortable with getting by the race thing well enough that I don’t have to dwell on it, which was never true before.”

Indeed, it was a very different Grimes who 15 years ago graduated from law school and anxiously weighed an offer to join a private law firm in Orange County.

After all, Orange County presented a radically different life style from the North Carolina fields where he first helped pick crops at age 5; from northern Virginia, where he attended all-black schools, met his wife, Elouise, and went to college, and from San Francisco, where he led black student rallies, marches and office takeovers while at Hastings College of the Law.

Grimes had seen Orange County first hand for two years as a computer programmer at North American Rockwell, and so contrary was that memory to his own history and beliefs that he recalls thinking at the time:

“I’m going down to the citadel of racism, of conservatism. . . . They had been burning crosses around here; some black guy had even gotten hanged.”

His wife is quick to point out that no one had in fact been hanged, but Grimes insists that the point remains just as salient.

“I knew I would be watched closely, said Grimes, then only the second black lawyer in the area. “I guess I took it almost on a dare to myself--to see if I could do it.”

During those early days as a lawyer in a law firm, then in his own practice, Grimes recalls that his motivation was clear and often passionate: “I thought setting brothers free . . . representing brothers who had been wronged and who the system was against, was the best thing.”

Benjamin Travis, a black lawyer with whom Grimes worked in Northern California in the early 1970s and who is now an Alameda County Superior Court judge, recalls that Grimes in those early days spoke constantly of “the cause” and often--too often, Travis thought--defended accused minorities for free or low pay.

“I’d constantly tell him, ‘Law’s a business like anything else, and you can’t always give out your time for free.’ He wanted to go on a crusade, to take on all the causes. It was noble, but it didn’t make good business sense.”

Today, however, Grimes’ thinking has changed; to some extent, so has his view of Orange County as he has tried to achieve a better mix of good business and social conscience, taking on a broader mix of clients and issues.

The stylish clothes that are his trademark and the upper-middle-class, two-story home in Costa Mesa in which he lives with his wife and the youngest of his three children--Akua, 16--are evidence of the financial success that has come his way. But Grimes, while declining to disclose his income, insists that money is not the overriding factor in this change.

“I don’t see it as selling out. I see it as achieving a broader perspective and realizing what is a benefit to the majority of people you’re trying to help,” he says.

His theory goes like this: A black man in white America or white Orange County cannot by himself right every wrong done to a black person, but he can, by achieving a position of stature and respect in the community, help smash old stereotypes and provide a source of hope for future minorities.

Testimony to this change in thinking was the case not of an impoverished inner-city minority but a white, middle-class woman from the suburbs of Anaheim that more than any other case has made Grimes’ reputation. Her name is Sheryl Lynn Massip.

Grimes was at first repulsed by the brutal details of how Massip had tried to throw her colicky, 6-week-old son into traffic, then hit him over the head with a blunt object and finally killed him by running over him in the family car. Like many who heard the details, he found it inconceivable at the time that any supposed bodily change could drive a woman to commit such acts.

But his research on postpartum psychosis changed that opinion. He calls the case among his most satisfying, if only because it may have produced a better public understanding of the illness that, in its most dire form, is thought to trigger severe anxiety, psychotic delusions and even violence in three of every 1,000 new mothers.

Massip, 25, and her family credit Grimes with having helped her through these last two difficult years. Associates say close personal ties with clients are a trademark of a man known to play tennis with some of those he has defended.

“I think he’s a real good lawyer, and he also shows a lot of compassion,” Massip said. “I remember when I was sitting in jail (after her arrest in September, 1987), he was able to get me to smile and chuckle with a few jokes, which nobody else was.”

Despite Grimes’ pleas that his client was driven to insanity by the disorder, a county jury last fall found Massip guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of her infant son.

But Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald, in a stunning reversal, threw out the jury’s verdict, declared Massip innocent by reason of insanity and set her free.

Legal observers say the Massip defense solidified a reputation among the law community that Grimes had built through his work on behalf of such murder defendants as Zachary F. Pettus, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1983 killing of a Huntington Beach woman but spared the death penalty; Darrel Roberts, who was eventually freed after four mistrials in the 1981 beating death of his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son, and Jerry Pick, still awaiting trial in the murders of two jail inmates.

At the same time, the emotional Massip case, offering a first-of-its-kind defense in a California court, introduced Grimes to a far broader public audience, both locally and nationally.

In the months before and after the trial, the sight of Grimes--either alone or close at Massip’s side, guarding her from any media questions he did not want answered--became a frequent one on local TV and radio news programs, newspapers and even a few national talk shows.

Grimes garnered attention from the scholarly community as well, speaking at legal and psychiatric symposiums on the Massip case and the broader issue of postpartum psychosis and the law.

“He is quite a showman,” says Melanie Burrough, a therapist who helped organized a recent American Psychiatric Assn. seminar at which Grimes spoke on his experiences in the Massip case.

“He reminds me almost of a black Baptist minister in his oratory style,” she said.

After a full day of normally dry sessions at the conference, “it was amazing for me to see a class of 50 people sitting on the edge of their seats at 5:30 at night,” she said.

As appeals in the case continue, Grimes is still the subject of media attention.

But he has long since moved on to other cases, including the defense of DeHoyos and a Riverside County woman who Grimes says may have also suffered from postpartum psychosis when she brutally attacked and seriously injured her two children.

In the DeHoyos case, Grimes will try to show at a preliminary hearing now scheduled for October that the Texas drifter is mentally unstable.

Grimes said he was initially attracted to the law in general and defense work in particular because “as a defense attorney, I felt that I could do more for black people. There were already enough people prosecuting and persecuting my people unjustly, and they needed protection.”

Like most defense attorneys, he speaks passionately of the defendant’s right to adequate counsel as a principle that outweighs the revulsion he may feel toward a criminal suspect who might well be guilty.

“That’s the difference between a police state, where a person who’s accused is simultaneously tried, convicted and executed, and a democracy that values due process,” he said.

As for Orange County, the one-time anti-establishmentarian who saw the county as the “citadel of racism” says he has found a home here and plans to stay put.

“I don’t consider myself a religious man,” Grimes says, “and I know it may sound weird, but I really think that somewhere along the way, I was called from up high to come to Orange County.”