Attorney Fights 60-Day Suspension : Law: Milton Grimes, defense counsel in several notable cases, was penalized for failing to pay state income taxes. He says the penalty is too severe.

A local attorney who gained nationwide exposure for his successful postpartum-psychosis defense of accused murderer Sheryl Lynn Massip is seeking to overturn a recent state Supreme Court decision ordering him to stop practicing law for 60 days.

The July 10 court order, also carrying a two-year probation for attorney Milton C. Grimes, stemmed from his failure to file state income tax returns from 1980 to 1982.

Grimes acknowledged the omission in 1988 when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor tax charge in Orange County Municipal Court. He was ordered to pay delinquent taxes of $1,269, along with a $4,000 fine, and perform 100 hours of community service.

The 45-year-old lawyer, who filed an appeal for review on Wednesday with the state Supreme Court, said in an interview that he thinks the court’s 60-day suspension is too harsh. The court ordered the same suspension that had been recommended by the State Bar of California, although it reduced probation from the recommended three years.

“When I make a mistake, I’ll pay for it. I just don’t want to overpay,” Grimes said. “I just don’t believe this is a fair penalty for an attorney to pay for an offense that doesn’t affect a client.”

Grimes said he neglected to file his tax returns because of pressures at the office.

“At the time, my practice was getting more demanding and I had just dropped an associate so was handling it by myself. It was quite stressful, and I procrastinated (on the taxes), and just didn’t file them,” he said.

“There are a lot of people who don’t file, but they just don’t get caught,” he added. “I did not know that the penalty for what I did would have been the suspension of what I do for a living. I thought these things were worked out administratively.”

Grimes, a native of the South, has achieved a reputation as one of the strongest criminal defense attorneys in Orange County through his often-innovative defenses of such high-profile murder defendants as Zachary F. Pettus, Jerry Pick and, most recently, Richard DeHoyos, accused of abducting, molesting and killing 9-year-old Nadia Puente of Santa Ana last year. Grimes tried to show that Pettus, accused of stabbing and strangling to death a local boutique owner, could not get a fair trial because he was black, and that Pick, accused of killing a fellow jail inmate, could not get a fair trial because of his mental incompetence.

Grimes garnered the most attention, however, in his defense of Massip. In one of the first tests of the postpartum-psychosis defense in any court in the country, Grimes failed to persuade a jury in November, 1988, that the Anaheim housewife was temporarily insane, suffering from a severe form of the “baby blues,” when she ran over her infant son with the family car.

But Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald, impressed by the strength of the defense, threw out the jury’s verdict and freed Massip anyway. The 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana last month refused to overturn Fitzgerald’s extraordinary decision, allowing Massip to remain free.