Child’s Killer Has an Abnormal Brain, 2 Doctors Tell Court

A lawyer for Gregory Scott Smith asserted Monday that the confessed child killer has the mind of a child trapped in the body of a man.

James Farley, one of his court-appointed attorneys, presaged testimony by two doctors that Smith has an abnormal brain and is borderline mentally retarded.

“This evidence is not being presented as an excuse for what occurred, not at all,” Farley said. It is “only to show that the individual who sits before you . . . who pleaded guilty to each of these crimes, is not a monster but a human being.”

Farley and co-counsel Willard Wiksell hope to persuade a Ventura County Superior Court jury to recommend that a judge sentence Smith to life in prison, instead of death in the gas chamber, for the kidnap-slaying of 8-year-old Paul Bailly nearly 22 months ago.

Smith, 23, pleaded guilty in October to charges that he kidnaped, raped and murdered the boy and then burned his body on March 23, 1990, in the Santa Susana Knolls near Simi Valley.

Smith had been fired 2 1/2 weeks earlier from his job as a day-care aide at a Northridge latchkey program after Paul and other children there complained that he treated them roughly.

Dr. David Benson, a UCLA neurologist, testified that psychiatric tests on Smith showed that his mental skills are between normal and impaired.

Benson, who examined Smith in January, 1991, said he found no evidence that Smith has brain damage. But Benson also testified that Smith probably has impaired motor skills because he is left-handed while none of his relatives share that trait, which Benson said is genetic.

During the examination, Smith had trouble remembering a string of 10 words two hours after they were read to him, and could not draw a simple three-dimensional picture of a box, suggesting that his brain is abnormal, Benson said.

However, Benson admitted during cross-examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris that he could not tell whether Smith was giving true answers or trying to skew the test results to appear less intelligent.

Benson also testified that he estimated Smith’s IQ to be about 85--just above the borderline for mental retardation and lower than IQ test scores of 89 and 96 that Smith had at ages 13 and 16, respectively.

Later in the day, Dr. Monte Buchsbaum testified that he found 10 abnormalities in Smith’s brain in a sophisticated head scan.

The scan involved injecting a mildly radioactive sugar solution into Smith’s bloodstream, then using a radiation detector and computer to analyze how fast each part of his brain consumed the sugar.

The scan showed slower-than-normal sugar consumption in the frontal and temporal lobes of Smith’s brain, which control planning, memory, emotion and skills involving words and numbers, Buchsbaum testified. He is a researcher from the Brain Imaging Center at UC Irvine.