Mother Who Killed Baby Has Sanity Hearing : Ventura: Opposing opinions are given by a psychologist and a psychiatrist before jurors again receive the case of Francisca Sanchez Jimenez.

Ten days after they convicted an Oxnard woman of second-degree murder in the death of her newborn baby, jurors returned to Ventura County Superior Court on Monday to decide if she was legally insane.

Francisca Sanchez Jimenez, 23, faces a prison term of 15 years to life if the jury decides that she was sane when she gave birth in a portable toilet in July and let the baby boy die in the tank’s chemical wastes.

If she is found to have been insane, Jimenez could be released when a judge determines that she has regained her sanity.

The sanity trial is the first in a Ventura County murder case in more than two years, and it is all the more uncommon because it will be decided by a jury rather than a judge, the attorneys said.

And in a sanity trial, the burden of proof rests with the defense.

The jurors got the case late Monday after listening to a battle of expert witnesses: a defense psychologist who testified that Jimenez was incapable of understanding what she was doing, and a prosecution psychiatrist who insisted that there was “nothing to prevent her from knowing right from wrong.”

In California and most other states, a 150-year-old test known as the McNaghten Rule is applied to pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. Under that standard, Deputy Public Defender Jean L. Farley had to show that Jimenez suffered a mental disorder at the time of the crime, and that the disorder either prevented her from understanding the nature of her act or prevented her from realizing that it was wrong.

Jose J. LaCalle, a defense psychologist who testified for three days at Jimenez’s murder trial, told the jury Monday that the defendant suffers from a “schizoid personality disorder” that affected her reasoning when she gave birth while working in an onion field.

“Given her mild mental retardation and mental disease . . . adding to that the tremendous stress of the moment, she did not have the capacity to formulate a rational decision,” LaCalle said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol J. Nelson cited Jimenez’s statement to investigators that she did not hear any crying. “Evidently she knew that that mattered,” Nelson said. “Doesn’t that indicate that she knew that if she killed a living baby, that was wrong?”

LaCalle replied that Jimenez knew right from wrong at the time of the interrogation several months after the birth, but that she was “not able to form that judgment at the time of the crime.”

Nelson’s expert witness, psychiatrist Donald S. Patterson, testified that Jimenez was “aware of what was occurring” when she gave birth. He cited her failure to call for help during the delivery or to seek medical attention afterward.

He said a schizoid personality disorder would not prevent someone from knowing right from wrong, “but it might cause a person to care less about right versus wrong.”

In her closing argument, Farley faulted Patterson for failing to read all of the transcripts, public records and other evidence in the case. She assured the jurors that if they find that Jimenez was insane, “she would not be getting off,” and would have to undergo treatment until she is judged to be sane.

Nelson told the jury that Farley was appealing to the jury’s sympathy for an illiterate woman who grew up without a mother in a remote Mexican village.

The jury resumes deliberations today.