Woman put baby in fire as sacrifice, court told

An Auckland woman who put her baby in the fire was offering the child as a sacrifice to save the world, a High Court jury heard today.

The 29-year-old mother, represented by Paul Trehey, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of attempted murder by reason of insanity - a plea accepted by the Crown.

It was accepted that the woman, who has name suppression, placed her four month-old daughter in the fire during the incident on June 20.

Psychiatrists agreed she was legally insane at the time, but Mr Trehey said it was right for their views to be scrutinised by a jury.

In his opening address, prosecutor Kieran Raftery told the jury: "She was offering a sacrifice to save the world...that is what she believed at the time."

She thought that forces of evil, The Jackal, threatened her family and the world.

"The way she saw to stop that was to offer her child as a sacrifice," Mr Raftery told the jury.

He said the woman knew what she was doing but did not know it was morally wrong.

In her distorted mind she believed she was sacrificing the child for the greater good of mankind to protect it from the Jackal - the devil in disguise.

Mr Raftery said that while psychiatrists for the defence and prosecution agreed about the woman's mental state, criminal trials were dealt with by jurors and not psychiatrists.

"It may well be that at the end of the day you have no difficulty in agreeing with the psychiatrists as well," said Mr Raftery.

Mr Raftery told the jury the woman's mother heard the child's distressed screams and rushed to the room, pulled the infant from the fire and put her in a sink of cold water until the ambulance service arrived.

The child was recovering but still suffered burns to her back. But for the grandmother's intervention, the child would have burned to death.

In her statement, the woman told Detective Wendy Pickering that she thought there was a "terrible game happening" and she felt she was being commanded.

"I know I put baby on the coals. I thought it was the only way to save the world. I thought my baby was Jesus, my mum was God. I thought I had to save the world by sacrificing my baby."

Dr Alexander Simpson, the director of regional forensic psychiatric services, told the court that the woman suffered from an acute psychiatric illness.

The woman, who believed she was part of the battle between good and evil, felt she carried the burden of protecting the world from The Jackal.

She believed that the youngest member of every family had to be sacrificed to prevent the Jackal's attack.

A good and loving mother, the only explanation for what happened was her mental illness.

Her behaviour was delusionally motivated and she was unable to recognise the moral wrongfulness of her actions, Dr Simpson said.

The trial before Justice John Laurenson is expected to end tomorrow.