EXPERT WITNESS TESTIFIES NIEVES' ACTIONS WERE 'DELIBERATE'.

Byline: Holly Edwards Staff Writer

SAN FERNANDO - Sandi Nieves' actions were ``deliberate, directed and purposeful'' the night her four daughters died in the house fire she is accused of setting, an expert witness for the prosecution testified Tuesday.

Dr. Robert Sadoff testified Tuesday that Nieves seemed to have ``selective memory'' of events leading up to the fire, and could therefore not have been truly unaware of what she was doing, as a defense witness had testified.

The forensic psychiatrist said he has worked with more than 300 people suffering from dissociative disorders, has testified in some 8,000 criminal trials, and said Nieves does not meet the criteria of a dissociative personality.

``There was too much she remembered about that night and that is not consistent with amnesia or dissociation,'' Sadoff said.

``People often claim dissociation, but very few have it. In criminal cases, we have to have a higher degree of suspicion about it because people have an advantage not to remember.''

Now rebutting defense testimony, prosecutors are calling their final expert witnesses this week in the trial of Nieves, 36, who faces the death penalty if convicted of the first-degree murder of her daughters.

An expert witness for the defense previously testified that Nieves was unaware of her actions the night of June 30, 1998, when the fire occurred. This ``dissociative'' state was the result of epileptic seizures, post-abortion depression, head trauma caused by her mother's physical abuse, and the potentially toxic combination of anti-depressants and diet pills, said Dr. Philip Ney, an expert witness for the defense.

Under cross-examination by Deputy Public Defender Howard Waco, however, Sadoff conceded that it's possible for stress, a hormonal imbalance caused by a recent abortion and severe depression, to induce a dissociative state. But, Sadoff added, that would be ``extremely rare.''

Questioning Sadoff about Nieves' state of mind on the night of the fire, Deputy District Attorney Beth Silverman laid out the chain of events prosecutors claim led up to the deadly blaze:

Nieves told her children they were going to have a slumber party in the kitchen, wrote a suicide note to her ex-husband, drove to the post office to mail the letter, purchased a can of gasoline, wrote two more suicide letters, drove to the post office to mail them, parked her van against the garage door, sealed the windows and doors with dowels, covered an air vent with a sheet, removed the batteries from smoke detectors, poured gasoline in the house and lit it, turned on the stove and placed rags and towels inside of it, and ordered her children not to move from the floor.

``She told her children to just vomit on the floor and to breathe into sheets,' Silverman said. ``She then walked over the bodies of her dead children, walked outside and put her feet in a play pool. She walked back over the bodies of her dead children, called an ex-boyfriend and then called 911.''

According to Sadoff, Nieves' actions were ``inconsistent with someone who is unconscious of her actions.''