against his client's Supreme Court conviction.

The news means that a decision on whether DeRoza will hang or not will be delayed until after the appeal is heard -- at the next sitting of the Court of Appeal in March.

DeRoza, 21, was sentenced to die last week after being found guilty of drowning his five-year-old daughter Lynae Brown in Hamilton Harbour.

Attorney Mark Pettingill confirmed an appeal against the conviction had been lodged on Monday in relation to the law on insanity.

Mr. Pettingill said the Supreme Court heard evidence from Government psychiatrist Dr. Vanessa Crawford that DeRoza had been identified as a paranoid schizophrenic in 1995.

She told Chief Justice Austin Ward that DeRoza had received prescription drugs for his condition just four days before the horror killing. And she said his mental state at the time of the killing "was such that his mental responsibility would be diminished.'' DeRoza later claimed that voices he had heard through reggae records had ordered him to sacrifice his daughter.

Mr. Pettingill said: "We argued that at the time he was hearing voices and acutely psychotic.

"The judge effectively said that there wasn't evidence to support the position with regard to insanity -- and the psychiatrist had said there was.'' "We are just questioning whether the direction with regard to insanity was the right one or not.'' During the trial, however, Dr. Crawford conceded to Attorney General Elliott Mottley that DeRoza knew he was killing someone.

And Mr. Mottley stressed that he had given two different motives for the killing -- the other being that he did not consider Lynae to be his daughter, the mother was "loose'' and had been pressurizing him for money.

Any death sentence has to be confirmed by Governor Thorold Masefield, acting on advice of the Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy. Deputy Governor Peter Willis said: "The Committee does not normally meet until after the judicial process has taken its course.''