Martin rejected the parents' explanations to detectives that the boy often scratched himself, fell or bit the inside of his mouth, causing the dozens of wounds he displayed.
"I cannot believe they're self-inflicted," the judge said.
In one photograph, taken at a birthday party for his little sister, Andrew "looks so forlorn that it's striking," Martin told the capacity crowd in his courtroom. Of all the pictures of the boy, the judge went on, the ones that most affected him were those that showed the tot lying down, lifeless, so emaciated that he had "no buttocks."
FOR THE RECORD - An article in yesterday's editions gave an incorrect age for Andrew Griffin, whose parents were convicted of second-degree murder in his death. He would have turned 4 on Feb. 20.
THE BALTIMORE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
Andrew would have been 5 years old last Friday. Of the Griffins' five surviving children, the three youngest are in separate foster homes, the others with John Griffin's mother.
During closing arguments, the prosecutor showed on a screen a photograph of Andrew as a baby, smiling at the camera from his crib, apparently robust. The caption gave his date of birth, Feb. 20, 2005, and that of his death, Dec. 26, 2007. In the next picture, taken after he died, Andrew lies on his back, limbs limp, eyes open, his ravaged body covered with cuts, abrasions and bruises.
He looked, an emergency room doctor testified, like "a Holocaust victim."
The question of how Andrew went from one state to the other in less than three years was central to the trial of the Griffins, who lived in Rodgers Forge.
"You may not starve your child to death," Coffin said, her voice hoarse with emotion. Andrew's parents, she said, failed to seek medical attention for him, even when, as they told the police, he lost a considerable amount of weight a few months before he died.
"He could have been saved," Coffin said, citing the testimony of another doctor. At no point, she said, from the time Andrew was born to the time his father found him lifeless in their bedroom, did the parents sound the alarm to anyone that the boy needed help, that he was not gaining weight as babies should, that he was in a perilous decline.
When a pathologist examined Andrew's body, it weighed 13 pounds, roughly what a normal 3-month-old weighs. His organs were tiny, the doctor said, his brain had begun to shrink, and he had begun to grow a thin covering of hair on his back - an attempt by the body to provide the warmth that his compromised circulation no longer could.
All were signs of advanced starvation, the pathologist said.
