State v. Martinez
| Decision Date | 28 June 2022 |
| Docket Number | 37344-4-III |
| Parties | STATE OF WASHINGTON, Respondent, v. EDUARDO S. MARTINEZ, Appellant. |
| Court | Court of Appeals of Washington |
UNPUBLISHED OPINION
Twenty-three years after then-nearly-15-year-old Eduardo S. Martinez is alleged to have raped his two young stepbrothers, and 20 years after the youngsters' allegations came to light and were charged as crimes, Eduardo[1] was located across the country. He waived extradition, returned to Benton County, and in a fourth trial-following three mistrials-was convicted of the charges. He assigns error to what he contends were (1) a violation of his constitutional right to a speedy trial, (2) the trial court's abuse of discretion in granting a motion for joinder of his prosecution with that of his brother, (3) its abuse of discretion in declaring the third trial a mistrial and (4) its abuse of discretion in denying his motion for a new trial.
No constitutional speedy trial challenge was raised in the trial court, so the State had no reason to fully develop its explanation for the delay in bringing Eduardo to trial. In addition, disputes over responsibility for the delay will need to be resolved. Eduardo must raise that challenge through a collateral attack.
We reject Eduardo's remaining challenges. In a contemporaneous appeal, the panel grants relief to Eduardo's brother Alejandro for errors made at sentencing due to changes in law from the time of the 1995 crimes. In the interest of sentencing consistency, we grant the same relief to Eduardo. We affirm his convictions but remand for resentencing.
In 1993, Urbina Martinez Miranda met and married Santiago P.V.[2] in Mexico. Urbina had children from prior relationships including the defendant, Eduardo S. Martinez and his older brother Alejandro Ocampo Martinez. Santiago brought three children of his own into the marriage who we will refer to pseudonymously as Emiliano Julian, and Rodrigo. Soon after the marriage, the couple Eduardo, and Santiago's sons immigrated to the United States and settled in Prosser. Alejandro was already living in the United States, having moved to Grandview in 1991.
For about a year, the family lived in a single wide trailer in a mobile home park on Highway 22. In the summer of 1995, Santiago purchased a recreational type trailer and located it in a trailer park behind the Burger King in Prosser (hereafter the "Prosser trailer park"). Members of the family other than Alejandro lived in the trailer. Alejandro continued to live in Grandview but occasionally stayed at the Prosser trailer.
That year, Urbina and Santiago separated several times. They eventually divorced. During one of the separations, Santiago moved with his three children to Grandview and the children enrolled at Whitstran Elementary. The two families never saw or heard from each other again.
Three years later allegations of sexual abuse to Julian and Emiliano came to light when a parent of a Whitstran student brought to the school's attention an explicit drawing that had circulated on the school bus. It bore Julian's name. Most prominent in the drawing was a depiction of a man having anal sex with a woman. The principal of Whitstran Elementary, Sarah Juzeler, met with fourth-grader Julian to discuss the drawing bearing his name.
Julian initially denied creating the drawing, but before long admitted authorship and disclosed he had been sexually abused three years earlier by his stepbrother Eduardo.
Principal Juzeler determined from school records that Julian and his brother Emiliano, a fifth-grader at the school, had lived in the Prosser trailer park in the fall of 1995. As a mandatory reporter, Principal Juzeler notified Child Protective Services (CPS) of what she had been told.
The allegation was referred to the Benton County Sheriff's Office and Detective Lee Cantu undertook the investigation in late September 1998. He and Mary Santoy, a sexual assault counselor, conducted interviews of Julian and Emiliano at Whitstran Elementary.
According to Detective Cantu, Julian told him that Eduardo had sexually abused him. He told the detective he believed Eduardo and Urbina still lived at the Prosser trailer park. The detective then spoke with Emiliano, who told the detective that both Eduardo and Alejandro had sexually abused him. Like Julian, Emiliano believed Eduardo and Urbina were still living at the Prosser trailer park.
Detective Cantu contacted the boys' father, Santiago, who disclaimed any knowledge of the abuse, which was never reported to him by either Emiliano or Julian. According to Detective Cantu, Santiago also told him that Eduardo was living at the Prosser trailer park, and told him he believed Alejandro was in New York.
On October 12, Detective Cantu went to the Prosser trailer park in hopes of finding Eduardo and Alejandro. He went to the manager's mobile home and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A handwritten sign in the window identified "Alejandro Martinez" as the manager, and provided a telephone number, which the detective called. The individual who answered spoke English and identified himself as Alejandro Martinez. The detective told Alejandro that his name had been provided in connection with a case the nature of which he did not identify, and he would like to speak with him. Alejandro said he was at work and would not get off until 5 p.m., but he provided the name of the produce warehouse where he was working and Detective Cantu drove there to meet with him.
On arriving, the detective contacted the warehouse manager and asked if he had an employee by the name of Alejandro Martinez. The manager said no, but they did have an employee named Ricardo Martinez. The detective met with this employee who verbally identified himself as Alejandro Martinez but provided no identification. According to the detective, Alejandro said he was fluent in English and preferred to communicate with the detective in English. He waived his Miranda[3] rights. An advice of rights form that was later offered as evidence includes Alejandro's name, a date of birth, address, and phone number, handwritten by Detective Cantu. According to Detective Cantu, Alejandro affirmed that he still lived at the Prosser trailer park with Eduardo and his mother.
Detective Cantu asserts that, at the inception of the interview, he told Alejandro he was investigating an "incident" involving Emiliano and Julian that occurred in the fall of 1995 but did not specifically describe it as sexual abuse. Report of Proceedings (RP) (Trial)[4] at 630. Alejandro told the detective he remembered the incident but "it was very hard for him to talk about." RP (Trial) at 639. Alejandro then gave a written statement to the detective in Spanish, which translated to: "Me, Alejandro, did that with [Emiliano] one time," with no identification of what "that" was. RP (Trial) at 643.
Detective Cantu told Alejandro he would be charged with rape of a child in the first degree. He did not immediately book Alejandro due to overcrowding issues at the jail, however. According to the detective's notes of the interview, he spoke with Alejandro for a little over 40 minutes.
Three days later, the detective tried to contact Alejandro and Eduardo at the Prosser trailer park but found no one. Alejandro also did not answer calls to the phone number Detective Cantu had reached him at before. Detective Cantu forwarded information to the prosecutor that resulted in charges being filed. An information filed on November 2, 1998, charged Alejandro S. Martinez with one count of rape of a child (Emiliano) in the first degree under former RCW 9A.44.073 (1988). An information filed on December 14, 1998, charged Eduardo S. Martinez with two counts of rape of a child in the first degree under former RCW 9A.44.073 (1988), one addressed to the alleged rape of Emiliano and the other addressed to the alleged rape of Julian. A motion asking the juvenile court to decline jurisdiction of the charges against Eduardo was filed at the same time. Warrants were issued in 1998 for both brothers' arrest.
Detective Cantu would later testify at trial that the warrants issued but that he took no other steps to locate Alejandro or Eduardo. RP (Trial) at 650. He explained, "We had no, no location or . . . approximate location where they might have gone to .... Although New
York state is not a large state, it's heavily populated [and] New York City's a heavily populated city. So we had no, no where [sic] to start." RP (Trial) at 650. The record does not reveal that any action was taken on the charges for over two decades.
In the years that passed, Eduardo and Alejandro moved to Connecticut, worked, married, purchased homes, and started families. It appears that during this time frame, Alejandro consistently went by "Alex," not Alejandro, and often used his paternal surname Ocampo, with or without his maternal surname Martinez. (We refer to him hereafter as Alex, except when we describe the testimony of witnesses who referred to him as Alejandro.)
In November 2018, Eduardo was driving on a Connecticut highway when someone rear-ended him. The police responded to the accident and a check of Eduardo's identification documentation that he provided at their request turned up an outstanding arrest warrant for a Connecticut driving under the influence (DUI) charge from October 1997. According to Eduardo, he had failed to resolve that old charge because he had caused an accident at the time, and he became concerned that he might be jailed or even deported.
It was in connection with the continued prosecution of the old DUI charge that Connecticut...
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