MY DAUGHTER'S PLIGHT
by Mary Ann Martorana
On September 25, 2007 the life of my 34 old year daughter was changed forever. She was visiting friends who had a legal medical marijuana garden growing in their backyard. It became very late and she decided to sleep on their sofa rather than driving home alone in the dark. Her friends also appreciated another set of ears, since a group of thugs had been stalking the house for some time and had threatened to shoot them for their medical marijuana. Both of them were senior citizens and very nervous. They were both white men.
At 2:45 AM Adrienne heard cars pull up slowly and saw tail lights through the loose fence around the yard. Suddenly car doors slammed and the sound of several sets of sneakers pounding the pavement broke the quiet of the night. The whole neighborhood heard the noise and thought they were under attack. At least one man came out with a shotgun. (According to the laws of California, this kind of an attack can be classified as a riot)
A gang of males running and scattering, appeared through the rickety fence slats. They fanned out and surrounded the house.
They’re back! My daughter yelled to her sleeping friends. Get up get up! Call 911! Panic ensued and in fear and haste she grabbed the .22 rifle she had loaned to the roommate and ran to the window. Suddenly the sensor light in the side yard clicked on and three figures appeared right hands up in a gun crouch position. Frightened and startled, she accidentally pulled the trigger of the rifle, which was pointed at the eaves of the neighbor’s garage, then ran to make a second call to 911.
She saw no one but the three gangsters in the side yard. Shortly thereafter one of the gangsters was found in the neighbor’s driveway wounded. He was at least 8 feet below and 25 feet to the left of the window where my daughter stood with her rifle pointed upward and could not possibly have been seen or aimed at by her. When police came, she was almost immediately assumed to be guilty of shooting the gangster and treated as a criminal. The two white men were questioned and later released. Sometime later one of the men was arrested because he had an old felony charge and should not have been around guns. He is serving 9 months in prison on a plea he took.
Police drove my daughter around for two hours, apparently against standard procedure with the dash camera deliberately off, (police would not produce the tape for discovery) questioned her and refused her rights to consult a lawyer for advice., even though she asked several times in the police car. They photographed her in her underwear and locked her up in the “Hall of Justice” without arresting her. She was panicked and terrified and had no idea of what was happening. She told them she was a disabled person on social security but they ignored her. Later she was interrogated then arrested when she again asked for a lawyer and refused to sign the inaccurate statement that homicide detective Higgins wrote. They strip searched her, put her in a white suit and shackles and transported her barefoot to the county jail, where they strip searched her again.
She was charged with 2 felony strikes by DA Jan Scully and has been fighting to prove her innocence ever since. The DA’s office, in fact, is trying to put on even more charges. She is facing 23 years in prison and two strikes if she goes to trial, even though she has very serious health problems and is very likely to die in prison. They may even try for a third and give her life. Even a plea bargain supposedly carries two felony strikes and at least a year in prison. I thought charging more than one felony strike for a single crime was against the law, but apparently the law means little here in Sacramento, especially where it concerns persons of color. So far, the DA’s office has spent $500,000 on this case and we are just at preliminary hearing.
Adrienne’s lawyer has told her she is going to lose at trial and to prepare to go to prison in time for Christmas. He has told her the burden is on her to prove her innocence and not on the state to prove her guilty, and that is the way it works in Sacramento. Even though she has a life threatening condition which requires surgery she cannot get “time off” from her endless court appearances to have the surgery and recover. I actually located the witnesses who can testify that the gangsters were armed, but when I gave the information to the attorney, he ignored me completely. This is our third attorney and is a panel appointee, since the other two exhausted all my financial resources.
The police tapes of the gangsters admitting to criminal conspiracy in planning the robbery and stating that the wounded man was not shot by my daughter probably will not be allowed in court because my daughter’s attorney says they are “no good.” I have seen one of them and the gangster actually admits to criminal conspiracy and states that Adrienne was not the shooter. Our Sacramento Courts are famous for excluding exculpatory evidence and ruling it irrelevant or inadmissible.
The jury will not be allowed to know that it was a known street gang named the Belden Boys who attacked the house because the District Attorney refused to charge them and the defense attorney tells me her word is “gold” as to who is a criminal and who is not. Two of the white gang members have since committed crimes and received a slap on the wrist. No one for the defense has been allowed to examine the rifle, which was old and rusted and did not fire properly. The discovery in the case was with held from the defense for months and the prosecution has failed to show in court several times but has suffered no consequences. Everything is stacked against my daughter, who has very little time left and is suffering from debilitating panic disorder and seldom leaves the house. She may as well have been in prison for the past two years.
I have been doing a great deal of research into how people are treated in the same circumstance, which is usually classified as self defense here in Sacramento and does not result in such extreme prosecution. Here is a stunning case comparison which I found:
From the Sacramento Police Blog:
December 4, 2008, 7:00 a.m., 4524 13th Avenue: Shooting
Officers received a call of a male subject who had been shot and was laying in the alley near 14th Avenue and 45th Street Officers arrived and located Tyrone Clark who had been shot. The injuries appeared to have been non life-threatening. During a canvass, officers discovered the home owner who had shot him. The homeowner shot Clark as he was attempting to steal an air compressor from her back yard.
This second shooting was by a 34 year old woman. She was a white homeowner who apparently did not call 911, because she was discovered in a neighborhood canvass by police. The thief was a black parolee who was blinded for life by the shot.
These two apparent self-defense cases seem very similar. In fact, Adrienne’s case seems far more a case of obvious self defense than the second. Both of the men who were shot were found on the other side of a fence and both were in the act of stealing. In the first case there was no intent to shoot anyone; in the second the aim was deliberate. Both women were fearful and felt threatened. Both men recovered with some disability. The first has some head trauma; the second is blind for life. That is sad, but they were in the act of committing a crime. This is what the average citizen would think and the average citizen could not be more wrong.
In the first case, my daughter (who has no criminal past) was immediately judged to be guilty of attempted murder and the case was treated as a homicide on the spot. She was told she was going to make a routine statement but instead was videotaped being frog marched out to a police car, even though she had not been arrested or read her rights. All this was broadcast several times on local and national news. With only a few minutes notice, all the media in Sacramento was present with their satellite dishes fully deployed. Also a press release immediately went out to the national news with her picture, saying she had shot a juvenile over “her” “pot garden”. No investigation into the attacking gangsters was ever made. (They later came forward and admitted they planned the crime and also claimed their friend was not shot by my daughter) No other suspect was ever considered, although ballistics show it was almost impossible the shot came from her gun and it cannot be proven because the bullet is still in the gangster’s head.
In the second “self defense” case the name of the home owning white woman shooter was withheld. Sacramento DA Jan Scully, who has turned Sacramento 2009 into Meridian Mississippi 1954 , declared this shooting justifiable self-defense and the woman walked away free. The woman has gone about her life with no consequences.
My daughter is black and the house she was visiting was a rental. She found out the hard way that in Sacramento the shocking reality is that it isn’t what you do that matters. It is who you are and what race you are.
I am a member of The Justice Reform Coalition, which is trying to bring a number of these outrageous cases to the attention of the public. They all involve persons of color. The murder of Luis Gutierrez by sheriff’s gang task force in Woodland CA is among our cases, which involve blatant racial profiling and selective prosecution. Also, one of our members is involved in the Oscar Grant case. State and local authorities will do nothing about any of this.
I believe California has become ground zero for demonstrating just how far the extreme right wing law-and-order/white supremacist movement can go. California, not the South, is the true birthplace of this horrific movement. It is long past time for the national civil rights spotlight to shine on the atrocities that are happening here.