Appeal: Reinstate action vs. Martinez

Attorneys for convicted killer Jodi Arias have asked the State Bar of Arizona to reinstate a bar complaint against prosecutor Juan Martinez, saying there is overwhelming evidence that he violated attorney-ethics rules during Arias’ 2015 trial.

The 37-page objection to the complaint’s dismissal was filed Friday.

The appeal contends that Martinez leaked confidential information about the case and its jurors to two women attending the trial as social-media

commentators. As a result, the attorneys claim, the identity was leaked of the sole juror who voted against sending Arias to death row for murdering her sometime-boyfriend Travis Alexander.

The objection also alleges that Martinez, a deputy Maricopa County attorney, had inappropriate communications with another juror whom he had discharged from the case.

Karen Clark and Ralph Adams, who specialize in attorney ethics, filed their initial complaint against Martinez in early 2017. Legal counsel for the State Bar, which licenses and disciplines attorneys in Arizona, dismissed the complaint in January without sending it on to the Bar’s probable-cause committee, which could recommend sanctions against Martinez or refer his case to a disciplinary hearing.

If sanctions or a disciplinary hearing occurred, either could impact Martinez’s long and lauded career and could affect Arias as well. Any findings against Martinez could affect the status of Arias’ appeal of her conviction and life sentence, which have not yet gone before the Arizona Court of Appeals for review.

The objection filed Friday was addressed directly to the probable-cause committee. The objection is public record and was obtained by The Arizona Republic. It alleges that:

Martinez engaged or attempted to engage women with whom he had flirtatious or outright sexual relationships to get information about jurors or to leak confidential case information over social media. One of his alleged lovers, a social-media blogger, bragged to at least two others that she helped Martinez dig up negative information about the sole juror who refused to vote for a death sentence. And curiously, that juror’s name was revealed minutes after a mistrial was declared.

While the second Arias trial was underway, Martinez carried on an inappropriate telephone and text-message relationship with a juror who had been dismissed from the case. The woman alleges that Martinez pressed her for information on what other jurors were thinking. Martinez claimed he quickly ended the correspondence, which the woman debates.

Clark and Adams’ allegations are supported by interviews with four key witnesses. Their appeal contains documentation, including forensically authenticated real-time text messages between one of Martinez’s alleged lovers and a friend with whom she carpooled.

Martinez did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

In 2008, after a tempestuous onand-off romance, Arias shot and stabbed Alexander to death in the bathroom of his Mesa home. She confessed to the killing but claimed she had acted in self-defense.

She went to trial in January 2013, and to everyone’s surprise, what seemed to be an ugly domestic murder was turned into a morality play of good and evil by tabloid TV.

National news crews descended on Maricopa County Superior Court. Trial groupies waited in line for seats in the courtroom, and some transformed themselves into social-media personalities by blogging and tweeting live from the scene and by voicing their antipathy for Arias for the cameras outside the courthouse. Trial-watch bloggers, mostly intent on seeing Arias condemned to death, outnumbered the traditional media that packed into the courtroom.

The first trial was streamed live. In short time, Arias appeared to draw trial watchers’ antipathy, and Martinez, with his flamboyant and confrontational trial style, became an international idol.

The jury found Arias guilty of firstdegree murder but, despite Martinez’s efforts, was unable to reach a unanimous decision as to whether she should be sentenced to death or life in prison.

A second jury was impaneled in October 2014 to sentence Arias, but in April 2015, it, too, deadlocked and Arias had to be sentenced to life in prison.

Since the second mistrial, Martinez has been the subject of six Bar complaints. Five were dismissed by the Bar without reaching the level of a formal complaint. A fifth considered Martinez’s behavior in several cases over a decade’s time, including the Arias case. It went before a disciplinary panel in December and was dismissed after a hearing.

The Bar has formally objected to that dismissal, and the Arizona Supreme Court has ordered the presiding disciplinary judge to state his legal findings as to why he dismissed the complaint.

Clark and Adams filed their initial complaint in February 2017, detailing Martinez’s conduct with three women: a social-media blogger, a trial groupie who frequently commented for TV, and the dismissed juror.

It alleged sexual relationships and suggested that some liaisons took place in Martinez’s county office. It alleged that Martinez had passed information to the women.

Martinez also admitted granting them access to his office but said no confidential materials were exposed.

Martinez’s attorney, J. Scott Rhodes, responded to the complaint in part by writing, “Mr. Martinez’s private sexual life is no one’s business but his own. The extent of the State Bar’s interest in Mr. Martinez’s private life extends no further than to know that it has not impacted his ethical and professional duties.”

In the Bar’s January 2018 letter dismissing the complaint, Bar counsel Craig Henley wrote, “While the two women deny having sex with you, you neither admitted nor denied having sex with them, and there is no compelling evidence on the subject.”

Karen Clark has a track record as an ethics lawyer. In 2004, while acting as counsel for the State Bar, she secured a disbarment against Ken Peasley, a wellknown Pima County prosecutor, for prosecutor misconduct. It was the first time in the country that a prosecutor had been disbarred, and Clark’s findings led to two murder convictions being overturned.

Working with Adams, who is also her husband, she succeeded last year in disbarring Kirk Nurmi, Arias’ lead attorney, largely on the fact that he had violated attorney-client privilege by writing a tell-all book about the case.

Martinez had begun writing a book — now published — about the Arias case during the 11⁄2-year hiatus between Arias’ first and second trials. A Bar charge against him on that count was dismissed, but Clark also wants that decision to be reconsidered.

After the dismissal of their initial complaint against Martinez, Clark and Adams conducted their own interviews and included the transcripts of those in their appeal.

The document also includes hundreds of pages of other material, including records in Martinez’s personnel file from 1990 and 1991, when he was reprimanded first for inappropriate and unprofessional contact with secretaries in the office and then for making an inappropriate sexual remark to a female attorney.

Clark and Adams’ current allegations are supported by interviews with four witnesses: the blogger’s former business partner; the freelance television journalist who carpooled with the blogger; the blogger’s ex-husband; and the dismissed juror, who went so far as to text nude photos of herself to Martinez.

The Arizona Republic is not printing the names of any of the women, although they are named in the objection.

The narrative that Clark and Adams pieced together says that Martinez began his relationship with the blogger in 2013, between the two Arias trials. The blogger’s former business partner said that the blogger confessed the affair to her. Martinez supposedly took the blogger to lunch and mentioned that a friend of his had a condo nearby. They went there. The business partner also said that the blogger told her that she and Martinez would meet in attorney rooms, in a closet in the courthouse and in Martinez’s office.

The business partner overheard phone calls between the blogger and Martinez. She said that the blogger became jealous when Martinez seemed to be making overtures to her, too.

The business partner stated in an interview with Clark and Adams that she told Martinez she was happily married, and he responded that he could prove she was not.

“I get he can sleep with who he wants to sleep with,” she said, according to a transcript. “But (the blogger) was a married woman. I’m a married woman. He’s sexually harassing me in a courtroom, you know, at the courthouse. It’s like how is that okay for him to do that?”

When Martinez asked the two of them to try to arrange a jailhouse interview with Arias, the business partner balked, and it led to the two women parting company.

During the second Arias trial, the blogger began carpooling to the courthouse with a freelance television journalist who was contributing stories to local and national media outlets. The blogger admitted the affair to the carpool friend, who reported in an interview with Clark and Adamsshe also frequently heard Martinez’s distinctive voice when he chatted with the blogger on her cellphone.

The blogger and the carpooler also texted each other frequently, and the carpooler provided those texts — hundreds of them — first to an attorney who had them forensically authenticated as belonging to those two women, and eventually to Clark and Adams.