Martinez under scrutiny
New allegations put Martinez under scrutiny
New allegations spur a state committee on attorney discipline to reinstate a Bar complaint against deputy Maricopa County Attorney Juan Martinez.
A state committee on attorney discipline and ethics on Friday reinstated a Bar complaint against Deputy Maricopa County Attorney Juan Martinez and ordered the State Bar of Arizona to further investigate the allegations against him.
Attorneys representing Jodi Arias, perhaps Martinez’s most famous conviction, had alleged that Martinez used two trial bloggers, with whom he may have had intimate relations, to obtain and disseminate confidential information during Arias’ 2013 and 2015 trials.
They also alleged that Martinez carried on an improper text-message and telephone relationship — including sexting — with a juror who had been removed from the jury to try to find information about the remaining jurors.
The Bar dismissed those charges in early January.
The attorneys, Karen Clark and Ralph Adams, then conducted their own investigation and took their findings directly to the Bar’s Attorney Discipline Probable Cause Committee, which determines if attorneys should be admonished or face disciplinary hearings in front of the state’s Attorney Disciplinary judge.
On Wednesday, Clark and Adams provided more information to the committee, including letters from prominent attorneys urging action against Martinez.
They included new allegations, including claims that Martinez had sexually harassed at least eight women
who work in the courthouse, and had once pushed a woman’s face into a garment removed from a corpse that reeked of decomposition and was evidence in a murder trial Martinez was prosecuting.
On Friday, responding to objections from Martinez’s attorney, J. Scott Rhodes, the committee ruled that the new allegations only were marginally relevant to the original complaint and would be better placed in a new Bar complaint.
In an order signed by the committee chair, Judge Lawrence Winthrop of the Arizona Court of Appeals, the Bar’s dismissal was vacated and the Bar was ordered to reinvestigate the original charge. Further, the new information could be used inasmuch as it was relevant to the original charge, the order said.
Six other complaints have been filed against Martinez since the Arias trials. Five were dismissed by the Bar without reaching the level of a formal complaint. A sixth complaint considered Martinez’s behavior in several cases over a decade’s time, including the Arias case. It went before a disciplinary panel in September 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.