Case was supposed to a ‘slam dunk’

The man who raped and strangled 16-year-old Brittany Binger left a wealth of DNA evidence at the scene. He attacked her on a long-ago winter night as she walked beside a country road called Pocahontas Trail. Authorities found his semen in the victim and slivers of his scratched off skin under her fingernails.

When police arrived at the scene, they saw a 20-ounce juice bottle, three-quarters full of Minute Maid Strawberry Passion, standing upright about four metres from Brittany’s body, suggesting that the killer had carefully set it on the pavement before grabbing the girl. Detectives traced the lot number on the label to a nearby Miller Mart. And security video recorded at the convenience store around the time of the killing showed a day labourer named Oswaldo Martinez buying just such a drink, investigators said.

Seven weeks later, on Feb. 18, 2005, detectives in James City County clapped handcuffs on Martinez, then 33, a Salvadoran immigrant who had been in the United States illegally for months. After DNA tests confirmed that the semen and torn pieces of skin were his, police said, he was charged with capital murder.

“A slam dunk,” recalled one detective. “That’s what we thought.”

Twelve years later, however, the curious case of Oswaldo Elias Martinez — who has been deaf and effectively mute all his life — is a long way from being resolved.

Unable to read, write or enunciate more than a few small words, Martinez communicates mainly through pantomime, grunts and crude drawings. As a result, even though experts say he is not psychotic or severely intellectually impaired, he remains legally incompetent to stand trial because he cannot assist in his defence or understand what is happening in a courtroom.

Only a handful of such criminal cases, involving defendants who grew up bereft of language, have confronted the U.S. justice system in the past century. And at a time of heated debate about illegal immigration, with U.S. President Donald Trump vowing to bar “bad hombres” by increasing deportations and building a wall on the nation’s southern border, the prosecution of Martinez has ground to a halt.

Now 45, he is housed in a secure state hospital, possibly not eligible for deportation and still presumed innocent in Brittany’s death. After trying in vain for years to teach him to communicate clearly in American Sign Language, specialists have declared that further efforts almost certainly would be useless. Experts in brain science said Martinez’s neurological window of opportunity for learning language, including fluent sign language, closed decades ago.

“I’ve represented a number of capital defendants in my time,” said his attorney, Timothy Clancy, who has been practicing law for 30 years. “This case by far is the most unusual I’ve had — completely unique.”

Clancy has asked a judge in Williamsburg to dismiss the case, arguing that Virginia, by continuing to keep Martinez behind bars, is violating his constitutional rights to a speedy trial and to due process and equal protection under the law. The legal fight over that issue, set to begin next month, is bound to be knotty and protracted, possibly wending through several state and federal courts.

But the potential looms that someday, Martinez will go free.

Brittany Binger, as a friend described her, was “a lost kid,” sweet and sentimental by nature but downhearted and unmoored at 16, a highschool dropout estranged from her divorced mother and father, unwilling or not welcome to live in either parent’s home.

In the autumn of 2004, three women whom Brittany had known for years took her in, making room for the troubled teenager in their mobile home in the Windy Hill trailer park, off Pocahontas Trail.

Sometimes Brittany bunked with another friend, in the neighbouring Whispering Pines mobile home community. On Sunday, Jan. 2, 2005, she was headed there about 7:30 p.m., walking from Windy Hill alone in the dark. She made it halfway. Martinez, raised in agrarian poverty in El Salvador, also lived in Windy Hill, in a six- by seven-foot tool shed.

Two of his brothers already were in the United States with valid work permits when Martinez entered the country illegally about a year before Brittany’s death, police said.

Although much about his background remains unclear, mental-health professionals and other specialists have pieced together some of Oswaldo Martinez’s history by painstakingly extracting bits of information from him and by interviewing his brothers.

Born deaf in 1971, the fourth of nine siblings, Martinez came of age during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, attending school briefly as a child before quitting and going to work selling vegetables with his mother in a rural marketplace. He left his wife and two sons in El Salvador, according to authorities, who said that before 2005, Martinez had no U.S. or foreign criminal record that they know of, except a 2004 public-drunkenness arrest in the Williamsburg area.

Asked about his client’s version of events on the night Brittany was attacked, Clancy, the defence attorney, shrugged, saying, “No one can communicate with him effectively enough to know even that.”

A judge in 2005 declared Martinez unfit to take part in court proceedings, and he has not been allowed to enter a plea in the case.

To be legally competent, as the Supreme Court defines it, Martinez would need to be able to assist in his defence by communicating coherently with Clancy, and he would have to possess at least a general understanding of what was going on in the courtroom during his trial.

His language deficit appears to be the only obstacle preventing him from being called to account in the girl’s death. Mental-health professionals who have met with Martinez over the years said he shows no signs of serious psychiatric illness.

Hundreds of pages of evaluation reports written since 2005 tell a story of futility, detailing efforts by an array of specialists to render Martinez fluent in American Sign Language, or ASL, and to teach him the basic workings of the criminal justice system.

Meanwhile, the victim’s father, James Binger, was growing angry and impatient as he waited for justice.

Binger, now 53, said in an interview that he has attended at least 20 court hearings for Martinez since 2005. He called the particulars of the case “incredibly frustrating” and said the judicial process has been “crazy” and “absolutely unreal.”

Binger, a construction foreman, said that after watching Martinez in court many times through the years, he thinks his daughter’s alleged killer is sufficiently competent to stand trial.

Speaking to a TV reporter in 2014, Binger said of Martinez, “I hope you die in jail, brutally.” On the phone Monday, he said: “That’s right — that’s how I feel. But what I want done, I can’t get done.”

I’VE REPRESENTED A NUMBER OF CAPITAL DEFENDANTS IN (30 YEARS OF PRACTISING LAW). THIS CASE BY FAR IS THE MOST UNUSUAL I’VE HAD — COMPLETELY UNIQUE. — TIMOTHY CLANCY, REPRESENTING OSWALDO MARTINEZ, WHO CANNOT COMMUNICATE THROUGH MEANS OF LANGUAGE

PHOTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST BY TIMOTHY C. WRIGHT Brittany Binger was headed for the Whispering Pines mobile home community near Williamsburg, Va., in January 2005 when she was attacked and killed. The suspect has been ruled legally incompetent to stand trial.