Former Stanislaus official pleads guilty
SACRAMENTO — Karen Mathews Davis, former clerk-recorder of Stanislaus County, pleaded guilty last week to lying to federal agents investigating death threats she had sent to herself when she was a congressional candidate three years ago.
Mathews Davis, 68, faces up to five years in federal prison when she is sentenced Sept. 28, although the plea deal confirmed Thursday suggests a shorter term. She and her lawyer declined to comment after the hearing in federal court.
Still unknown is how her case might affect, if at all, the man who spent 19 years behind bars based on Mathews Davis’ testimony when she was a popular public figure in Modesto. She moved to Lodi years ago.
Authorities in late 2015 said they would revisit the older case, which ended in prison convictions for nine people involved in an extremist tax protest. Mathews Davis was the star prosecution witness 20 years ago against Roger Steiner, saying he beat and cut her and sodomized her with a pistol in a 1994 ambush in her Modesto garage.
Steiner, 79, frail and using a walker for the past year, did not attend Thursday’s hearing. His Fresno attorney, Patrick Fortune, said he is disappointed that nothing was said touching on Steiner or the older case.
“When he thought about it, it came down to his personal motives,” Fortune said. “She was going down either way, so his presence wouldn’t make a difference.”
In the hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Troy Nunley asked Mathews Davis: “How do you plead?” She responded, “Guilty, your honor.” Asked about treatment for mental illness, she said she is seeing both a psychiatrist and a psychologist, and takes medication.
Although the maximum punishment for her crime, a felony, is five years in federal prison, prosecutors agreed to recommend a shorter term. The judge said he’ll decide after reviewing a background report to be produced before sentencing in September. At that hearing, victims will be afforded an opportunity to say how Mathews Davis’ actions have affected them, but it’s not clear whether Steiner fits that definition.
Steiner was the only defendant jurors in 1997 found responsible for the ambush. In the longest trial to that date in Fresno’s federal court, she identified Steiner as the assailant. Three years ago, she published a book called “The Terrorist in My Garage.”
“As God is my savior, you have condemned and convicted an innocent man,” Steiner blurted at the trial’s end, and he has steadfastly proclaimed innocence since.
Mathews Davis, Stanislaus’ clerk-recorder from 1990 to 2001, stood up to tax extremists, refusing to record bogus documents or to remove a $416,000 IRS property tax lien. Authorities said she received threatening calls and letters; a bullet was fired through the recorder’s office window and a fake bomb was left under her car.