After four hours of deliberations, a Solano County Superior Court jury on Tuesday acquitted Timothy James Martinez on eight felony counts of child sexual assault.
Judge Jeffrey C. Kauffman, following final jury instructions, handed the case to the 12-member panel at 10:10 a.m., but by 2 p.m. jurors returned with the not-guilty verdicts.
Seated at the defense table in Department 1, Martinez, 35, of Vacaville, was then released and his bail exonerated, official court records showed on Wednesday.
Out of custody on bail during the nine-day trial, he was charged with seven counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 and one for aggravated sex assault involving oral copulation. Two of the original 10 counts were dismissed earlier.
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The jury’s decision was a setback for the prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney Luke B. Leichty, whose final arguments on Friday included the assertion that Deputy Public Defender Pamela Boskin “ignored the victim’s testimony in court,” and that it was consistent with the victim’s statements made to Vacaville police investigators during the first of two interviews three years apart.
“It’s not a reasonable conclusion” to claim that the victim made up a story and that, as a young teenager, she “described what happened in a way that only a 13-year-old can describe,” he told jurors in his rebuttal to the defense’s closing argument.
But jurors apparently were persuaded by Boskin’s claim that the victim, who failed to recall some specific details while on the witness stand for three days, was “stuck in a lie,” suggesting fabrication of abuse “that doesn’t make sense.”
At the beginning of her closing statements, Boskin described the victim in 2019 as middle school student struggling, “cutting herself,” and “self-harming,” and hearing voices.
She said the victim’s “struggles were not regular struggles” and was seeing a therapist once weekly and getting “intensive mental health services.”
Boskin asserted that the victim would say things to friends “that would get the attention from her peers,” and that those statements were “the context in why the allegations were made.”
As the judge did in his instructions, she reminded jurors that the allegations in a criminal case must be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” and to consider “the quality” of the victim’s testimony, which she repeatedly called “inconsistent.”
At one point Boskin also reminded jurors that the victim, now 18 and a college student in North Carolina, told an investigator “that this is where my mind went blank,” referring to an alleged distressing sexual encounter with Martinez. (The Reporter typically does not identify victims of sexual abuse.)
The victim’s inability to recall some details “should give you doubt,” she told jurors.
Boskin also cited the recorded interview with Greg Teplansky, a deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office, when the victim lived in Trona, a desert town, during her high school years. Teplanski testified in court that the victim could not accurately remember how many times Martinez had sexual intercourse with her.
“Omissions are inconsistencies,” Boskin said, keying on a theme of her argument, the credibility of the evidence, that some of it “did not make sense.”
At one point, she suggested that the victim contrived stories about the alleged sexual abuse, confusing “what actually happened” with something the victim saw in a movie or read about.
Boskin also claimed that Martinez was unlikely to have sex with the victim, who he knew was seeing a therapist.
“Doesn’t make sense,” she repeated.
Additionally, there was no police investigation after the victim reported the alleged crimes to a therapist, no recovery of bedding, no collection of DNA, and, thus, no corroboration that the abuse occurred.
The victim, she said, made statements over the years and eventually became “stuck in a lie.”
At the outset of his closing argument, Leichty noted the alleged sexual abuse by Martinez, who is related to the victim, occurred during a five-month period, from late November 2018 to late April 2019 in a two-story home in Vacaville.
He called the sexual assaults “the deepest” kind of betrayal, then showed a video, with audio, of the 13-year-old victim making statements to a Vacaville police investigator.
She appeared to have a clear recollection of what occurred in several instances of the alleged molestation, saying in an elevated and agitated tone that what happened — episodes of fondling, oral sex and intercourse — was “not right,” that the relative was “supposed to be teaching me the difference between right and wrong.”
Leichty told jurors that she was “telling the truth about what happened.” (Under California law, the direct evidence of one witness can prove any fact, but cautions a jury to review carefully all the evidence before accepting the single-witness testimony.)
He recalled her testimony that began two weeks ago, remembering that Martinez came into the large downstairs room on the first floor, where she slept, that he allegedly began touching her in a sexual manner as she tried to watch a TV program, and apologized a day later.
At other times during her in-court testimony, Leichty reminded, she stated she did not want the sexual activity, stood up and backed up against the wall and away from Martinez during one instance and became angry.
He recounted that the frequency of the sexual assaults occurred once weekly, on weekends, and recalled an instance when Martinez is alleged to have engaged in oral sex with her in the master bedroom’s shower, and instances of sexual intercourse.
Leichty said her descriptions of what happened indicated her credibility and that Martinez engaged in “substantial sexual conduct” with her.
He then reminded the jurors about various witness statements and also her statements made to Teplansky.
The victim made statements in the recorded interview with Teplansky, a second interview in 2022, that, in some instances, were at odds with the victim’s statements in 2019, which Leichty acknowledged. However, he conceded, as years pass, a human being’s memories are not absolutely clear.
He called the defense’s suggestions of the victim’s questionable mental health “a distraction.”
Leichty said Martinez picked the victim because the defendant thought, “Who would believe her?”
The jury on Tuesday did not.
