Prosecutor of Year Has a Firm Lock on Success : Justice: Critics charge, however, that Torrance deputy district attorney’s victories are due to prosecuting minority defendants in front of primarily conservative, white juries.

When the South Bay’s most notorious murder suspects are brought to trial they can expect to face an unlikely nemesis: a soft-spoken grandfather who quotes Shakespeare, favors well-worn sweaters and recalls that some of his happiest days were spent as a high school English teacher.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Martin is usually the man seated at the prosecutor’s table in Torrance Superior Court when the district attorney’s office is determined to send a man to his death, or to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

At 66 he is the oldest active prosecutor in the county and, among his peers, one of the most respected. Martin has sent four killers to Death Row and put 25 others in state prison, many for life.

This month, 892 fellow deputy district attorneys named Martin the county’s Prosecutor of the Year.

“He is our master prosecutor,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Heflin, who heads the Torrance office. “He is our big-case guy, for the trials that require the most subtle lawyering and the most detail. He is our star.”

Colleagues say that something more than his legal skill has helped Martin win 29 of the 30 murder cases he has tried. One fellow prosecutor says Martin has succeeded by drawing on his eclectic background--teacher, ocean lifeguard, Army Air Forces belly gunner, businessman, Sacramento bureaucrat and lawyer--”to paint pictures that jurors find irresistible.”

Opponents are not always as generous. Some defense attorneys say the scales of justice are tipped in Martin’s favor because he tries mostly black and Latino defendants in front of juries that are usually conservative and white.

Martin is “a very unique animal,” according to Deputy Public Defender Mike Clark. “Take him out of his habitat, and he is going to have a hard time surviving.”

Defense lawyers complain that Martin has occasionally stretched the home-court advantage, and the rules of law, by excluding minority jurors from his trials. The state Supreme Court validated that accusation in one of Martin’s cases, overturning a death penalty conviction he had won.

But Martin blames that ruling on liberal Supreme Court justices and says that he was libeled by the high court’s ruling. He notes that he convicted the defendant, Melvin Turner, a second time in 1987, with a jury that included five blacks.

Even some of his critics say they are ambivalent about their foe. “He is such a charming guy,” said Loren Mandel, a defense attorney who also charged that Martin’s exclusion of black jurors led to an unfair trial for his client, Jose Fuentes. “I think if I met him on the street I would shake hands and smile, but if I had to see him in a courtroom again, I might want to spit on him.”

But Martin will not be drawn into verbal jousting outside of court.

“A trial is war. It’s all-out war,” he says. “But I respect the professionalism of my opposition. I have no animosity at all.”

Such studied calm is not learned in law school, but in life.

Surviving enemy fire in a B-24 bomber over Germany during World II left him feeling that every day was a “bonus day,” Martin once told an interviewer. “I will never think that life is cheap.”

Between combat missions, the 19-year-old New York native read Adela Rogers St. Johns’ stories of trial lawyers in action, “Take the Witness.” He found the courtroom images glamorous, but it would be more than 30 years before he would learn if reality lived up to his expectations.

Martin did not prosecute his first case until he was 50, at an age when many deputy district attorneys have planned their retirements or left for more lucrative private practices.

Sixteen years later, he spends most of his days in a 12-by-20-foot office on the first floor of the Torrance courthouse that he shares with one other prosecutor.

Men such as Russ Enyeart, a mountainous homicide detective from the Inglewood Police Department, crowd into the tiny cubicle. Enyeart--who sports a belt buckle marked “187,” the penal code section for murder--explained recently that his work has only begun when he brings a case to Martin.

When the two recently began to prepare for a murder trial, Enyeart recalls telling Martin: “I know, Bob: You want my home phone number. And I’ll tell my wife not to expect me on weekends.”

Martin once sent an investigator to search pawnshops in Pittsburgh, Pa., believing that a murder suspect had sold his victim’s jewelry there. The investigator found a Pittsburgh jeweler, who testified in 1988 that Maurice Hastings had pawned a unique diamond pendant like one owned by murder victim Roberta Wydermyer.

Hastings was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Some detectives sometimes feel that their task is complete when a suspect has been arrested and charged with a crime, Martin said, but he insists that they track down arcane evidentiary morsels such as “trigger pull”--the amount of pressure needed to fire a gun.

“The really good investigator,” Martin tells rookie prosecutors, “will understand the significant difference between solving the case and proving the truth of the charge beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.”

In 1986, two sheriff’s investigators presented Martin with a plaque, “The No Stone Left Unturned Award,” after he discovered forged credit card receipts to blow apart an alibi and convict Rishardo Lawrence of the Crenshaw District of killing his former girlfriend.

Martin savors that win. His description of the victim might have been written by Raymond Chandler: “She was a compulsive gambler and a compulsive eater,” he says. “And she didn’t always tell the truth.”

Jurors enjoy Martin’s vivid language and his “common-sense approach,” says fellow prosecutor Michael Duarte. “He really sees through all the b.s.”

When a Palos Verdes Peninsula anesthesiologist went on trial in the mid-1970s for a hit-and-run accident that severely injured a 15-year-old girl, Martin produced two eyewitnesses who testified that the doctor could have seen the girl because it was light outside at the time of the crash.

The doctor countered with a series of experts--a luminescence engineer, a meteorologist and the assistant director of the Griffith Park Observatory--who testified that it had been dark.

Martin asked one of the experts: “Which is more reliable, scientific surveys or personal observation?”

The researcher responded: “Personal observation. Every time.”

Superior Court Judge Frank Baffa, who tried the case, recalls: “It was amazing how Martin sucked the guy right in. It was one of the telling points in the case.” The doctor was convicted.

In the 1980s, Martin has sent four murderers to Death Row.

* Melvin Turner robbed and shot a doctor and a schoolteacher inside a Torrance Municipal Airport hangar.

* Stanley (Tookie) Williams shotgunned three members of a Taiwanese family inside their Gardena home.

* Jose Fuentes shot a Brink’s guard in a Christmas-season robbery attempt at a department store in Del Amo Fashion Center.

* Henry Duncan stabbed and slashed a young mother who managed a cafeteria at Los Angeles International Airport.

Martin tried, and convicted, both Turner and Fuentes a second time in 1987, after their death sentences were overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Fuentes’ death sentence was one of 13 upset in 1983, when the court ruled that defendants could not be sentenced to death without proof that they had a specific intent to kill.

Fuentes’ appeals lawyer, Michael Hassen, is preparing to challenge his second conviction, as well, before the Supreme Court.

“We are going to argue that 14 black jurors were improperly challenged” by Martin, Hassen said. There is only one published legal opinion in which so many jurors from one group were dismissed, Hassen said.

“A defendant is entitled to a representative cross-section of the community,” Hassen said. “If you exclude any group, you no longer have a representative cross-section.”

The same accusation arose, and was validated by the Supreme Court, during Turner’s first murder trial in 1980.

The court found that Martin used peremptory challenges “in a racially discriminatory manner for the apparent purpose of obtaining an all-white jury to try this black defendant. . . .”

Three blacks were removed from the jury. Martin did not properly justify their exclusion, the court ruled in a unanimous opinion. Justice Stanley Mosk, writing for the court, said he had “little confidence in the good faith” of Martin’s justifications for removing the jurors.

Justices Edward A. Panelli and Malcolm M. Lucas concurred with the decision but said Superior Court Judge Thomas Fredericks was to blame because he did not tell the prosecutor that he had to justify his peremptory challenges.

Martin says he is pained by the accusation that he discriminated during jury selection. He noted that five blacks were on the jury in 1987, when Turner was retried and again sentenced to death.

“It is probably one of the vilest charges that can be made against anyone, that he is a racist,” Martin said. “When there is even the intimation of that in a court decision, you cringe. You know it’s in the books and you know it is unfair.”

His co-workers say that Martin thrives on the face-to-face competition of a trial, which he did not find in three previous careers.

Born in New York City, he graduated from Amherst College in 1949. He taught English and history at the Chadwick School on the Palos Verdes Peninsula for four years, a job he says he might never have left had he not needed more money to support his wife, Monica, and three children.

He spent nearly 10 years working in management for a series of high-technology firms and attended night classes at the USC School of Law. At 43, he graduated and took a job as a Los Angeles County deputy public defender.

But a third career--government bureaucrat--intervened before Martin returned to criminal law in earnest.

He was appointed chief counsel and director of the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, then director of the California Department of Social Welfare and, finally, special assistant to former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Joe Busch.

Martin asked to be released from his political assignment to return to the courtroom and, in 1973, he prosecuted his first case. A year later, he was assigned to the Torrance courthouse.

Martin says that he turned to the courtroom looking for “the drama and the people. The jigsaw-puzzle aspect to the logic. It all seemed to be the life of the mind and of discipline and discovery: a collection of things.”

Although trials sometimes drag, he says, “there are moments when everything comes together.”

He believes that social scientists and liberal courts have sometimes been too forgiving of criminals. “It’s not a highly sophisticated concept--the idea of doing something wrong,” he says. “It’s a deliberate choice and they know what they’re doing.”

It is such simple messages that Martin tries to send to juries.

Deputy Public Defender Clark says he can’t completely understand it, but that Martin’s authoritative style can be compelling.

“He has the ability to take a case and to completely neglect to talk about the defense case,” Clark says. “And he tells the jury, ‘He’s guilty because I’m telling you he is.’ And they return with a verdict, in his favor.”