Persistence Pays Off for Battered Woman : Abuse: Choked and beaten, victim fights through legal process. Her assailant receives a stiff sentence.

In jail, after he’d had some time to reflect on the mess he was in, Jose Maria Martinez wrote the mother of his son a letter.

She had told the cops that Martinez had beaten the hell out of her--dragged her off the bed, pinned her to the floor, choked her until she nearly lost consciousness and then whacked her on both sides of the head to revive her. In all, she said, he slapped and punched her about 30 times in 45 minutes. The police had hauled him off to jail--after chasing him for half a mile.

In the letter, he pleaded with her not to press charges. He urged her to explain it all away by saying he’d been drinking. He told her to lie for him. “All this is going to be drop if you do what I say,” he wrote of the charges he was facing. “You the only person who can help me and get me off.”

For once, Claudia Clark was not moved. Finally, the painful truth had hit her: “You can’t let them keep beating on you and beating on you. Because, one day, they’re going to end up killing you.”

Clark resolved to really tough it out. She decided to press charges against the father of her 4-year-old son. “This time,” she said in an interview, “he was going down. Not me.”

That anger and determination launched a process that vividly underscores the formidable obstacles--some practical, others emotional--that a battered woman encounters in going to court. The process took many weeks. But it produced a result that illustrates how the much-maligned court system can still exact justice--if a woman is willing to believe in it and in herself.

The same day she was beaten, a couple of days before last Christmas, Clark had to endure the humiliation of submitting to police photographs that documented the angry red welts on her neck. That night, she suffered the indignities of a medical examination.

Over the next few weeks, she met and had to confide in a prosecutor. Her phone had been turned off, so she had to attend every court hearing--if only so she would know when the next hearing was. That meant baby-sitters for the boy and long bus rides across the San Fernando Valley from her North Hollywood apartment. The baby-sitters and the bus rides cost money, which she didn’t have much of, living on welfare and food stamps.

She had to be patient; the Jan. 17 earthquake scrambled schedules at the Van Nuys courthouse. Finally, when the case did go to trial, she had to testify against Martinez, to publicly confess and confront the shame of being a victim and the fear of retribution. And, of course, she had to trust that 12 strangers would believe her version of the story, not his.

At the trial Martinez maintained his innocence, but a Municipal Court jury convicted him of four counts, including spousal abuse. And, a few days ago, Judge Lloyd Nash sentenced Martinez to four years and 11 months behind bars, believed by the city attorney’s office to be the longest sentence ever handed down in Los Angeles in a misdemeanor domestic violence case.

Deputy City Atty. Jeffrey M. Harkavy, who prosecuted the case, said the average sentence for such a crime is considerably shorter. A first offense typically might result in a sentence as light as community service to as tough as six months in jail, Harkavy said. A second offense might bring up to a year in jail, he said.

“More women should come forward and know that the system treats these cases seriously,” Nash, who has been on the bench about five years, said in an interview in his chambers.

He cautioned, “Not all cases require this type of sentence. But some cases cry out for the maximum sentence. And this case is one of them.”

Martinez could not be reached for comment. His defense attorney, Van Nuys lawyer Christopher P. Nance, declined a request for an interview.

Martinez, now 25, had been convicted of beating Clark once before, in 1991. For that, he received 30 days in jail, six months of counseling and two years probation. He also had pulled two stretches in state prison, both for drug-related crimes.

He had been on parole for only a few weeks when he beat Clark, now 26, for the last time. The beating took place on Dec. 23, 1993.

“This guy,” Harkavy said, “is bad to the core.”

When she first met Martinez, Clark said, he seemed so different. He was a talented artist. He was charming. And he obviously had the hots for her. In the summer of 1989, they moved in together, but never married.

Soon she was pregnant. And then things got ugly.

When she was three months pregnant, she said, he asked if another woman could move in with them. She declined. He insisted. No way, she said. He got mad. With steel-pointed shoes, he kicked her in the stomach. She said he also punched her and gave her a bloody lip.

Later, he apologized.

When the baby, who was born without any apparent damage from the kick, was 3 months old, the car refused to start. Martinez clenched the wheel. “What’s wrong?” Clark said. He erupted, she said, punching her in the right eye.

“There was a flash of light,” she said. “I went blind for a month.”

Later, he apologized.

Another time, she said, she was holding the baby over her shoulder when he hit her. The force sent the baby’s head smacking into the wall.

He apologized.

Over time, Clark said, he beat her regularly. “He hit me, like, every week, sometimes twice a week,” she said.

Afterward, he would always apologize. “He wrote the book on apologies,” she said. Inevitably, she said, she would take him back--hoping that things would change between them and, more than that, that he would provide for his son.

But, she said, “He never worked, nothing.” Instead, he did time behind bars. She survived on food stamps and welfare checks.

In November, Martinez was released from prison. Clark allowed him to see their son and, sometimes, to sleep on the couch. She was wary of having him around yet hopeful: “He is the father of the baby. Who’s gonna take care of the son if it’s not the father?”

Clark was insistent that there be no sex. She was so adamant that she slept in her clothes. “That’s what got him mad,” she said. “I didn’t want to be with him.”

Early on the morning of Dec. 23, a knocking sound echoed through the apartment. Clark thought it was the downstairs neighbors getting ready for work. Martinez said it was her boyfriend at the door, a man named Juan. She said that was silly.

There was no one and no Juan in her life, she told him. He didn’t believe it. Enraged, he went to the kitchen, grabbed a butter knife and plunged it into the pillow just a couple of inches from her head, according to her testimony at the trial.

Then, she testified, he dragged her out of bed, got on top of her with his knees pinning her elbows and put his hands to her throat. She felt she was passing out. He hit her head to revive her.

It went on like this, she said, for more than half an hour--until their child, who was also in the room, finally woke up. “Look what you do,” she said she told Martinez. “You do this in front of your son.”

That got him off of her, she said, and she dashed for the window, sliding the glass pane open with one hand and punching the screen out with the other. She wriggled out to a balcony and then down stairs, to a pay phone, where she called 911.

Moments later, she said, when she saw Martinez leave the house, she went back inside. She received a phone call from Martinez, who said, “I’m going to come back and finish you off,” Harkavy said.

Police arrived, and, after a half-mile chase on foot, arrested Martinez.

Later that morning, the thought dawned on her: “If the father is going to be like this, better the son doesn’t have a father. My son deserves better than this.”

So, she realized, did she. “A man hitting a woman--there ain’t no excuse, really.”

It was that notion that fueled her determination to pursue the court case. It also sustained her through the emotional turmoil of what was to come.

At the police station, as the flashbulbs snapped, “it was humiliating,” Clark said. “I felt so stupid. I had let him do that, and here were these officers so sorry for me.”

At the hospital, she had to explain what happened all over again: “I had to walk around with these marks on my neck.”

A couple of weeks later, Martinez sent her a letter from jail. In the letter, which later became part of the court record, he wrote, “I’m going crazy thinking about the problems I have right now.”

Drop the charges or get them dropped, he wrote. “I pray for that,” the letter said.

He closed it by writing, “I’m sorry for all I making you go through.”

She was untouched. “I read it and said, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

Over the next few weeks, it was back and forth to court. Each visit meant hiring one of the neighbor women to baby-sit, at $1 per hour. Each way on the bus was $1.10. On a welfare check of $490 per month, the dollars and dimes started to add up.

Clark had to go visit the courthouse more times than she had expected, often just to learn that the case had been postponed. And because of the quake, there were a lot of postponements.

The sensible thing, of course, would have been to call the court. But her phone had been disconnected because, she said, Martinez had made calls and left her with a bill she couldn’t afford.

When the trial came, Clark said, the city attorney’s office arranged for her to take a cab to the courthouse. When she took the stand, she was numb. “I didn’t have no feelings for the guy anymore,” she said. “I just didn’t feel nothing.”

Martinez followed her to the stand. He denied assaulting her. He did, however, concede that he tried to run away from the officers. “He did that, he said, because she liked to make stories up about him and get him in trouble,” Harkavy said.

The prosecutor added, “In my opinion, Mr. Martinez was lying through his teeth when he testified.”

After a four-day trial, the jury came back in a bit over two hours with guilty verdicts on all four misdemeanor counts: spousal abuse, false imprisonment, making threats to kill and resisting arrest.

Prosecutors did not pursue felony charges. In large part, Harkavy said, that was because Clark forgot at first to tell officers about the stab into the pillow with the knife, which might have been charged as a felony assault.

Misdemeanors carry a maximum of one year in jail. On May 26, Nash sentenced Martinez to a year on each of the four counts, then tacked on an extra 11 months for a probation violation linked to the 1991 assault on Clark.

She welcomed the lengthy term, saying there is security in having him behind bars--though if he racks up credits for good behavior, he’s unlikely to do all four years, 11 months.

The longer, the better, she said. But she stressed: “I wasn’t out to get him. He was out to get me.”