Breaking the Pattern of Domestic Violence : Courts: Abuse victim Claudia Clark’s pursuit of the legal process pays off as the companion who beat her receives the maximum 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 police that Martinez had severely beaten 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 on foot for half a mile.

In the letter, which later became part of the court record, he pleaded with her not to press charges. He told her to lie for him. “All this is going to be (dropped) if you do what I say,” he wrote of the charges he was facing.

For once, Claudia Clark was not moved. Finally, she said, 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 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 underscores the obstacles--some practical, others emotional--that a battered woman can encounter in going to court. The process took 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.

After a four-day trial, at which Martinez maintained his innocence, a Van Nuys Municipal Court jury convicted him on four counts, including spousal abuse. A few days ago, Judge Lloyd Nash sentenced Martinez to 4 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.

“Not all cases require this type of sentence,” said Nash, who has been on the bench about five years. “But some cases cry out for the maximum sentence. And this case is one of them.”

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 or as tough as six months in jail, Harkavy said. A second offense might bring up to a year in jail, he said.

Martinez could not be reached for comment. His defense attorney, Christopher P. Nance of Van Nuys, declined to be interviewed.

Pressing charges, Clark said, took persistence.

The day of the beating, Dec. 23, Clark had to submit to police photographs that documented the angry red welts on her neck. That night, she suffered the indignities of being examined at a hospital.

Over the next few weeks, she had to confide in a prosecutor. Her phone service 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 bus rides from her North Hollywood apartment. That 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 confront being a victim and the fear of retribution.

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

He had been on parole for only a few weeks when he beat Clark, now 26, most recently. When she first met Martinez, Clark said, he seemed so different. He was a talented artist. He was charming. In the summer of 1989, they moved in together but never got married.

Soon she was pregnant. 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 got mad. He kicked her in the stomach with steel-pointed shoes, she said, and punched her, cutting her lip.

Later, he apologized.

When the baby was 3 months old, the car wouldn’t start. Martinez clenched the wheel. “What’s wrong?” Clark said. He erupted, she said, punching her in the eye.

Later, he apologized.

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

He apologized.

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.” She survived on food stamps and welfare checks.

In November, 1993, Martinez was released from prison. Clark allowed him to see their son and, sometimes, to sleep on the couch.

Early on the morning of Dec. 23, a knocking sound echoed through the apartment. Clark thought it was the 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 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 inches from her head, according to her trial testimony.

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

Later, Martinez left the house, and then called Clark and told her, “I’m going to come back and finish you off,” Harkavy said.

Police arrived and, after a 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.

That notion fueled her determination to pursue the court case.

When the trial came, Clark said, she realized she “didn’t have no feelings for the guy anymore.”

Martinez followed her to the stand. He denied assaulting her. He did, however, concede that he tried to run away from the officers.

The jury came back in two hours with guilty verdicts on all four misdemeanor counts: spousal abuse, false imprisonment, making threats to kill and resisting arrest.

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 11 months for a probation violation linked to the 1991 assault on Clark.