South Bay judge denies sentencing recall for serial rapist

SAN JOSE — A Santa Clara County judge is upholding the century-plus prison terms of a serial rapist and jail escapee from the 1970s and 1980s after the man got an unusual chance for resentencing through an anomalous series of state actions and court rulings.

Eric Patrick Martin, 68, has been in California prison custody steadily since 1987, following other prison stints in the previous decade; he twice escaped custody and committed more sexual assaults while he was a fugitive. He is currently serving prison sentences totaling 136 years.

“Nothing exists in the record before this court that demonstrably show that the circumstances surrounding the petitioner have changed since his original sentencing,” Superior Court Judge Benjamin Williams wrote in a written decision published Thursday. “Therefore, this court finds that the petitioner continues to pose an unreasonable risk to safety.”

In a statement, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office lauded the ruling.

“We are grateful that the court heard our arguments, considered both sides, and came to a well reasoned decision to deny recall to Mr. Martin,” the statement reads.

At a March 12 hearing in front of Williams, Deputy District Attorney Brian King argued that Martin should not have gotten consideration for a sentencing recall given that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2020 rescinded a letter it issued in 2019 backing sentencing relief for Martin.

King added that Martin’s prolific criminal history, and his lack of contrition at a 2016 risk-assessment hearing for elderly parole, meant that Martin “still is an unreasonable risk to public safety.”

David Tarica, the deputy public defender representing Martin, pointed to his client improving himself and remaining violence-free since he was last admitted into prison. The attorney said that the court had to evaluate the threat of the man in his late 60s as opposed to when he was committing the crimes for which he was convicted.

In his ruling, Williams recognized Martin’s personal progress, but also gave a nod to the prosecution’s contention that Martin has not engaged in any formal sex-offender programming while in prison. Tarica had argued that Martin was doing as much work on that front as he could, and pointed to a scarcity of programming availability in the prison system.

“This court finds credible (Martin’s) statements suggesting self-reflection and growing self-awareness to his past criminality,” Williams wrote.

But the judge pointed to the severity of Martin’s crimes in his decision.

Martin served prison time for sexual assaults he committed in the 1970s and early 1980s in Alameda, San Francisco, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Shortly after he was paroled in 1983, he was arrested and later convicted of a string of attacks in San Jose, including a home break-in where he forced a woman to orally copulate him with the victim’s young daughter nearby.

He was given a 79-year sentence for the San Jose crimes; in 1986 he was transferred from prison to jail custody at Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County to face robbery, sexual assault and false imprisonment charges in connection with a 1984 Newark attack.

In October 1986, Martin reportedly staged a fight at Santa Rita so that he could feign injury enough to be taken off the grounds for medical care. During that transport, he knocked out a deputy and fled to Southern California, where he surfaced the following month in San Bernardino County after stealing a car by pulling a gun on a used-car salesman during a test drive.

Martin was arrested in Los Angeles after police tracked the stolen car, but he escaped custody again after first giving authorities a fake name using a driver’s license he stole or found, which led him to be put in minimum-security jail housing. Like in Santa Rita, he faked illness to prompt another hospital trip, then overpowered a deputy transporting him and took their gun away.

When Martin was arrested a week later, in December 1986, authorities determined that while he was on the lam, he had sexually assaulted a woman at gunpoint.

In 2019, then-CDCR Secretary Ralph Diaz recommended Martin’s sentence be recalled: A change in state law had given sentencing judges the discretion to dismiss previously mandatory 5-year prison enhancements for prior convictions, which were part of Martin’s Santa Clara County sentence.

Prosecutors objected to the secretary’s recommendation, noting that it only addressed Martin’s robbery convictions and not the accompanying sexual assault convictions or other past crimes. The Santa Clara County Superior Court denied the recall on the grounds that the new law did not apply retroactively to Martin.

Martin appealed; while appeal was underway, the subsequent CDCR secretary, Kathleen Allison, rescinded the department’s recall recommendation for Martin. The appellate court overturned the lower court’s denial on retroactivity grounds and ordered a new hearing to evaluate Martin’s fitness for resentencing on its merits.

That led to the hearing before Judge Williams, who noted prison officials’ about-face in his written ruling.

“The withdrawal of support of his petition by CDCR weighs heavily against the petitioner,” the ruling reads.

Martin is being held at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville. His next parole evaluation is set for September 2031, when he would be in his mid-70s.