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Home, Not Free: Parolee Brenda Martin has Struggled In Her Own Country
 Kevin Libin - National Post
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June 05, 2010
| | Brenda Martin is reunited with her mother, Marjorie Bletcher, left, in Trenton after being paroled in May, 2008. | |
Rebecca Roth is delighted to be in Boise, Idaho, which doesn't happen all the time when people visit Boise, Idaho. After four years in a Mexican prison, though, Boise, Idaho looks pretty great. It's one of the stops on a sort of freedom lap Ms. Roth is doing around the American Pacific Northwest, catching up with friends and relatives she hasn't seen since getting tangled up in the odious financial scams run by Edmonton's Alyn Richard Waage from his Mexican mansion.
A few weeks ago, Ms. Roth beat the charges. Clean. She turned away the opportunity to waive her appeals and transfer to an American prison. She stayed and fought.
"That's why I didn't take the prisoner transfer, so I that would have the ability to exonerate myself," she says. "I would have been a felon in Mexico and the U.S. and I was not agreeable to that."
She has no record now. Anywhere. A Mexican public defender who "worked his you-know-what off " convinced the same judge who sentenced her and Canadian Brenda Martin to nine and five years in prison, respectively, to quash Ms. Roth's sentence, and dismiss the original charges for lack of evidence.
"I had to spend two more years in jail, but now I am free, and justice has been done," Ms Roth says.
Brenda Martin was convicted along with Ms. Roth but made different choices. She is not free. She is on parole. She lives at a halfway house in the Toronto area after spending the last few months in a Kingston, Ont., prison. She has had some trouble staying out of trouble. She cannot visit Boise, Idaho.
Like Ms. Roth, Ms. Martin agreed to do some chores for Mr. Waage at his Puerto Vallarta mansion, the fruit of a massive US$60-million ponzi scheme. She was, like Ms. Roth, accused by Mexican authorities of helping Mr. Waage launder his dirty money. They both insist they were innocent, only Ms. Roth is officially so.
Last month, Mr. Waage was released from a North Carolina prison, roughly two years after his accomplices, his son Carey, Keith Nordick and Michael Webb were all released. Out of all these characters in this crime story, only Ms. Martin remains a ward of the state, on parole till February, 2011.
Ms. Martin was for a time in early 2008 the Most Important News Story in Canada. Federal MPs were swamped with phone calls and letters from constituents demanding they save Ms. Martin, having served two years of a five-year sentence, from a supposedly rigged Mexican justice system and bring her home. The prime minister got involved. And three Cabinet ministers. Former prime minister Paul Martin visited her. Ms. Martin, emotional, regularly called reporters to plead for Canadians to rescue her. The Puente Grande prison was a hellhole, she said. She was beaten. Her weight and her mental health were rapidly deteriorating. Still, she badmouthed the government; said the politicians were only interested in photo-ops with her - "a dog and pony show that showed up ... for their own personal political gain." Back home, Canadians tried to square her version of this miserable existence with reports of jailhouse beauty pageants (Ms. Martin won) and relatively decent prison surroundings.
The government got her out. She had to give up her appeals and, against her better judgment, effectively concede guilt in helping Mr. Waage launder a few thousand of the $60-million he had fleeced from investors. Canada spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it happen: 16 translators waded through Mexican legal documents; she was flown home on a government aircraft. There are 1,700 Canadians imprisoned around the world, many of them undoubtedly unjustly. None got the treatment that Ms. Martin did.
"I have to be grateful," she says. "I think they did an amazing thing and wow was it fast bringing me back."
But there have not been, in the two years since her return to Canada, many moments of delight
for Ms. Martin. She served eight days in Kingston's campus-style Grand Valley Institution for Women upon her return, which she complained made her "ready to go back to Mexico." Supporters, dozens of whom who had thronged her arrival at the airport in tears, felt stung, or lost interest. Ms. Martin felt alone, she says.
Released on parole to her hometown of Trenton, Ont., she was depressed. She was bored.
"Some major, major issues had happened in my life and to top it off I'm in this dead-end town with no possibility of jobs because it's a very impoverished place. It's pretty bad when the downtown stores are Giant Tiger, Bibles for Missions, Goodwill and Salvation Army."
There were problems. The time some locals at the downtown Chinese buffet recognized her and asked her to join them. They insisted on picking up her tab, she says. Then didn't. The police came banging at her door later that night accusing her of theft. That's her version. She had reportedly "consumed a large amount of alcohol on that day," according to parole documents.
Then in September there was what Ms. Martin calls "a small bout of self-harm." Two good friends in Mexico had just died; a stranger on the street yelled at her for wasting taxpayers' money. She engaged, according to parole documents, in "excessive drinking" and did something to hurt herself (Ms. Martin won't go into details but agreed it was similar to the time she cut herself with a razor in Mexico).
She was admitted to a psychiatric ward, then a group home, and was ordered by the parole board to stay away from alcohol and drinking establishments. She was required to get substance abuse counselling. Eventually she was allowed to get her own apartment.
Then, in January, sad because no one remembered her birthday, Ms. Martin went to a drinking establishment. And she drank. She "reportedly blacked out," says the parole board account. She was "unco-operative" with police. She later told the parole board that someone at the bar must have drugged her. The parole board thinks she has a drinking problem. Ms. Martin says she is not an alcoholic.
"I didn't use my wise mind on my birthday. I was a little depressed. And I was caught drinking. But it was made out a lot bigger than it actually was," Ms. Martin says.
She was returned to prison for breaching parole. She was released May 17. She wants to get her own place in Toronto, she says, and return to catering. She wants to become anonymous. Media attention, once her saviour, is a major stress.
"In essence Brenda Martin has truly been exonerated by Mexico," says Deb Tieleman, a former childhood friend of Ms. Martin's who was instrumental in championing her case. "Brenda in her own mind is an innocent woman, which she truly is ... so should she really be on parole? Should she really be scrutinized the way she's being scrutinized? It's really unfair."
When news broke in March that Ms. Roth convinced the Mexican court that prosecutors had relied on faulty evidence and that there was insufficient evidence for a retrial, Ms. Martin immediately thought of her own case.
"I hope this is going to maybe set the record straight that maybe an average Canadian could go 'Wow. She was innocent. And boy oh boy, no wonder she's had a hard time dealing with it,'" she says. "Vindication. It's OK right now because I know it myself but I would like people to see it."
But Ms. Martin will never get the official exoneration Ms. Roth did. "She chose to return to Canada before all her legal options were exhausted and unfortunately I think that results in her being a felon in two countries now," Ms. Roth says.
Today Ms. Roth is free and happy. Ms. Martin cannot say the same.
klibin(at)nationalpost.com |
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