Former Lieutenant at Brooklyn Federal Jail Convicted of Raping Female Inmate

NEW YORK — A former lieutenant at Brooklyn’s federal jail was convicted Friday of repeatedly raping a female inmate entrusted to his care. The guilty verdict against the defendant, Carlos Richard Martinez, brought to an end a two-week trial that included emotional testimony from the victim and shed light on the problem of sexual assault at the jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Martinez, 48, was charged in May with raping the inmate — a young Dominican woman who was serving a drug-trafficking sentence — at least four times between December 2015 and April 2016. The jury, in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, found him guilty not only of sexual abuse, but also of the sexual abuse of a ward and of violating the civil rights of his victim, who testified about the assaults using the pseudonym Maria. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Martinez was indicted with another lieutenant at the jail, Eugenio Perez, who is awaiting trial, and a rank-and-file corrections officer, Armando Moronta, who pleaded guilty in November to sexually abusing three female inmates.

Known as the MDC, the jail holds about 1,800 inmates; about 3 percent of them are women. In 2016, a federal judge expressed reluctance about sending women there because, as she said at the time, its conditions made it sound like it was in “some Third World country.”

When the trial began on Jan. 9, a federal prosecutor, Nadia Shihata, told the jury, “This is a case about power and abuse.” Shihata went on to say that Martinez raped Maria while she was assigned to clean an office in the jail and ensured that no one walked in on them by watching feeds from security cameras during the attacks.

On the witness stand, Maria testified through an interpreter about how the abuse by Martinez started slowly in her first few months at the jail with explicit comments about her sexual preferences. It turned violent, she recounted, on a Sunday morning in 2015 when the two were alone in the office and Martinez pushed her facedown on a desk and forced himself on her.

“I was raped,” Maria said. When Shihata asked who raped her, Maria paused for almost 30 seconds, unable to look at Martinez sitting across the room from her. With tears in her eyes, she eventually identified him through a photograph.

In a delicate gambit, Martinez’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, told the jurors that they needed to respect both the victim and the defendant. But he also said some women on the jail’s cleaning team were sexually involved with the guards, hinting that Maria’s encounters with Martinez may have been consensual.

The prosecutors rebutted that argument by presenting Maria as a vulnerable target — a young woman who spoke no English and whose family never came to visit her. One of Maria’s fellow inmates testified that after one of the rapes, she returned to their dormitory bleeding, crying and terrified.

The prosecutors also said Martinez bought Maria a Plan B contraceptive pill after one of the attacks. As evidence, they introduced a receipt showing that he purchased the pill at a Rite Aid near the jail and, using his rewards card, got a $5 discount.