No lam for the ‘Ham
Recently convicted Sara Batterham will soon be spending more time in Mono County Superior Court, as she is scheduled to appear before a judge in two more separate trials.
Batterham was convicted on Nov. 16, 2011 on three of five charges against her, including embezzlement, one of two forgery counts, and preparing and submitting false documents for trial. Batterham is to stand retrial on of one of the original counts from last year, Count 5 Intimidating a Witness, on which the jury was deadlocked.
On Tuesday, a preliminary hearing was held in Bridgeport before Judge Stan Eller to determine if she would stand trial on three new charges: preparing false documents to be produced as genuine for fraudulent or deceitful purposes, doctoring court minutes and (in an intellectual version of the old “file in the cake” trick) trying to escape from custody by purporting she had been released on her own recognizance.
Batterham recently turned down a deal that would have had her plead guilty to the original Count 5, but in exchange she would serve only concurrent time; no additional sentence time would be added. If she’s convicted on the Count 5 retrial, she could get an additional 2 years, 8 months added to her sentence.
Also known by her maiden name of Wisemiller, Sara was arrested on Aug. 30, 2007, along with her husband, Colin Batterham. At the time, the Batterhams were employed by Surat Singh, owner-operator of the Mammoth Econo Lodge, Sara (then 30) as a manager, and Colin in hotel maintenance. After an investigation, in August 2008, the Batterhams were charged with creating a fictitious merchant account under Singh’s name, and routed almost $11,000 in transactions to another account registered to the couple.
During the trial this past November where she was found guilty, Batterham represented herself against Mono County Deputy District Attorney Jeremy Ibrahim, but not without considerable difficulty. In January Judge John T. Ball, who presided over that trial and will sit on the bench for the Count 5 retrial, revoked the defendant’s pro per status, which means she is no longer allowed to represent herself. Therese Hankel was appointed as her her attorney for all purposes.
In court prior to counsel being appointed to represent her, Batterham said she had dreamt that Judge Ball had been beating her to death with his gavel and smothering her with his robes.
On Tuesday, the three new counts were laid out. The first count involved a document alleging Oklahoma-based attorney Christian Zeaman, an old family friend, had at one time represented Batterham between August and September 2008, after she was accused of stealing from Singh (Zeaman previously testified he’d only had a representation agreement with Colin).
Zeaman said the document Batterham had produced was a forgery.
In last year’s trial, Ibrahim asserted that Sara stole Zeaman’s identity when sending fake subpoenas for fake evidence and later tried to pass those off as genuine during the trial. Ibrahim also outlined how Batterham was involved with sending threatening emails to Zeaman, in what he suggested was a blatant attempt to prevent him from testifying against her.
In this case, Ibrahim pointed to several discrepancies, such as content, handwriting, signatures, headers and other differences, between a document showing Colin’s agreement and one supposedly drafted to include Sara. Hankel cross-examined investigator Wade McCammond, asking if he recalled a September 2008 phone conversation with Zeaman, in which he reportedly invoked attorney-client privilege vis a vis Sara. McCammond said he doesn’t remember the exact conversation, though he couldn’t say it didn’t happen. Hankel then asked if McCammond ever inquired as to whether another contract existed that went to representing Sara. He replied no. She also referenced McCammond’s report, which she said indicated there was a verbal agreement with regard to “conflicts [Zeaman] might have while representing Colin.” She also attacked a claim supposedly made by Zeaman that Sara was being represented at the time by a lawyer named “Mr. Otto,” and a subsequent lack of follow up to establish Otto’s existence or whether he’d had any contact with Sara.
The next two counts are related. Ibrahim insisted that Sara altered the court minutes from a Dec. 28 proceeding, and had Colin fax one of the three pages to the jail, with a change that included several lines of redacted text and a check in the box showing she’d been released “OR,” i.e. on her own recognizance. Ibrahim maintained this was a clear attempt to get her out of jail illicitly.
The fax, received at the Bridgeport jail on Dec. 30, got the attention of the jailers, at first due to the date it was received (two days after the proceeding; standard procedure is the same day) and later due to the “877” area code on the fax header.
The Mono County Superior Courthouse in Mammoth has a standard fax line using a “760” area code. A check against a copy of the same minutes in Sara’s custody jacket showed the original version had no such check in the “OR” box. A call to Judge Mark Magit, whose initials were on the Dec. 30 fax, revealed that he hadn’t been in court that day, and never authorized sending the minutes, much less issued an “OR” order.
Hankel said there was no evidence that her client forged anything. The document, Hankel insisted, was part of a stack of documents Sara had previously given to Colin, and needed sent back for use in preparing a writ of habeas corpus.
Judge Eller agreed that some of the evidence connecting the documents back to Sara was on the thin side, as Hankel inferred. But, he did find enough circumstantial evidence to indicate it was possible she altered documents for her own benefit, and that a trial on all three counts was appropriate.
Her husband, Colin took a deal offered to him in December, and entered a guilty plea to a misdemeanor. He will serve 2 years of probation, which will terminate upon full joint restitution to Singh.
Meanwhile, Sara’s Count 5 proceedings have been continued to March, and her arraignment on the new charges is set for Feb. 21. Judge Eller set bail at $100,000.
