Appeals court nominee Martin is famously independent

She's not afraid to take a stand, colleagues agree

By the time Adan Gil Miranda appeared before her for sentencing, U.S. District Judge Beverly Martin had already been reversed twice by the appeals court for her rulings in the case.

First, Martin threw out a jury’s guilty verdict against the illegal Mexican immigrant. She found the evidence too thin to support allegations Miranda guarded a drug stash house in Smyrna.

She also granted Miranda a new trial on grounds the prosecutor made improper arguments to the jury. But both times, the appeals court reversed, sending the case back to her.

As Miranda finally faced sentencing more than two years after a jury first found him guilty, Martin said she had no choice but to give him the mandatory minimum — 15 years in prison.

Miranda told her, “Whatever your sentence, I will keep on thinking that you are the best judge in all the United States.”

“You may be a minority on that, Mr. Miranda,” she replied.

While Martin could not beat the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, two years later she may be about to join it. She is President Barack Obama’s choice to take an open seat on the court.

Lawyers who practice before Martin say her unflagging independence and fierce determination to do what she thinks is right were reflected in her rulings in the case against Miranda.

“She has a heart and she cares about people,” Atlanta lawyer Michael Trost said. “She’s not afraid to take a stand. She’ll follow her instincts, make the difficult calls and let the chips fall where they may.”

Martin, 54, who declined comment, is backed by Georgia’s two GOP senators, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson, and the Democratic chairman and ranking Republican of the Judiciary Committee. The Senate has scheduled a vote on her nomination for Jan. 20.

According to her close friends, Martin also has a quality Obama says he wants in his judicial nominees: empathy.

At a hearing last year, she was moved by a U.S. soldier’s record of heroism on the battlefield when sentencing him for his role in a plot to rob drug dealers. Sentencing guidelines called for a term of up to 63 months and the soldier’s lawyer asked for 42 months. But Martin gave him three years.

During trials, she will ride lawyers hard, demanding they waste no time out of concern for jurors who have been pulled away from their jobs and families.

“She cares deeply about people,” said Susan Cole, a U.S. magistrate who has known Martin since she was a young lawyer in Macon. “She has a huge capacity for empathy.”

Martin also has a strong backbone, both literally and figuratively. Years ago, she was diagnosed with a congenital back ailment. A steel rod was inserted into her spine.

As a judge, Martin will not hesitate to take a stand if it means rejecting a defendant’s pleas for leniency or refusing to accept the government’s position.

“She doesn’t think she’s the person in the room who knows more than anybody else,” Atlanta lawyer Ken Canfield said. “But she’s her own person and is not intimidated.”

Born and raised in Macon, Beverly Baldwin Martin is a fourth-generation attorney.

In 1890, her great-grandfather founded the Macon firm now known as Martin Snow. Martin’s grandfather joined the firm after returning from World War I, and her father, T. Baldwin Martin Jr., who ran a thriving commercial law practice, joined in 1948.

After Beverly Martin graduated from the University of Georgia law school in 1981, she joined the firm too. “It was a joy,” her father recalled recently. “She threw herself right into it.”

After three years, Martin moved to Atlanta to work as a lawyer for the state attorney general’s office. She stayed there a decade, defending state agencies when they got sued. In 1994, she returned to Macon as an assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting drug cases. Four years later, President Bill Clinton named her U.S. attorney in Macon.

While heading the U.S. attorney’s office, Martin aggressively employed Weed & Seed, a federally funded program that weeds out drug activity in a community and then “seeds” it with social and economic programs.

John Vazquez, then Macon’s chief of police, said Martin actively pushed the program and worked arm in arm with local law enforcement. “She was very compassionate about it,” he said. “It was easy to work with her because her character and integrity are beyond reproach.”

In 2000, President Clinton tapped Martin for the U.S. District Court in Atlanta.

As a federal judge she has presided over a number of noteworthy cases. In 2002, she allowed a discrimination lawsuit filed by white female librarians against the Atlanta-Fulton County Library board to go to trial. The plaintiffs won a $23.4 million verdict, which Martin reduced to $16.8 million. In 2006, she wrote a 251-page ruling rejecting the fiercely litigated appeal of Wayne Williams, the suspected Atlanta serial killer convicted of killing two men in 1981.

Last year, she declared unconstitutional a 30-year mandatory sentence for a Texas man who traveled to Atlanta to have sex with whom he thought was a 10-year-old girl. Instead, the man was caught in an FBI sting. Martin sentenced him to 19 years and seven months in prison.

There was also the case involving Miranda, who was arrested in 2002 when agents raided a Galleria apartment used to stash drugs. At trial, one witness said he had seen Miranda inside the apartment watching television.

When agents later burst inside, Miranda once again was seen on the living room couch watching TV. An agent said Miranda then fled to a back room where drugs and guns were stored. Miranda did not grab either of them; he briefly held the door shut and then went into a bathroom before surrendering.

After a jury convicted Miranda of drug conspiracy and illegal gun possession, Martin overturned the verdict. She said there was no evidence he ever touched the drugs and there was no testimony he was involved in the operation. His mere presence did not make him guilty, she found.

The 11th Circuit disagreed, saying the evidence proved Miranda worked as a guard of the drug stash house. His knowledge of drug-dealing at the apartment and his attempt to keep officers from entering the room with drugs and guns was enough for “a rational jury” to find Miranda “knowingly and voluntarily joined the [drug] conspiracy.”

Jim Jenkins, one of Miranda’s previous lawyers, said Miranda has always maintained his innocence and refused to consider a deal that would have allowed him to serve little prison time.

“His answer was always, ‘No, never,’ ” Jenkins said. “Even after I argued with him about the practicalities of it, he has always maintained he didn’t do anything wrong and was not going to admit to doing something he didn’t do.”

Miranda continues to fight his conviction. At a Dec. 8 hearing, his former roommate, Jose Jaimes Cambray, who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking offenses, testified Miranda was not involved in the drug ring.