It's 'Just Wrong,' Says the Plaintiff
Oliverio Martinez hadn't yet heard the news about his case, but that was no surprise.
He lives a world away from the marble chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. He doesn't have a phone, or even a bathroom. With his father, Oliverio Sr., he resides in a dark, cramped trailer about the size of a suburban walk-in closet, a dilapidated tin box outside Camarillo beside the strawberry fields he had worked for the better part of 20 years.
Martinez, 35, is blind and paralyzed. His prospects shrank dramatically one November night in 1997 when he was shot five times by Oxnard police.
The shooting reverberated up to the nation's highest court. Martinez sued, contending that an officer should have listened to his agonized protests and stopped questioning him as he lay bleeding in the ambulance and the emergency room.
On Tuesday, Martinez learned from a reporter what the Supreme Court had decided: Police may not have violated his constitutional rights when they questioned him without reading him the Miranda warning.
"That's just wrong," Martinez, a Guadalajara native, said in Spanish. "They were the cause of it all."
The high court did not close the door on the possibility of Martinez one day collecting damages. Five justices agreed he may still sue police for use of excessive force and "outrageous conduct" in the hospital interrogation.
Martinez can use whatever settlement he might get.
"I've got nowhere to go," he said. "All I want is a little room."
He and his father pay rent of just $50 a month, he said. But, Martinez said, the property's owner wants him out, weighing the risk of letting a blind man who uses a wheelchair live amid rumbling produce trucks and field workers' cars.
An open plastic water barrel sits on the dirt outside the Aristocrat-brand trailer. To bathe, Martinez dips into the barrel and heats pots of water on an electric grill inside. He draws drinking water from a battered orange cooler. Field bathrooms are an easy walk for his father, but not for Martinez, who uses a bucket that his father then empties.
In pain much of the time, Martinez sometimes can get around by using a walker. One of his eyes is missing and, beneath his sunglasses, he wears a bandage over the socket.
Martinez has slipped through the government safety net of welfare payments and food stamps. He can't obtain such benefits, he said, because he lost the paperwork proving that he is a legal U.S. resident.
