Victim asks for leniency for his wife



By RUTH HEIDE

ALAMOSA — At the urging of the victim, Senior Judge Robert Ogburn on Monday sentenced Marietta Madril, 51, of Antonito, to three years probation on a felony attempted second-degree assault charge resulting from Madril’s placing rat poison in her husband’s medication.

Victim Robert Madril, 57, who is retired from the public defender’s office, asked Judge Ogburn not to impose any more incarceration on his wife and said he believed she had already suffered enough. “She’s a convicted felon. She lost her reputation. She lost family members. She lost friends. She’s paid her dues. Believe me, she’s paid her dues,” he said. “For me, I just want probation for her.”

He also told the judge that his relationship with his wife was repaired and was even better than it had been before the incident. The two have been married nearly 35 years.

Robert Madril added that his wife is helping their daughter care for her child at their home. In addition, he said his wife recently acquired a new job.

Madril’s attorney Michael Emmons also recommended no further incarceration. He added he has rarely had a client in district court with such a clean record as Madril. Ogburn pointed out Madril had not even had a prior traffic ticket.

Emmons said Marietta Madril stated that she only wanted to make her husband sick, not kill him. Emmons added if his client really wanted her husband dead, she had opportunities to do that while they were hunting. He said he felt confident his client would not commit a similar crime in the future.

“The victim thinks she has suffered enough, and so do I,” Ogburn said when he sentenced Marietta Madril to supervised probation plus court costs, abstention from alcohol and controlled substances and no firearms or weapons in the home except if Robert Madril wishes to have some of his weapons under lock and key. “I don’t want to penalize Mr. Madril,” Ogburn said. Robert Madril told the judge he had 30-35 firearms locked up at his son’s house.

Ogburn also recommended domestic relations counseling for the Madrils as a couple and said although Marietta Madril could continue the mental health counseling that she has already begun voluntarily, he would not order her to.

“We have a domestic relations case here,” Ogburn said.

Ogburn said most spouses probably think about murdering each other during the course of their marriage but they are able to stifle the urge.

When Marietta Madril was initially questioned in this case, she said she was sick of her retired husband being around all the time.

The judge said women dread their husbands’ retirement if the men do not have outside activities to keep them out of the house, “and God forbid if a retired husband starts trying to micromanage a woman’s household. It’s an invitation for disaster. I don’t know if that’s part of the mix in this case.”

Ogburn said a retired man can only go hunting, fishing and golfing so often, and those activities take money he no longer has because retirement reduced his income.

Ogburn said he himself had “flunked” retirement and was glad to be working to some degree. Robert Madril told the judge he had also returned to the workforce and was working full time. “As apparently Mr. Madril has discovered, flunking retirement is good,” Ogburn said. Having a full- or part-time job “gets you out of your wife’s hair and vice versa.”

Ogburn said he hoped the Madrils would have another 20 years together without this kind of problem occurring again. “There is an alternative if couples find life intolerable, unbearable. It’s called divorce, not murder and mayhem.”

The probation department and district attorney’s offices recommended five years probation with one year in community corrections. Marietta Madril could have been sentenced to 1-3 years in prison on this charge.

District Attorney Peter Comar told the judge this case made him apprehensive in agreeing with the community corrections sentence recommended by the probation department because he had known and worked with Robert Madril for years and knew Madril wanted his wife to receive probation. However, Comar said the probation department’s pre-sentence investigative report was very thorough and well thought out and provided extensive background in the case.

Comar said the factor in this case that always bothered him was that Madril was taking Coumadin(r), a medicine that already thins the blood. “Rat poison does the same,” Comar said. The administration of rat poison, d-CON, would have a much greater effect on someone who was already taking Coumadin, Comar said. “Eventually he was going to get sick and it was going to be at a much more rapid pace,” Comar said.

Robert Madril was already experiencing bleeding gums and stomach problems, Comar said. Bleeding gums is one of the signs that the poison is taking effect, he said, “so at some point he ingested enough, with the Coumadin, to cause the bleeding of the gums.”

Comar added Marietta Madril admitted she knew the d-CON would thin her husband’s blood, “so she had an idea what it would do to him.”

Comar added, “That’s alarming. I recognize she thought she had reason to do this, but no reason in my mind justifies giving your husband rat poison.”