Prosecutors will revisit high-profile 1997 tax-protest and assault convictions

Federal authorities are taking a second look at the 1997 convictions of nine people implicated in a claimed attack on a Stanislaus County official now accused of fabricating death threats against herself in a recent congressional campaign.

“We normally do not comment on investigations, but in this case I’ve been cleared to say that we are reviewing her role in the (old) case,” said Lauren Horwood, spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney.

She referred to Karen Mathews Davis, who was arrested Oct. 28 after she was reported to have failed a polygraph test and admitted to federal agents that she sent threats to herself in late 2013 and early 2014 while running for a congressional seat.

“Wow,” said Roger Steiner, 77, who spent 19 years behind bars, mostly on the word of a woman whose credibility – once considered air-tight – now appears to be crumbling.

“It’s somewhat comforting, within the realm of justice, but it’s unfortunate for her,” Steiner said Friday.

He became a pariah upon his arrest 20 years ago, accused of beating and cutting Mathews Davis in an ambush in her garage and pulling a trigger on empty chambers of a gun placed to her head. She said Steiner sodomized her with the revolver and she implicated him last year as a suspect in the death threats, among other people, while telling The Modesto Bee and other reporters that she would not cower to bullies and terrorists.

She has not responded to calls.

What the future holds for Steiner and his eight co-defendants remains murky. Horwood said, “Given (the 1997) case’s complexity and the passage of time, a thorough review will take some time to complete.”

The high-profile 1997 trial stretched 41 days and was the longest case to that date in Fresno’s federal court.

Maintained his innocence from beginning

Steiner, released from prison about the time Mathews Davis said she received renewed threats, has consistently proclaimed his innocence in no uncertain terms. He wasn’t supposed to say anything to jurors when they convicted him more than 18 years ago, but could not help himself at that critical moment.

“As God is my savior, you have condemned and convicted an innocent man,” Steiner blurted out, according to The Bee’s account in early May 1997. He soon would be sentenced to nearly 22 years in federal prison and was released on probation after 18.

“I have never seen that. Never,” said Anthony Capozzi, an attorney for nearly four decades who represented one of Steiner’s eight co-defendants. “It was a spontaneous and emotional statement, and I thought it was heartfelt.”

But no one seemed to pay attention until The Bee caught up to Steiner a week ago, living in a broken-down trailer parked in a cow pasture west of Fresno, having made peace with his lot in life. Since then, old friends have reached out. Readers want to send money. National TV crews are interested in his story. Attorneys are mulling his legal options.

Steiner will take things slowly, he said a couple of days ago. He wants justice, not revenge, he says, and he will be patient.

And when Mathews Davis is hauled into court to face charges, Steiner plans to be there.

“I don’t want her to skate because she says she’s crazy,” he said. “If the judge wants to show any leniency, I’ll have to stand up and say, ‘Objection, your honor.’ ”

Mathews Davis, the prosecution’s star witness in 1997, has not responded to calls since bailing out of jail Oct. 29, and neither has the federal agent who reportedly took her confession. When a TV news reporter confronted her and asked if she had created phony death threats, she said everyone makes mistakes.

Her credibility shredded, the seminal question seems to be: Did she start lying during the recent campaign, or 20 years ago?

Steiner’s trial attorney, Daniel Harralson of Fresno, thinks Mathews Davis played loose with the truth from the start. Just before the 41-day trial ended, he told jurors that, deep down, she knew it was not Steiner who assaulted her but lacked the courage to admit it because doing so would be a political embarrassment.

“She was looking for attention, for her (re-)election bid the next year,” Harralson said in a recent interview, echoing what he believes was the motivation for her claims of threats last year.

“She wanted to tell everyone that she put an old man back in prison so she could get elected to Congress,” Steiner said.

But plenty of witnesses saw angry men come into the county recorder’s office from 1992 to 1995, a time when tax-protest groups seemed to gain membership and traction. They demanded that her employees record bogus documents, Mathews Davis refused, and tension mounted as people became more desperate.

Evidence introduced at trial included threatening calls and letters, a bullet fired through the recorder’s office window and a fake bomb left under Mathews Davis’ car.

Steiner was tied to none of it.

Questions in case

Authorities said three Modesto men – the father-son duo of George L. and George Kendell Reed, and Roger Knight – planned the attack and brought in Steiner, who lived in Oregon, as the hit man. A government informant who had dated Knight’s stepdaughter testified that he overheard the men plotting.

A review of trial reports suggests potential problems with that version of events:

▪ All three accused of being conspirators denied having known Steiner before they were arrested.

▪ The informant, Anthony Dalglish, was painted by other witnesses as a habitual liar willing to testify to avoid a jail sentence after police found him with a small quantity of methamphetamine, and to avoid deportation to his native England. By the trial’s end, even prosecutors were referring to him as a liar and drug addict.

▪ Modesto police detectives found no evidence in a February 1995 search of the trailer Steiner lived in, and his car, in Oregon.

▪ Steiner would not have had time to attack Mathews Davis at night and show up to work 800 miles away early the next day, even getting a ticket that morning from a Washington trooper, Harralson said. Prosecutors contended the trip was possible. Steiner recently told The Bee he was nowhere near Modesto on the night in question.

▪ Mathews Davis provided at least four versions of the attack in accounts to various officers, Harralson contended. For example, she told authorities just after the attack that the garage was dark and later said the light in the garage door opener enabled her to see clearly the face of her attacker.

▪ A doctor who examined Mathews Davis after the attack conceded that cuts he found could have been made by fingernails.

▪ When Mathews Davis testified, Steiner’s attorney asked about psychiatric or psychological treatment she had received before the claimed ambush. Judge Oliver Wanger quickly excused the jury from the courtroom, a big argument ensued and eventually Wanger barred any questions about her mental health.

“Yet the court (in October) takes into account a psychiatric letter to release her on bond,” Harralson mused in a recent interview. Its contents were not discussed in court.

In another twist, in Mathews Davis’ arrest warrant affidavit, a U.S. treasury agent cited her recent failure of a polygraph test just before she was said to have come clean about faking the death threats. But the fact that Steiner passed a polygraph test administered by Oregon State Police before his arrest, reportedly clearing him from involvement in the Modesto ambush, was kept from jurors because such examinations are considered unreliable and not admissible in California courts.

“I didn’t think any reasonable person could come to the conclusion that Roger Steiner was guilty of this crime,” Harralson said. “I felt we exonerated him completely. However, the jury didn’t subscribe to that.”

Fresno attorney Roger Nuttall, who represented another co-defendant, said Steiner had a shifty look that didn’t engender sympathy.

Capozzi, the other defense attorney, said, “When you get into court, it’s hard to overcome the government. Jurors see the government present something and think, ‘You must have done something wrong.’

“I didn’t think Steiner was guilty then, and I still don’t,” Capozzi continued. “There was so much evidence pointing to his innocence. The fact that he was tied in with these tax protesters just made him look bad.”

It probably didn’t help that authorities had found posters of Adolf Hitler and swastika paraphernalia in Steiner’s trailer. He was arrested sleeping with a shotgun. And he had been apprehended in 1989 on suspicion of phoning threats to the offices of two state senators, one from Modesto; references to threats were dropped when he pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon, earning a four-day stay in jail.

None of that points to guilt in the attack on Mathews Davis, Harralson said.

“There was so much BS in this case, so much false information and a contrived theory,” he said. “I was disappointed for many years at how shallow the jury was, how easily they were fooled.”

Tim Kersten of Burney on Thursday said he befriended Steiner in about 1986 and was dismayed when his friend was accused.

“That was entirely out of his character,” Kersten said. “Philosophically, he might have had contention or disagreement with the (political) status quo. But I didn’t see anything to suspect involvement in physical violence.”

What’s next for Steiner?

Now that everything seemingly has changed, what are Steiner’s options?

His new attorney, Patrick Fortune of Fresno, said they are discussing asking a judge to release Steiner from probation or even to overturn his 1997 conviction.

“This has been a long ordeal for him,” Fortune said. “I don’t think we’ll be too hasty. He’s been a very patient man.”

Linda Starr, legal director of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University, said exoneration requires proving that evidence convicting Steiner was false.

“If witness testimony was absolutely critical to that case, and it turns out she falsely implicated other people (in the current case), that’s a pretty important piece of information,” Starr said.

She added: “If I were a (prosecutor), I would want to know if I had a bad conviction. (Prosecutors) are generally trying to do the right thing: seek justice. This might not be justice.”

Nuttall agreed, saying, “U.S. attorneys are good people. They don’t like to prosecute innocent people,” and suggesting that authorities in Steiner’s case might weigh in on what should happen next.

That happened Friday, with Horwood’s announcement, which advised that a quick resolution is not likely.

Steiner said he stole a package of peanuts from a gas station when he was 6, returning later with a nickel for the store owner when guilt overcame him.

“I felt so good after that, and that’s what Karen Mathews needs to do. She’ll get rid of the psychological monkey on her back when she comes forward and says the real scenario about what happened in 1995. If it happened, it wasn’t me.”

This story was originally published November 7, 2015 at 6:22 PM with the headline "Prosecutors will revisit high-profile 1997 tax-protest and assault convictions."