Ex-Stanislaus official’s death threats case postponed again

The case against a former Stanislaus County official accused of sending death threats to herself has been delayed again, partly because 67-year-old defendant Karen Mathews Davis is having “significant and continuing health issues,” a court paper says.

The problems “have made it more difficult for defendant to participate in and assist defense counsel,” says a paper prompting a delay from Friday to Sept. 2 in Sacramento’s federal court.

In May, Mathews Davis – Stanislaus’ clerk-recorder from 1990 to 2001 – told The Modesto Bee she often has been sick and has had two back surgeries. Her case has been delayed six times since her arrest in October.

Meanwhile, 78-year-old Roger Steiner has been in and out of the hospital with congestive heart failure, a condition that killed his father. Steiner says he was wrongly convicted of a brutal 1994 assault in Mathews Davis’ Modesto garage, when she was beaten, cut and sodomized with a pistol after resisting tax protestors.

“I’d like to get to the bottom of this Mathews Davis thing before I go,” Steiner said this week from his home, a broken-down trailer parked in a Fresno pasture.

Mathews Davis, who relocated to Lodi, ran for Congress in 2014, telling reporters she would not cower to terrorist bullies she said were sending death threats similar to others received in the mid-1990s. She later confessed to federal agents that she made up the more recent threats, authorities said, leading to her arrest and an investigation into her role in the earlier convictions of Steiner and eight others.

“My contention is it’s been a lie since Day 1,” Steiner said.

Mathews Davis told The Bee in May that fear at Steiner’s release from federal prison prompted recent mistakes, but she stuck to the earlier testimony that convicted him in 1997.

This story was originally published July 2, 2016 at 3:08 PM with the headline "Ex-Stanislaus official’s death threats case postponed again."