By Guy Ashley reporter for the Marin Independant Journal http://www.marinij.com
A Novato woman convicted of the attempted abduction of her young daughter will remain in Marin County Jail for at least another week because defense lawyers failed yesterday in their attempt to have her released pending sentencing.
Carol Mardeusz, 44, faces up to four years in state prison after being convicted in July of four felonies for using a falsified court order to try to take custody of her 10-year-old daughter, whom she had been barred from contacting by a Sonoma County judge.
With sentencing next week, lawyers for Mardeusz yesterday asked Marin Superior Court Judge Verna Adams to release the defendant on bail so that she can attend to health problems and prepare her case for a lenient sentence.
Adams refused to release Mardeusz, however, saying the defendant has repeatedly violated past custody orders by attempting to contact her daughter and may do so again if set free.
"The court is concerned about (the daughter's) safety if Ms. Mardeusz is released on bail," Adams said at a hearing.
Adams also refused a defense request to remove herself from the case, but agreed to send the request to another judge outside Marin for review. If that judge finds she should be removed, Adams said her rulings yesterday would be invalidated.
Mardeusz was convicted by a jury following a three-week trial in Adams' court. While the defense repeatedly attempted to make custody of the girl the trial's central issue, Adams repeatedly ruled that that matter was adjudicated in Sonoma County, and the question of whether Mardeusz violated existing custody orders was all that was to be considered by the jury.
Court papers say that a Sonoma County judge ruled that custody of the daughter would remain with her father until Mardeusz submitted to a mental health examination, which Mardeusz apparently refused to do.
After her convictions in Marin, however, Mardeusz was ordered into the custody of the state Department of Corrections for a 90-day mental evaluation.
Mardeusz returned this week from the California Women's Institution in Corona, and the conclusions of psychiatrists who evaluated her there have not been made public.
An attorney for Mardeusz, Patricia Barry, referred to those conclusions during yesterday's hearing, however, and indicated that two psychiatrists at the locked facility had found Mardeusz to be "delusional."
Barry said the defense intends to vigorously contest those findings, which can be considered by the judge at sentencing. She said she had hoped Mardeusz could be released on bail so she could meet with a Los Angeles-area mental health expert for an independent evaluation that might counter findings made by the state-appointed psychiatrists.
"She's not delusional and she doesn't want that label," Barry said of Mardeusz.
The case grew out of a heated, years-long dispute between Mardeusz and a former boyfriend over custody of a daughter they had together in 1990. It also coincided with ongoing uproar over how child custody cases are handled in the Marin courts, triggered by an outside investigator's report critical of rulings made by two longtime family law jurists, Michael Dufficy and Sylvia Shapiro.
The Mardeusz case became a cause for a cadre of court critics in Marin who latched onto her claims that she never got a full hearing before full custody of the daughter was provided to the ex-boyfriend in 1995.
The case is cited on petitions now circulating in Marin that seek to recall Adams, District Attorney Paula Kamena and Superior Court Judge Terrence Boren, in a special election next May. All three officials are accused of mishandling the Mardeusz case.
The deadline for petitions seeking to recall the three court officials was today.
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