Defendant Will Be Sentenced to 20 Years Consecutive to His PA Prison Term
Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark today announced that a 44-year-old
convicted murderer has pleaded guilty to Manslaughter for raping and strangling a14-
year-old girl in the Bronx in 1998, and will get 20 years in prison to run consecutive to
his sentence in Pennsylvania.
District Attorney Darcel Clark said, “This defendant brutally killed a young girl
and was finally brought to justice 13 years later, when DNA tied him to the crime. He is
currently in prison for murdering his wife, and now this sentence ensures that he will
remain there for many more years.”
District Attorney Clark said the defendant, James Martin, 44, pleaded guilty on
October 27, 2016, to first-degree Manslaughter before Chief Administrative Judge Robert
Torres. Martin is expected to receive 20 years in prison when he is sentenced on
November 10, 2016. The sentence will run consecutively to 22 to 40 year sentence he is
serving in a Pennsylvania prison for the 2005 murder of his wife.
According to the investigation, on Feb. 23, 1998, the body of Marleny Cruz, 14,
who was from the Dominican Republic and was living in the Bronx, was found on
Valentine Avenue in the University Heights section of the Bronx. Her body was bruised
and she had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
In 2011, the Bronx Homicide Task Force connected DNA recovered from Cruz’s
fingernails to Martin, who lived in the Bronx at the time, and he was indicted in 2012.
The case was prosecuted by Senior Homicide Counsel Nancy Borko of the
Homicide Bureau, under the supervision of Christine Scaccia, Deputy Chief of the
Homicide Bureau and Chief of the Gangs/Major Case Bureau.
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