What Marcia Pangburn wanted was simple: She wanted to clear her name. The dismissal of her case without the jury trial she had sought gave her no chance at vindication.

Pangburn has maintained her innocence since she was arrested, mourning at the graves of her brother and father and infant son in the early morning hours of July 13, 2014. She was subjected to field tests for sobriety, and was charged with two misdemeanors — resisting arrest and second-degree obstructing governmental administration. A breath sample at the police station, according to her arrest report, registered .01, well below the legal limit of .08 for driving.

A working-class woman — she was a hospital x-ray technician at the time of her arrest — Pangburn didn’t have money on hand to pay the $265 to retrieve her SUV, which police, suspecting she was a drunk driver, had had towed from the graveyard, although she was not driving it, having been taken to the police station in a patrol car.

The tickets for the misdemeanors were delivered to her door four days after her arrest. “The charges of resisting and obstructing were an afterthought to protect the officers’ batting average or some other interests,” wrote Pangburn’s attorney, Lewis Oliver, in a response to the prosecutor’s motion to dismiss.

“Rather than doing justice in this case, District Attorney David Soares’s office is engaged in protecting the police officers from potential civil liability,” Lewis wrote. “The District Attorney’s conduct is unethical and unprofessional, since protecting the police from their own misconduct is not a responsibility of the prosecution.”

Pangburn put the $265 charge for her impounded SUV on her credit card. “I’m a single mother. I don’t have a lot of money,” she said after being arrested. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay it.”

Then, she said, she had to use a loan to pay for a lawyer, pursuing her defense because she believes she did nothing wrong.

Well over a year after her arrest, Pangburn was denied the jury trial she was convinced would prove her innocence. New Scotland Justice David Wukitsch issued a decision on Oct. 9, 2015, calling Pangburn’s a “rare and unusual case that cries out for fundamental justice beyond the confines of conventional considerations.”

He granted the motion made by Albany County Assistant District Attorney Brittany L. Grome to dismiss the case.

Wutkitsch made the ruling over the objection of her lawyer, stating, “The Court is without authority to make a specific factual finding of defendant’s innocence or even whether the People can prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Either of those could have been decided by a jury. With the dismissal, Pangburn’s hopes for clearing her name were dismissed, too. She had borrowed money to hire a lawyer and gone through months of court procedures — all for naught.

Pangburn declined earlier offers from the district attorney’s office that she plea to the reduced charge of disorderly conduct or to adjourn the case in contemplation of dismissal. Her reason was simple: She said she did nothing wrong.

We admire her tenacity; it certainly would have been easier to accept the plea.

She soldiered on through pre-trial hearings in the Berne Town Court: The hearings, known as Mapp (whether evidence should be suppressed because it was obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure), Dunaway (whether police had probable cause to detain and arrest), and Huntley (whether a confession was voluntary) dragged on.

Three hours into the December 2014 hearing, Berne Justice Alan Zuk commented, “We are millions of miles away from those definitions.”

Ultimately, Zuk and the other Berne justice recused themselves from hearing the case to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Zuk, however, had already ruled on the Dunaway/Mapp hearing. Albany County Court Judge Peter Lynch in March then granted a transfer request from the district attorney’s office to the New Scotland Town Court.

In May, as Pangburn waited in New Scotland court to have her trial scheduled — for July — she expressed her frustration with how long she had made court appearances, almost monthly for a year.

We obtained a copy of Wutkich’s recent decision from Pangburn’s lawyer. Our Hilltown reporter, Marcello Iaia, had requested a copy of the decision and a chance to look at the court’s file on the case. “The court is in receipt of your request for information from this court,” Wukitsch wrote in response on Dec. 21. “No record exists in our court.”

David Bookstaver, spokesman for the New York State Unified Court System, explained, “They’re required to say, ‘We have no such record’ any time ... a case is dismissed.”

This system does not help someone like Pangburn who is looking for vindication. The lack of transparency that ended Pangburn’s efforts to clear her name were indicative of problems she had with the criminal justice system from the start.

Pangburn was 57 the night she visited the cemetery on Thompson’s Lake Road in East Berne, just a few hundred yards from her home. She had been to a housewarming party for her niece where her brother-in-law had made her a mixed drink. She said she didn’t know what was in it. “I’m usually a teetotaler,” she said. She went to her home afterward and then, later, she was feeling melancholy, and drove to the cemetery for solace.

At about 2 a.m., she was sitting in her SUV, a gold Toyota Highlander, listening to a country song on the radio, “I Drive Your Truck,” and crying. Two Albany County Sheriff’s deputies, each in his own patrol car, drove up to her parked SUV and asked if she had been drinking.

“I said no; I had a drink about three hours ago,” she said.

The arrest report says that deputies Javier-Luis Martinez and Philip Milano were responding to a “loud music call in Knox” when they saw a vehicle parked in the cemetery with its lights on. Martinez now works for the Bethlehem Police department, and Milano was taken off patrol because of a complaint last year.

Asked this week about the internal investigation of Milano, Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said, “I cannot release the results of personnel investigations that may have resulted in discipline.  I can tell you Deputy Milano no longer works at the Clarksville station.” 

Milano is still an officer, he said, but is now stationed at headquarters. “He’s not on the road,” said Apple. “We had a long talk with him. I always tell people, it’s not our job to balance the state’s budgets. We’re out there writing tickets, but the people we’re writing them on are the ones who can’t afford to pay them.”

The arrest report says, “A strong odor of an alcoholic beverage was emanating from within her vehicle.” Pangburn said there were no alcoholic beverages in her SUV. The only beverages, she said, were the coffee she had been drinking, and some unsweetened iced tea she had purchased earlier in the day when she had made a trip to the Great Escape with some family members.

Pangburn also said that she followed the deputies’ directions for the field tests. The report says she failed the horizontal gaze test, failed the walk-and-turn test, and failed the one-leg stand test, and was then asked to consent to a preliminary breath-screening device.

“I said, ‘I’ll blow in it.’ They said I wasn’t blowing right. I did it three times,” said Pangburn. Pangburn said she suffers from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and perhaps, because of her difficulties breathing, the test wasn’t registering.

At this point, Pangburn’s story and the deputy’s report diverge.

“I said, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to go home.’ They grabbed me and handcuffed me,” Pangburn said. “They were mean to me.” Deputy Milano said, “Now you made us put our hands on you. You refused to breath in the breathalyzer,” she recalled.

A copy of the video recorded from the dashboard of a patrol car given to The Enterprise by Oliver, shows a deputy asked Pangburn to submit to an alcohol-screening device after she took the one-leg stand test, at which point she began to walk away, saying, “You guys, I’m going home. All right? I’m going to walk home.” She stepped on a dirt path, turning away from the deputies.

Her home is a few hundred yards from the cemetery.

When the two officers rushed to block her way and she refused to submit to the screening device, one of the officers asked her to put her hands behind her back and she said, “No, I’m not doing it.” She lurched away and they grabbed her arms. She sat on the pavement of the road — saying, “I’ll do it then, I’ll do it” — as they pulled her rigid arms behind her back.

“They were abusive,” she said. “They treated me like a criminal.”

Sheriff Apple, asked what constitutes resisting arrest, said, “The discretion is up to the police officer. One person may vary from another...If she does anything to keep him from arresting her, that can be resisting arrest.”

We can’t be a judge; we can’t be a jury. The best we can do is tell what we saw on the dash-cam video, lay it next to what the arrest report says and what Pangburn says happened that day — and let the reader decide. Was this woman guilty of resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration?

What saddens us most is Pangburn, after her arrest, said she is wary of returning to the cemetery, where she regularly went to mourn and seek comfort.  Often, when she couldn’t sleep at night, she would walk or drive the short distance to the graves of those she loved. “I used to go there all the time,” she said.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer