CIARA JOBES - 15 yo (2002) - Baltimore MD

Six years after pleading guilty in the torture death of a teenage
girl, Satrina Roberts is asking for a new trial, claiming her attorney
gave her bad advice and that her plea was involuntary.Roberts was
sentenced to two consecutive 20-year prison terms in 2004 for murder
and child abuse. A hearing on her petition for "post-conviction relief"
was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, but it has since been postponed.Court
papers say Roberts didn't understand the elements of her offenses, both
because she had a clean criminal record and therefore "lacked
familiarity with the terminology used in the courts" and because she
"had a long history of mental health issues," along with an IQ of 56.
Roberts was awarded legal guardianship of Ciara Jobes, who lived
with her since 1998 because her own mother was dying of AIDS. The girl's
body was found in 2002 on Roberts' kitchen floor, covered in hundreds
of scars and emaciated, weighing just 73 pounds. A state
psychiatrist found Roberts competent to stand trial, but also concluded
that she was a heavy drinker who was bipolar and schizophrenic.
Her case led to sweeping reforms within the state's legal guardianship
program, including new requirements that the Department of Human
Resources prepare a parental fitness report for prospective guardians
and that judges be allowed to check on the children after their placed.

Here's one of the original stories...

A 15-year-old girl whose emaciated body was discovered in December had as
many as 700 wounds and bruises by the time authorities found her, according to
an autopsy report obtained by The Sun yesterday.

Police found Ciara Jobes' tattered, sexually abused body in her guardian's
kitchen in a Southeast Baltimore apartment last year.

The guardian, Satrina Roberts, 31, is charged with murder and child abuse.

Her attorney, who had initially suggested that Ciara's injuries were
sensationalized and that her death was not caused by abuse, changed course
after seeing the results of the autopsy. He now intends to argue that Roberts
suffers from mental illness and is therefore not criminally responsible for
the killing.

"My client was receiving [disability payments] because she was emotionally
not all there," said the attorney, Warren A. Brown. "She bordered on being
mentally retarded."

He said the autopsy "reads ugly" and has filed a motion in court seeking to
have Roberts held not criminally responsible.

Roberts, who had been Ciara's guardian for three years, was given legal
custody to protect the girl from a neglectful mother, a former drug user who
died of cancer and AIDS last summer.

Roberts pleaded innocent to the charges in March and is being held without
bail. She has no prior criminal record.

She has also been accused of withholding food from Ciara and forcing her to
use a hole in the wall as a bathroom.

The end to Ciara's short and tortured life was caused by a combination of
starvation and beating, prosecutors said.

According to the autopsy, Ciara was severely sexually abused, and had scars
and injuries covering almost the entire surface of her body.

Her muscles were "wasting," and she weighed 73 pounds, far less than the
118 pounds that would be normal for a child of her age and size, it said.

Roberts was also charged with possession of a deadly weapon - a belt and
electric cord that police say were used to beat Ciara. The report shows that
there were small copper wire fragments embedded in her wounds.

Brown said that Roberts admits to hitting Ciara as punishment but that she
was surprised to hear Ciara was sexually abused.

"She was shocked by it," Brown said. "Maybe taking care of this girl was
too much for her to handle. Maybe she did not understand the gravity of her
corporal punishment."

Juvenile Court records indicate that Roberts filed papers to become a
foster parent to Ciara in December 1998, six months after the girl's mother
told a judge that she preferred that Roberts, a college security guard, become
her daughter's guardian.

The defendant's relatives could not be reached for comment yesterday, but
previously said that Roberts is manic-depressive and schizophrenic.

Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. said at the time of Ciara's
death that he would investigate the matter to see where the system failed the
girl. A spokeswoman in his office said yesterday that the investigation was
continuing and that there was nothing to report.

Among the targets of his investigation are school officials, who did not
try to find out why Ciara had failed to show up for school until late October
- nearly two months after classes started.

Ciara attended several city schools in recent years and was assigned to
Patterson High School last fall but never showed up, Vanessa Pyatt, a school
system spokeswoman, has said.

School officials began trying to find out why the girl was not attending
school with a phone call to Roberts in October, but the number had been
disconnected, Pyatt has said.

Administrators followed up with two letters to the girl's home in November,
but there was no response, according to Pyatt. A truancy case was referred to
the courts, but Roberts did not appear for a court date Dec. 4 - a week before
Ciara was found dead.

Roberts was known in the O'Donnell Heights public housing complex as a nice
lady who enjoyed braiding the hair of neighborhood children. But police
detectives paint a different picture of Roberts, saying that when Ciara's
emaciated body was being removed from her kitchen floor, Roberts showed no
emotion.

She was not crying, police said, and did not ask paramedics if Ciara was
alive or dead.

Woman convicted of starving girl denied parole; victim had 700 wounds and weighed 73 pounds at 15 years old

JESSUP, Md. - When 15-year-old Ciara Jobes died, she weighed only 73 lbs.

Today Satrina Roberts, the woman convicted of starving the teen was up for parole.

Roberts was a foster parent to Jobes.

Jobe's body was found beaten and frail in a Baltimore home in 2002.

Three years later, Roberts was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Her attorneys tried to appeal the sentence on the grounds of mental illness, but were denied Tuesday morning.

Roberts was denied because of the nature of the crime, lack of insight, the impact on the young girl's family, and the problems Roberts had in prison.

Roberts has already been in prison for 10 years, serving time for the teen's death.

http://www.abc2news.com/dpp/news/region/anne_arundel_county_/woman-convicted-of-starving-girl-up-for-parole#ixzz2FfR6WAXQ