A Monmouth County woman serving 100 years in prison after being convicted of killing her two toddlers in a car fire in 1994 wants a new trial, court documents show.
Lawyers for Maria Dolores Montalvo, 61, have requested a new trial in her murder conviction, citing advances in arson science that cast doubt on the validity of expert testimony from her 1996 trial.
Montalvo, of Union Beach, was charged in 1994 with murder and aggravated arson after she lit her car on fire with her two children, 28-month-old Raphael and 18-month-old Zonaida, inside, officials said.
“Since Ms. Montalvo’s conviction, the scientific evidence presented in her case has been revealed to be fundamentally flawed and unsupported by current medical understanding,” Montalvo’s attorneys told NJ Advance Media. “As scientific knowledge evolves, the justice system must evolve with it.
“In Ms. Montalvo’s case, that means ensuring she receives a new, fair trial grounded in valid and reliable science.”
Her attorneys, Deputy Public Defenders Tamar Lerer, who runs the Forensic Sciences Unit, and Joshua Hood, said “a conviction based on bad science is not a just conviction.”
The request for a new trial was filed in superior court in February and a hearing was held in Monmouth County on Oct. 22. Judge Jill G. O’Malley has not issued a decision on the motion for a new trial as of Thursday.
Montalvo, who was working as a nurse at the time of the incident, has maintained her innocence for decades, according to documents filed in the case.
She is incarcerated at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Hunterdon County.
Lerer and Hood argue in their motion for a new trial that Montalvo’s conviction was primarily based on testimony from an arson expert and ignored significant evidence, such as eyewitness accounts and burns Montalvo suffered in the incident.
A spokesperson for the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors challenged Montalvo’s lawyers’ assertions of new evidence based on updated science, claiming Dr. Vytenis Babrauskas, an expert in fire and explosion safety and principal member of the National Fire Protection Agency’s Technical Committee on Fire investigations, strayed from the arson investigation and delved into the lack of a motive and witness testimony.
“Despite being couched in the scientific rubric of developments in standards by the NFPA and scientific pattern studies, Dr. Babrauskas’s opinion and defendant’s motion in reality do not truly rely upon either in defendant’s quest for a new trial,” prosecutors wrote in their rebuttal to a motion for a new trial.
“Both rely upon that which experts cannot and never have been able to do in New Jersey courtrooms — opine on the credibility of lay witnesses,” prosecutors continued in laying out why the court should deny the motion.
Prosecutors suggested that Montalvo was motivated to kill her two young kids after her husband, Raoul Aponte Jr., ended their relationship a few days beforehand, stating “heartbreak and revenge are well-established motives for murder.”
At the time of the incident, prosecutors said Montalvo drove to her in-laws’ house in Long Branch on Feb. 22, 1994, and set her car on fire with her children still inside.
Montalvo’s husband was a corrections officer at the Monmouth County Jail and his parents said they were excited to see Montalvo when she entered the driveway, expecting a visit from their grandchildren.
Aponte’s mother told authorities she saw Montalvo “stoop, bend and throw something into the vehicle” before it erupted into flames. Authorities said Montalvo’s clothes were soaked in gasoline and caught fire as well.
Montalvo bought $3 worth of gasoline at a gas station on Route 36 in Hazlet just before heading to her in-laws, prosecutors said, and a gas container was found on the passenger seat after the fire was extinguished.
Montalvo’s attorneys argue in court filings that prosecutors relied heavily on two arson experts that testified the fire started in the footwell of the car, and testimony from Aponte’s mother that said Montalvo tossed a match into the car.
But Lerer and Hood say prosecutors discounted an eyewitness who saw Montalvo pulled out of the car after it caught fire and testimony from a gas station attendant who said the gas can was not properly sealed when it was placed in her car.
A neighbor who testified for the defense said he was outside and heard a loud boom before looking back at Montalvo’s car and seeing her be pulled out of the car as she was on fire, according to court filings.
Pictures of Montalvo included as exhibits in court filings show burns across the right side of her face and on her right hand.
In a statement to investigators, Montalvo said the gas can was on the front passenger floor and that there was the smell of gasoline inside the car. Despite the fumes, she said she lit a cigarette anyway and that there was black smoke and fire throughout the car very quickly.
Montalvo’s attorneys argue that a lieutenant in the arson unit of the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office identified the origin of the fire prior to receiving lab test results about the presence of accelerants and a V-burn pattern that, at the time, was considered to indicate the origin of the fire.
The lieutenant determined the fire had started at the front passenger area or near the driver’s seat and floor, according to Montalvo’s attorneys. He also testified that gasoline vapors can ignite with sufficient heat, causing a flashover and boom described by the neighbor, according to court documents.
During the trial, an arson expert from the NFPA testified for the defense that V-patterns are useful in determining points of origin in short-burning fires, and offered his own conclusion that gasoline vapor started the fire.
But since the 1990s, V-shaped patterns have been labeled as unreliable indicators of a fires origin, according to Montalvo’s attorneys.
Lerer and Hood cite Babrauskas in court documents claiming that V-burn patterns are unreliable.
“Inferring the origin location of a fire to be the place where one observes the base of a V-pattern, or the place of heaviest burning constitutes ‘junk science,’” Babrauskas writes.
Lerer and Hood’s theory with the help of Babrauskas is that gas vapors in the car ignited when Montalvo lit the cigarette creating a “flash fire” and when the door was opened to pull Montalvo out of the car, the oxygen fed a flashover, court documents show.
As a result of the flashover, any burn patterns in the car are unreliable, according to Lerer and Hood.
A jury convicted Montalvo on Nov. 27, 1996, of two counts of murder, felony murder and one count of second-degree aggravated arson. She was spared the death penalty, but sentenced to consecutive 50-year sentences with a total of 60 years of parole ineligibility, her attorneys wrote in their motion for a new trial.