Cases prosecuted by New Mexico district attorneys fall 29 percent

Jul. 27—While crime remains high in New Mexico, the state's district attorneys have been prosecuting fewer cases in recent years — a trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of cases prosecuted by district attorneys in all judicial districts fell from about 59,600 in fiscal year 2017 to around 42,600 in fiscal year 2021, a 29 percent decrease, according to a report by the Legislative Finance Committee.

All but two judicial districts experienced double-digit decreases in the percentage of cases prosecuted, the report states. At 52 percent, the 2nd Judicial District in Bernalillo County saw the highest decrease.

Jon Courtney, deputy director of the Legislative Finance Committee, wrote in an email Tuesday the committee's courts analyst will continue to delve into the data to try to determine the reasons for the decrease.

"One of the reasons for some districts could very well be upstream metrics, including the number of cases that are coming in the door," he wrote. "We know that violent crime arrests are down statewide and that clearance rates in many jurisdictions have been declining over the last several years."

Another possible factor: the pandemic.

"We are all aware that the pandemic has impacted the ability for all criminal justice stakeholders to generally accomplish a goal of launching more cases and reaching a timely resolution of those cases," Marcus Montoya, 8th Judicial district attorney and president of the New Mexico District Attorneys Association, said in a written statement.

"The pandemic has adversely impacted a defense attorney's ability to meet with clients, limits on grand jury, and most importantly, trials could not be conducted while the courts were literally closed during the pandemic. Like many other service-oriented industries, the criminal justice system was not as prolific or efficient during the pandemic," he said.

At least not in New Mexico.

During a legislative committee meeting Monday, Courtney highlighted a ProPublica report comparing court operations during the pandemic in Bernalillo County, which suspended criminal trials for much of 2020 and 2021, to the court system in Wichita, Kan., which resumed jury trials in July 2020 after a four-month suspension.

"Overall, [Wichita] managed to hold 32 criminal jury trials in 2020, compared with 75 in 2019 — a much smaller drop than the ones in Albuquerque and other cities," ProPublica reported.

The news organization reported the 2nd Judicial District, which includes Bernalillo County, held 86 criminal jury trials in 2019 but only 18 in 2020.

In a statement, Lauren Rodriguez, communications director for Bernalillo County District Attorney Raul Torrez's office, agreed the pandemic had a "devastating impact" on the criminal justice system in the state's largest county and decried a failure to adopt policy recommendation it had proposed to the Bernalillo County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council in May 2020.

In the letter, officials asked policy makers to use a portion of federal CARES Act funding to use the Albuquerque Convention Center to resume grand jury and trial operations.

"Unfortunately that recommendation was not adopted by the courts and — as we forewarned in the spring of 2020 — we not only saw a 20 percent reduction in law enforcement referrals to our office but also a 50 percent reduction in felony case initiations and an 80 percent reduction in trial settings during that period," Rodriguez said in the statement.

While the pandemic affected court proceedings, other issues also could be at play.

"It is also possible we will find different factors impacting performance in different districts as some districts had different trends from the statewide trend," Courtney wrote.

Ellen Rabin, a public safety analyst for the LFC, said the decrease in the number of prosecutions started before the pandemic.

"To the best that we can hypothesize, COVID looks like it may have exacerbated some of those existing trends, but the trends were there prior to COVID," she said.

The LFC report also found that cases adjudicated by jury trial decreased 47 percent, or from 851 to 449, between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2021.

"The coronavirus pandemic likely had a significant impact here," Courtney wrote, adding the state temporarily suspended jury trials during the pandemic.

First Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies said in a statement the term "prosecution rate" is not an accurate indicator of what a prosecution team does on a day-by-day or year-by-year basis.

"What the legislators see is a total that is based on the number of cases referred to DA's offices from law enforcement agencies," she said. "This number comes from arrests or criminal complaints filed but does not account for the screening process within the office that ensures the quality of a case over the quantity of cases."

Carmack-Altwies also said focusing on the quality of the prosecution over the quantity is a paradigm shift not yet reflected in end-of-year reports.

"This shift properly allocates resources to focus on prolific and violent offenders, and the viable cases with quality investigations, cooperative witnesses, and are supported by evidence that we can confidently prove beyond a reasonable doubt," she said.

Sen. Joe Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, co-chairman of the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee, which touched on the LFC report during its Monday meeting, said crime is "probably" the preeminent issue on New Mexicans' minds. He said the various criminal justice issues are intertwined.

"The inescapable statistics that we see over and over in the last 12 months are that crime is up sharply. Prosecutions are down sharply. Incarceration and imprisonment are down sharply, and it's hard for me not to draw a correlation between those things," he said.

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