New Mexico spent over $400K fighting prison rape suit, $150K in settlements
Oct. 1—State officials paid $100,000 recently to settle a lawsuit brought by a woman who said a guard at the Springer Correctional Center repeatedly raped her while she was an inmate at the women's prison between 2016 and 2018.
For a year, the woman alleged, the guard forced himself on her twice a week.
She is one of at least 11 women who have filed lawsuits since 2018 contending officials at Springer fostered an environment that emboldened guards to exploit them with impunity and made them afraid to report the alleged abuse.
State corrections officials announced last year a plan to close the facility, a former detention center for boys that has been plagued with sexual assault claims since female inmates were moved there in 2016. The Corrections Department, which set no timeline for shutting down the prison, cited a dwindling inmate population and aging infrastructure. But the agency appeared to back off the plan, at least temporarily, after facing pushback from a small community that relies on jobs at the prison.
In the meantime, the costs of civil complaints alleging abuse are mounting.
The woman who most recently settled with the state had a co-plaintiff who accused a different guard of sexually assaulting her at the Springer facility. She agreed to a $50,000 settlement in March.
As of August, the state had spent $409,000 defending itself against the women's lawsuit, New Mexico General Services Division spokesman Thom Cole wrote in an email.
The state Corrections Department did not respond to a request for comment.
An attorney for the two women, Erlinda O. Johnson, said Friday the state's willingness to spend more fighting the case than they were willing to pay the women who claimed abuse by guards is indicative of a pervasive lack of accountability, both at Springer and among Corrections Department officials.
"It's all part of the same mentality," Johnson said. "They just refuse to recognize there is a problem there. They would prefer to spend four times as much resisting the litigation rather than compensate these women who were clearly victims. And in the end, the lawyers representing the state are the ones enriching themselves."
Contract attorneys from nine law firms were defending the state against claims in at least 11 lawsuits as of March.
None of the cases have gone to trial, but several have been settled in the past year.
State officials agreed to pay another plaintiff $450,000 earlier this year, after spending about $200,000 fighting her claims that she was raped by a guard and that Corrections Department officials refused to turn over public records pertaining to her case.
Johnson said Friday her firm still has five cases pending on behalf of women who say they were sexually assaulted at Springer.
Joseph J. Martinez, 42, of Cimarron — the guard accused by the woman who recently settled her case for $100,000 — is one of several defendants accused of raping more than one woman.
A lawsuit filed by a different woman — who alleges Martinez got her hooked on Suboxone, a medication used to treat opioid addiction, before demanding sex as payment for the drug — is still pending in a U.S. District Court.
Martinez is the only corrections employee who has been criminally charged in connection with rape allegations at Springer.
He faces two counts of second-degree criminal sexual penetration and is scheduled to stand trial in November.
Neither Martinez nor his criminal defense attorney, Alan H. Maestas, responded to calls seeking comment Friday.
