Opinion: Bail Reform Is Not The Problem By Christine Steele

Bail Reform Is Not The Problem By Christine SteelePhoto by2nd Life Media Alamogordo Town News

During the past several Alamogordo City Commission meetings, Mayor Susan Payne has repeated that bail reform was the worst thing to ever happen to this state. As someone who has been a journalist for 16 years in six different states and covered crime in three of them: New Mexico, Ohio, and Arizona, I can tell you: Bail reform is not the problem. New Mexico is the problem.

New Mexico has some of the weakest laws and lightest sentences for convictions I have ever seen. All bail ever did was keep poor people in jail and put cash in bondsmen’s pockets. Judges always have the power to hold potentially violent individuals without bail. It’s called a dangerousness hearing (law specifies click here).

But rarely do they use it.

Weak New Mexico judges and light sentencing laws create a revolving-door criminal justice system system which keeps putting violent individuals back on the streets making New Mexico number one in the nation for violent crime.

Example: In Ohio, 24-year-old Morgan Jevec was sentenced to 15 years in prison for a DUI crash that killed a Bellevue, Ohio woman. In Silver City, New Mexico, a young, 20-something year-old white kid with daddy’s money was sentenced to probation for leaving the scene of an accident that caused the death of his passenger, a Hispanic man from El Paso who was the foreman on the job of the white kid’s daddy’s company.

The kid was drunk, absconded from the scene, and hitchhiked home to Arizona with his teeth sticking through his lip, according to witnesses who stopped to help him, whom he waved off before they could find his dead passenger. New Mexico State Police showed up to what they thought was a single-car crash. Grant County Deputies were already on the scene trying to shoo them away, saying, “This is our scene, we’ve got this,” until the State Cops discovered the dead guy under the back wheel and asked the deputies, “Do you have the dead guy back here?”

When the white kid went to court, his daddy’s money bought him a high-priced Albuquerque attorney who got the vehicular homicide charge thrown out at the preliminary hearing so all he had for charges was leaving the scene of an accident causing great bodily harm (or death.) The maximum sentence he could have gotten would have been 18 months in jail. Since New Mexico has 1-for-1 time, meaning inmates get 1 day off their sentence for every day they do, (this alone is another issue!) effectively cutting their time in half, the most time he would have served was nine months. At sentencing, then District Court Judge J.C. Robinson said he didn’t think sending the kid to jail for 9 months would serve any good purpose, so he gave him probation.

Same crime. Different sentences.

In Ohio in 2014, 73-year-old Lloyd Hicks of Bellevue, Ohio, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for holding his wife hostage, burning down their home and shooting at a deputy.

In 2010, in Grant County, New Mexico, Macario Arroyos stabbed his girlfriend nine times in front of their child and was sentenced to probation. Ten years later, he beat and strangled his next girlfriend to death. In between, he had multiple violent felonies and domestic violence charges that were all dismissed or he received probation. Had he received a valid sentence in his first stabbing and child abuse case, he would not have been out to kill his next girlfriend.

New Mexico’s weak laws and even weaker judges, along with the one-day-off for one-day served good time policy create a perfect storm for a revolving-door criminal justice system in which criminals are not held accountable for even the most violent crimes.

I’ve heard that the state’s overcrowded prison system is partly to blame. So, build more prisons if that is what is necessary to keep violent individuals off the streets. (But don't outsource them to private contractors). Let non-violent offenders serving sentences go to treatment and do community service. Build and staff more treatment centers to treat the addiction that fuels so much of the crime here. Urge your legislators to write stricter laws. Stop voting for weak judges and District Attorneys who sign every plea deal and dismiss violent charges. Do something. Vote. Write letters. But stop blaming bail reform.

Bail reform is not the problem. New Mexico is the problem.

NOTE About the Author: Christine Steele is an award-winning journalist and editor with 16 years of experience writing for newspapers from Maine to Arizona. She has won awards for Investigative Reporting, Editorials, News Reporting, Best Serious Column Writing, Deadline Writing, and Features. For the past six years, she has been a freelance marketing writer and teaches writing online at Western New Mexico University. She is also the founder of a cold case nonprofit, Southern New Mexico Unsolved Murders.

Linkedin.com/in/christinelste