Covid-19

Failure of prison coronavirus testing in NM begs scrutiny

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Luis Sánchez Saturno/The New MexicanGovernor Michelle Lujan Grisham delivers her weekly COVID19 press conference from the state capital. Six-thousand-five-hundred-fifty-eight people woke up Thursday morning behind bars in New Mexico’s 11 prisons, according to the state Department of Corrections. Just eight of them have been tested for the new coronavirus, which causes the respiratory disease, COVID-19. 

That’s a test rate of .0012%. The state employs about 1,800 people to supervise those inmates and oversee the lockups; it has ordered tests for 33 of them. The rate: 1.8%.

‘We’re stuck in here.’ Woman describes life inside Luna County jail during pandemic

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The Luna County Detention Center holds 590 inmates at maximum capacity. As of Wednesday morning, just over 200 people were locked inside the jail in Deming, about 30 miles north of the Mexican border. Shauna Smith, a 43-year-old mother who has been incarcerated there since October, said the inmate population has been steadily thinning since the coronavirus pandemic began sweeping across New Mexico in early March. The county of roughly 24,000 people has seen just 347 tests for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus, with three positive results as of Wednesday, according to the state Health Department. Like so many other jails and prisons around the state, few of those tests were performed at the Luna County Detention Center — four inmates and three staff members, all of whom were negative.

coronavirus

NM prison inmate says soap in short supply; possible COVID-19 outbreak behind the walls ‘a big worry’

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Joseph Chavez. Image courtesy of his family. Joseph Chavez says he gets one “tiny” bar of soap a week, gratis. If he wants more, it’ll cost him. And yet, corrections officers have for weeks steadily reminded Chavez, 42, and the other inmates being held with him in solitary confinement cells at the Penitentiary of New Mexico’s south facility near Santa Fe that they need to wash their hands.

#covid19

Citing COVID-19, Sandoval County attorney seeks court order to release non-violent inmates

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Commissioners for New Mexico’s fourth largest county on Thursday asked a judge to release non-violent jail inmates “during the State of Emergency caused by the COVID-19 virus,” New Mexico In Depth has learned. Sandoval County Attorney Robin Hammer on Thursday filed a three-page petition for writ of mandamus — a fast-tracking procedure used in exceptional circumstances — asking the District Court to blunt the “serious health risk” of the new coronavirus to those inside the jail by releasing people immediately. Hammer’s petition also asks the court to prohibit future bookings of anyone else charged with a misdemeanor or non-violent felony into the detention center until Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham lifts her State of Emergency declaration. The petition is set to be heard Tuesday by Chief District Judge George Eichwald. The move marks the first time a voice from outside New Mexico’s criminal defense community has called for releasing inmates amid the growing COVID-19 crisis.

coronavirus

Attorney alleges ‘deliberate indifference’ to COVID-19 in NM prisons, threatens legal action

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A group of more than two dozen New Mexico prison inmates, many with compromised immune systems, are considering legal claims against the state Corrections Department for its “gross negligence and deliberate indifference to the dangers of COVID-19,” according to documents obtained by SFR and New Mexico In Depth. As the rest of New Mexico remains under an order against gatherings of over 50 people and pleas from officials to practice social distancing, the state’s prison system has not tested any of the thousands of inmates locked up or the corrections officers guarding them. And there do not appear to be contingency plans in place should an outbreak occur. Parrish Collins, an Albuquerque-based attorney who specializes in civil rights, visited clients at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas on March 9, he wrote in a notice sent to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and corrections officials four days later. An officer told him the minimum-security lockup “was taking no precautions against coronavirus.”

“It was indicated that it was not a serious threat and there was nothing to worry about,” Collins wrote in the notice.

coronavirus

Gov says NM is prepared for COVID-19, but what about jails and prisons?

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Huge concertina wire coils and tall, monochrome walls command my attention as I walk through a locked metal gate and out into the prison courtyard. A thick bank of clouds over southern Santa Fe County intensifies the cloistered feel hanging over the Penitentiary of New Mexico, the state’s only Level-6 prison. As I leave the courtyard and return inside, I’m focused on the nearly silent clicking as my colleague takes photos of an empty day room and the sliver-like cells surrounding it for a yet-to-publish story months in the making. But for a moment, something invisible — if it’s even there — distracts me. What if COVID-19 got into a place like this?

Albuquerque Police Department

Racial discrimination claims against Hobbs Police draw unexpected rebuttal

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James Ginger / Courtesy of New Mexico PBS

Shannon Kennedy was “shocked” when she came across a document filed by the defense for the Hobbs Police Department while preparing for a sweeping civil rights trial focused on allegations of racist policing. The well-known Albuquerque lawyer and her partners had hired a police practices expert and a demographer to investigate claims by three former Hobbs Police Department officers, their clients, that department brass pushed them out for raising concerns about targeting black and Hispanic communities. 

The demographer produced a detailed, 15-page report that showed Hobbs PD made a majority of “pedestrian stops” in the city’s heavily black and Hispanic south end and that non-whites were far more likely to find themselves detained by officers in such stops. The demographer’s report, which relied on population mapping and data analysis, was dated July 30, 2019. A few months later, lawyers representing the city of Hobbs, which has a documented history of discriminatory policing, hired its own expert to produce a report on “the perceived issues in the case.” The resulting two-and-a-half-page document says simply the methodology used by the plaintiffs’ demographer — examining stop, detention and arrest rates in certain locations — is “an ineffective and flawed measure” of policing. The report does not address the demographer’s findings.

2020 Legislative Session

Scaled back probation, parole reforms advancing in Legislature

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A legislative effort to reform parts of New Mexico’s probation and parole systems is limping along as lawmakers near the halfway mark of this year’s 30-day session. House Bill 263, with a large group of sponsors from both parties, is meant primarily to decrease the number of people on probation and parole who are sent back to jail or prison for relatively minor infractions, so-called “technical violations.” Those include some failed drug tests and missing appointments with a probation or parole officer. If passed and signed, the measure would mark the beginning of a shift for the Corrections Department’s Probation and Parole Division — from a punitive approach to a more restorative philosophy. 

That means helping people address the underlying issues that keep them in the criminal justice system instead of trying to ensure public safety with jail cells — particularly when considering people who commit lesser offenses. 

That core purpose of the bill has remained intact over the past year, as legislators have worked on a “compromise” version with state prosecutors and others following a dust-up over the proposed reforms after last year’s legislative session. The state House and Senate passed a broader set of changes in 2019, but they met Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s veto pen after Attorney General Hector Balderas and all 14 of New Mexico’s district attorneys sent her a letter outlined fatal problems as they saw them. In her veto message, Lujan Grisham asked sponsors to meet with the prosecutors and iron out their differences.

Criminal Justice

Criminal justice race, ethnicity data may be coming to NM

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A state senator says she’ll push for laws in the coming years to answer a long-troubling question in New Mexico: does the criminal justice system here disproportionately target non-white people? Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, an Albuquerque Democrat and former law professor, tells New Mexico In Depth she was “stunned” to learn during this year’s legislative session, her first in the Senate, that few agencies collect or share data on the race and ethnicity of people caught up in the system. “I thought, how was I not aware of this?,” she said in an interview this week. “It was really weird.”

Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, D-Albuquerque

So Sedillo Lopez is working up a memorial she plans to introduce at the 2020 session, which begins in January, directing the New Mexico Sentencing Commission to study how — and whether — the state’s jails and prisons gather demographic information on people who are locked up or on probation. Though she doesn’t yet have a detailed plan for the next step, she aims to use the study to bolster a bill in 2021 that would “ensure that this data is collected and continues to be collected regardless of who’s in charge.”

The Sentencing Commission says it’ll be glad to do the work.

Criminal Justice

DA with six-figure salary claims poverty, judge grants her free lawyer (updated)

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Editor’s note:New Mexico Chief Public Defender Bennet Baur told NMID reporter Jeff Proctor during an interview in late June that he knew nothing about a public defender being appointed for southern New Mexico district attorney Francesca Estevez. On Monday evening, Baur emailed to say, in fact, his office had hired a private attorney, Keren Fenderson, to file a motion on Estevez’s behalf without informing Estevez. In a telephone interview Tuesday, Baur confirmed that he was unaware of the arrangement at the time of the interview with Proctor. Francesca Estevez is too poor to pay for a lawyer. That’s according to state District Judge Douglas Driggers of Las Cruces, who made the finding in a May 1 court order appointing the public defender’s office to represent Estevez as prosecutors pursue alleged violations of the Government Misconduct Act against her.