Court upholds conviction relying on phone location
The state Supreme Court has upheld the murder convictions of an Albuquerque man who tried to get out of trouble by saying he was sleeping at his mom’s house at the time of the 2011 shootings — though his cellphone location records showed differently.
The court’s ruling in Carlos Joe Carrillo’s case keeps him in prison for the deaths of 23-yearold Christopher Kinney and Lindsey Frost, 18.
It is also the first time the justices have addressed how testimony about cellphones and cellphone technology can be used in trial.
In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Barbara Vigil, the court decided that a layperson can testify about how cellphone companies keep records and what those records mean, but an expert must testify about how cellphone technology works, especially if testifying about how technology can pinpoint where an individual was using a phone. Both issues arose in Carrillo’s trial. Carrillo, a heroin addict on probation at the time of the Dec. 4 shootings, told detectives shortly after his arrest that he’d been home sleeping at the time Kinney and Frost had been killed.
But detectives got cellphone company records that showed about 80 phone calls or texts between Kinney and Carrillo leading up to the 4 a.m. shooting as the couple sat in their truck parked next to Tiguex Park in Old Town. Carrillo, who was also connected to the 2005 death of a 21-year-old man outside an Albuquerque strip club, and Kinney had been arguing over a drug deal.
In addition to the timing of the calls on the call log, the court heard testimony about the location of cell towers that were registering pings from Carrillo’s cellphone.
Carrillo claimed to be home, but the cell tower pinging his phone was located Downtown, not the tower that would have pinged had Carrillo been home.
The justices said that at Carrillo’s trial, the person testifying about the cell tower location was not an official expert and so the entry of that information was a mistake.
It wasn’t, however, a mistake that earns Carrillo a new trial.
A jury found Carrillo guilty in 2013, and he was sentenced to two life sentences, which in New Mexico is 30 years, plus 12½ years in prison. Carrillo is now 37.