City seeks reversal of Hawkes case ruling
Judge granted family’s request for sanctions against city before trial
City attorneys are asking an Albuquerque judge to reconsider her decision to impose “severe” sanctions against the city in a lawsuit centered on the death of Mary Hawkes, a teenage car theft suspect shot and killed by a police officer in 2014.
District Judge Nan Nash granted Hawkes’ family’s request for sanctions against the city, finding that “numerous” failures by the city police department left the family without access to the best evidence in the case. Nash ruled that at trial, the jury will be instructed that the shooting of Hawkes was unreasonable as a matter of law and that it proximately caused her death. Attorneys representing her family said that means a trial will focus only on damages, and they won’t have to determine whether the shooting was reasonable.
In a motion asking Nash to reconsider, Deputy City Attorney Stephanie Griffin argued, among other things, that the sanction deprives the city of its due process right to a fair trial by preventing a jury from assessing the reasonableness of the shooting. And she says several findings of fact that Nash lists in her ruling are not supported by substantial evidence.
The plaintiffs’ original argument focused on 10 items of evidence that they said were improperly preserved. That evidence includes a series of Albuquerque Police Department videos recorded the night of the shooting, along with an array of malfunctions that officers said prevented their cameras from recording the encounter between Hawkes and then-officer Jeremy Dear.
The family’s attorneys said that some videos the city provided had been altered, and in the cases where an officer’s camera malfunctioned, the device itself should have been preserved.
Nash said the failure to record the shooting was “disturbing and suspicious” but did not merit sanctions. But she said the city was at fault for failing to preserve the cameras.
In the latest motion, Griffin wrote the city “complied with its obligation to preserve” videos from that night, by uploading all relevant footage to an online evidence website. The cameras themselves aren’t “obvious evidence” and the city was not on notice that the items needed to be preserved for the family’s use, Griffin wrote.
She added that the city still has the cameras, but that plaintiffs have never asked to inspect them. But attorneys for the plaintiffs have argued that the cameras were not properly preserved as evidence and it’s not clear who may have had access to them.
Laura Schauer Ives, attorney for the plaintiffs, said that the city’s motion simply recycles failed arguments, and she does not believe it will be successful. She said she plans to ask the court to deny the motion and award plaintiffs the fees resulting from “needless hours” spent responding to the request.
“If this administration had spent even half the time its wasted on defending its bad decisions on improving APD, the city would be in a much better place today,” Ives said in a statement.
A city spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.