Lenient verdict in death of doctor shows flaws in laws

LIFE IS cheap in New Mexico. This was the statement of a 25-year veteran of the Albuquerque Police Department when a gullible jury delivered a mindlessly lenient verdict in the vehicular homicide trial of Sara Casados.

As charged, Casados could have gotten 12 years for recklessly driving at 71 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone, crashing into a stopped car, killing the driver and fleeing the scene.

By the time the jury got through gutting the charges, the maximum to which Casados could be sentenced was 21 months; Judge Cristina Jaramillo gave her every bit of it. It wasn’t enough, but it was everything the judge had available and it sent an unforgettable message: the carnage has to stop.

The victim of this tragedy, Dr. Teodora Konstantinova, will never be forgotten by the community she served — as a physician, a professor at the University of New Mexico and as creator of the hospitalist program at the VA hospital in Albuquerque. She will also be remembered for this trial, in which a no-nonsense judge made an eloquent statement about the value of a human life. We are all safer because of it. But we are not nearly safe enough.

Juries will keep on getting fooled and manipulative lawyers will keep on fooling them. Our criminal code needs to be revised — a big job that must be done right away. Before the Casados case even went to trial, it went to the Supreme Court of New Mexico for a ruling on the level of intent that the prosecution would be required to prove. This is more than a mere technicality; if the Supreme Court had ruled the way the defense hoped it would, the state’s case would have been, effectively, unwinnable.

In a word, the vehicular homicide statute is a mess — and it is only one of many New Mexico criminal statutes that desperately need to be fixed.

ROBERT SOBEL Santa Fe