Turnover not an excuse in murder case
It was going to take the Santa Fe District Attorney’s Office 22 months to bring a murder case to trial.
Judge T. Glenn Ellington last week ruled that was too long. He dismissed a second-degree murder charge against Robert MondrianPowell, 59, who was quickly released from the county jail.
He’d been incarcerated since his arrest in October 2016 for the death of retired Santa Fe librarian Elvira Segura at her house in Nambé. His case had been scheduled to go to trial in August. Ellington found that the delays violated MondrianPowell’s constitutional right to a speedy trial.
The District Attorney’s Office has cited turnover among prosecutors in the D.A.’s office and a lack of financial resources as a reason for the delays.
There were other issues. Prosecutors blamed “the courts” — a.k.a judges — for a 41-day delay before Mondrian-Powell was arraigned. The D.A.’s office had to get an order from Ellington before a former state Office of the Medical Investigator doctor who was demanding a high fee would give an interview about the autopsy. As of a couple of weeks ago, there were still questions about who actually identified the body at the OMI.
In a response to a defense motion calling for dismissal on speedy trial grounds, the latest lead prosecutor on the case cited turnover and lack of financial resources, and also argued there had been only justifiable delays “due to the copious amount of evidence that was collected, the considerable witnesses that had to be interviewed and the legal issues that defense raised that required pre-trial litigation.”
It seems like the state had a solid case against Mondrian-Powell, who lived in Segura’s house (as a tenant, according to her family). He has confessed to shooting her in the neck, or at least to shooting at her and seeing her bleeding from the neck, but never looking at the body again, after a violent confrontation in the bathroom. Her decomposed body was found there with blood spatters after Mondrian-Powell had left the house.
He held a yard sale at the Nambé home, apparently with her body still inside, before he took off and eventually was arrested in Las Cruces, where Segura’s car was found.
On the defense’s side was a messy autopsy that listed the cause of death as uncertain, despite missing vertebrae consistent with a shot in the neck and circumstances indicating violence. No bullet was found, and heart problems and ingestion of rubbing alcohol and amphetamine were other possibilities for the fatality, the autopsy said
District Attorney Marco Serna has said little about the case since Ellington dismissed the murder charge. Serna is considering an appeal and insisted his office was doing its job despite the ruling of unconstitutional delays in this important case.
It will be interesting to see what arguments Serna and his staff make if they appeal the dismissal. Were delays really unavoidable and is 22 months really too long for an incarcerated defendant to wait for a murder trial? There may be sound arguments against Ellington’s ruling.
But so far the D.A.’s office hasn’t helped itself by whining about staff turnover and funding from the Legislature. A defendant of course has a right to a speedy trial under the U.S. Constitution, regardless of the management difficulties of a particular prosecutor’s office. Turnover happens in all kinds of professional workplaces with tough jobs. Other prosecutors in New Mexico deal with the same funding issues.
Whoever came and went in the D.A.’s office, and whatever of the available budget, a murder case like the death of Elvira Segura should have been enough of a priority to keep its prosecution moving along at a reasonable pace.