Judge: No evidence given to hold rape suspect until trial
Woman is accused of holding down a child relative for assault
SANTA FE — A judge found Monday that prosecutors didn’t include any evidence in a motion to keep a Velarde woman accused of holding down a close family member during a rape in jail until trial.
So state District Judge Jason Lidyard ruled that the woman, Jamie Martinez, 30, be released from incarceration.
Martinez is charged with holding down her close relative, an 8-year-old boy, while her boyfriend, 30-year-old Ezekiel Maestas, raped him. The victim and his 7-year-old brother under-
went sexual assault exams in early June and both showed signs of sexual abuse.
Prosecutor Brett Barnes, of the Santa Fe District Attorney’s Office, had filed a motion to keep Martinez, who was indicted last week, in jail until trial. But Lidyard, who was a prosecutor with the office until he was appointed judge in March, denied the motion Monday because “there is not a single piece of evidence accompanying this motion.”
“The court finds that there is no evidence submitted by the state to establish dangerousness or that no conditions of release could protect the community,” Lidyard said in court.
After receiving a not-guilty plea from Martinez to one count of criminal sexual penetration of a child under 13, Lidyard released her on her own recognizance.
Martinez, who has no criminal history in New Mexico, is allowed to be away from home only between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. She can’t have contact with the victim or his brother and can’t be around other children unless she’s accompanied by an adult 35 or older. She also can’t be around schools, playgrounds or “other places that children frequent,” Lidyard ruled.
Before hearing arguments on the motion, Lidyard said he had no intention of granting it because the motion had only a snippet from a safehouse interview with a child and didn’t even include an arrest warrant affidavit, which Lidyard said he had to obtain himself. “A statement picked out of a safehouse interview and the charging document tells me nothing, so there’s no evidence to even base a ruling on,” Lidyard said.
Barnes responded by saying that the information taken from the safehouse interview, where the 8-year-old detailed an alleged rape, was enough to show that Martinez is a danger to the community.
“Those (parts of the interview) do have specificity,” he said.
This is the most recent ruling in a high-profile case that didn’t go in favor of the District Attorney’s Office. On June 22, Judge T. Glenn Ellington dropped a second-degree murder charge and other counts against Robert Mondrian-Powell, charged in the 2016 death of a Nambé woman, after finding that his rights to a speedy trial had been violated by prosecutors’ delays.
A pretrial detention hearing was also scheduled for Maestas on Monday, but it was postponed because he still doesn’t have a lawyer. Barnes said in court that charges regarding the 7-year-old boy are still in the investigative stage.