Weekend won’t lessen sting of Boyd decision

Raúl Torrez, the freshman district attorney of Bernalillo County, has learned one political lesson all too well. He waited until 4 p.m. Friday, just before he would escape for the weekend, to announce that he will not retry former Albuquerque police officers Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez for murder.

Gov. Susana Martinez did something similar at 3:26 p.m. Friday. She publicly released her 2-day-old executive order consolidating human resource offices throughout state government.

Torrez and Martinez announced controversial decisions at the end of the workweek to lessen media scrutiny and public attention. Martinez has been a politician for 21 years, so she’s well-versed in ways to limit a story to a one-day news cycle.

But Torrez campaigned as a fresh voice who would put the public’s interest first. He is off to a bad start with his use of the Friday night news dump.

Torrez revealed much about himself in the way he handled his first big decision as a district attorney. By dropping the murder case against the former officers, Torrez showed that he is less concerned with seeking justice than with how the Albuquerque Police Department will view him.

There was — and still is — a criminal case to be

made against Perez and especially against Sandy.

They were among 19 police officers who descended in three waves on a Sandia hillside where a homeless man, James Boyd, had camped illegally and then threatened officers. This overwhelming show of force against one troubled, schizophrenic man demonstrated that the command staff of the Albuquerque Police Department quickly lost control of what should have been a minor incident.

Sandy, like a schoolyard bully, pushed himself into the police showdown with Boyd. Sandy arrived with a stun gun and a bad attitude, his own words proving that he was interested in escalating the case to violence.

Sandy denigrated Boyd as a “[bleeping] lunatic,” and said he wanted to shoot Boyd with the stun gun.

Boyd, 38, later packed his few belongings and surrendered. But after he started to walk down an embankment to the waiting officers, they fired a flash grenade and sicced a police dog on him, reviving the confrontation. Boyd pulled out and held two pocketknives, but made no move toward an officer. Sandy and Perez then fired a volley of rifle shots that killed Boyd.

Police video of the shooting depicts more than Boyd’s last conscious moment on Earth. It demonstrated that Albuquerque police, true to their reputation, formed a large tactical squad to engage in violence when they had other options. Perez and Sandy killed a man that a good police force would have captured unharmed.

Torrez’s predecessor waited almost a year before doing anything about the case. Then she charged Sandy and Perez with murder. Defense lawyers succeeded in getting the former district attorney removed on the appearance of a conflict. A special prosecutor, Randi McGinn, tried the case last fall. Jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict, favoring acquittal, 9-3.

Then McGinn did something that a good prosecutor never would have considered. She offered to drop all charges against Perez, the less culpable shooter, if Sandy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. Since when does a prosecutor offer to dismiss a murder case against one defendant if the other pleads guilty to a greatly reduced charge? Sandy rejected the plea offer, so McGinn’s ugly attempt at deal-making became moot.

Torrez didn’t have a tough act to follow. But he ducked for cover on the Boyd case soon after taking office as district attorney in January. He farmed out the case for a review by other district attorneys. Torrez was elected to make judgments on prosecutions, not to rely on lawyers from other jurisdictions to weigh in, just because the defendants were police officers. Torrez also said two experienced prosecutors from his own office concurred with the outsiders’ recommendation not to retry Sandy and Perez.

And so, in the announcement carefully timed for Friday afternoon, the new district attorney ended the state’s case against Sandy and Perez.

Sam Bregman, Sandy’s lawyer, spent his Friday night crowing about Torrez’s decision.

“This case should never have been charged in the first place,” Bregman said, continuing his specious claim that police had no choice but to kill Boyd.

Bregman didn’t stop there. “Being a police officer is a noble job, and these two officers did their job as they were trained,” he said. “The whole community should be grateful and thankful for their service to us all.”

For all his redundancy, Bregman isn’t persuasive. All I’m thankful for is that Keith Sandy is no longer a police officer. Here’s hoping that Sandy, who’s still in his early 40s, doesn’t come out of retirement.