Congressional candidate passes on prosecuting bad cops
Fixation on Rio Arriba sheriff but not Albuquerque officers suspected of brutality exposes glaring hole in values former U.S. attorney claims to hold
Congressional candidate Damon Martinez faces a persistent question about his record. He won’t answer it, at least not to my satisfaction.
Martinez, a Democrat, was the U.S. attorney for New Mexico from 2014 until the Trump administration shoved him out the door last March. Now he’s running for the Albuquerque area seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
His tenure as U.S. attorney coincided with the period when the Albuquerque Police Department cemented its national reputation for brutality. The U.S. Department of Justice, with Martinez as its chief prosecutor in New Mexico, found that Albuquerque police had a pattern of using excessive force, including deadly force. Because of its terrible history of abuses, the Albuquerque Police Department is implementing reforms under the supervision of a federal court.
Like every U.S. attorney, Martinez also had the power to bring criminal charges against police officers for civil rights violations. He did so only once, and that case had nothing to do with the Albuquerque Police Department.
Martinez prosecuted a rural sheriff, Tommy Rodella of Rio Arriba County, for roughing up a motorist. Rodella’s case proceeded at near record speed. He was indicted, arrested, tried and convicted in only six weeks.
Martinez didn’t show this same commitment to rooting out bad officers in the Albuquerque Police Department. He never charged any of the police officers who degraded, brutalized and even killed people in the state’s biggest city.
I have no regard for former sheriff Rodella, who was a hothead with a badge. Rodella is serving 10 years in prison for his conviction in the case Martinez’s office brought against him.
But I’ve always wondered why Martinez went after Rodella with such intensity while complaints of abuse against Albuquerque police officers never resulted in a prosecution.
“Each case is different with a different set of facts,” Martinez told me. “I’m still in the position where I can’t discuss specific cases, so I have to be very careful with what I say.”
That’s not good enough, especially from a candidate who says he deserves to be elected based on his record and values. The values of countless people in New Mexico were at odds with those of Albuquerque police officers who needlessly bashed heads.
Martinez then told me it was Rodella’s lawyer who pushed for such a speedy trial. But that doesn’t explain why Martinez never charged a single Albuquerque police officer for using unnecessary force.
We went around the mulberry bush on this question. Martinez was no more forthcoming, regardless of how many times I pressed him on why a sheriff from the hinterlands got so much attention from federal prosecutors while Albuquerque police received so little.
Nobody disputes that every potential prosecution must rise or fall on the facts. And every fair-minded person believes a police officer has a right to defend himself.
But there was and probably still is an ugly truth about prosecutors in Albuquerque, heart of the 1st Congressional District that Martinez wants to represent. They were unwilling to charge bad Albuquerque cops with crimes, perhaps because prosecutors need the police department to win their cases. Martinez didn’t pursue police brutality complaints that should have been prosecuted. Neither did Kari Brandenburg, who was the longtime state prosecutor in Albuquerque.
Here’s just one example: Albuquerque Police Department Detective Christopher Brown shot an unarmed man in the back three times, killing him. Christopher Torres, the 27-year-old man that Brown shot dead, had a history of schizophrenia.
Brown and a fellow detective, Richard Hilger, had gone to Torres’ home to serve him with a warrant in a road rage complaint. They claimed Torres brawled with them in his backyard. The detectives said Torres grabbed Hilger’s gun, so Brown killed him in self-defense.
The state district judge who presided in a civil lawsuit in Torres’ death didn’t believe the detectives.
“There is no credible evidence that Christopher Torres grabbed Detective Hilger’s gun out of the hidden, insidethe-pants holster, held it in a firing position, and threatened either of the detectives,” Judge Shannon Bacon wrote in her decision.
The city of Albuquerque paid a $6 million civil settlement to Torres’ family.
Torres died in 2011, three years before Martinez became U.S. attorney. But the damning civil trial in which the detectives’ story was exposed as fiction happened in 2014, Martinez’s first year as U.S. attorney. Neither he nor Brandenburg filed criminal charges in that case, one that was far worse than the abuses committed by Sheriff Rodella.
Brandenburg, after years of doing nothing about police brutality, filed murder charges against two other Albuquerque officers who shot and killed a homeless man named James Boyd. A jury could not reach a unanimous verdict last October, and a judge declared a mistrial. Martinez and his successor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office also could have prosecuted Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, the officers who killed Boyd in a videotaped display of unnecessary force. They didn’t.
The city of Albuquerque paid a $5 million civil settlement to Boyd’s family.
Martinez told me he’s proud of his record as U.S. attorney. His office, for example, forced The University of New Mexico to change its practices in investigating complaints of sexual assault. Martinez said those who’d been molested or attacked were being victimized a second time by the cold policies of the university. He’s less eager to talk about the chronic problem of police brutality and what he didn’t do about it.
Martinez is one of seven Democrats seeking the nomination for the congressional seat. The odds against him are long. The odds of someone who was brutalized by an Albuquerque police officer getting justice in a criminal court are worse.