DA recruits 5 prosecutors to review police shooting
Serna: New process for deadly incidents avoids conflict-of-interest claims
First-term District Attorney Marco Serna announced Tuesday that he has recruited five district attorneys from around the state to serve on a panel that will review the April 29 fatal shooting by police of a 28-year-old Santa Fe man.
The case involves Officer Leonardo Guzman of the Santa Fe Police Department, who shot and killed Andrew James Lucero following a vehicle pursuit that ended in Eldorado. Police said Lucero, who was suspected of stealing a Mercedes, was killed after he jumped into a police patrol car and tried to flee.
Serna said while campaigning for office last year that he planned to change the way the prosecutor’s office handles cases in which police use deadly force. Instead of filing charges himself or asking a grand jury to decide whether an officer-involved shooting was justified, he would have a committee of district attorneys review the evidence.
A former Santa Fe district attorney, Angela “Spence” Pacheco, presented such cases to a grand jury in closeddoor proceedings. That process came under scrutiny after a grand jury deliberated for less than an hour before deciding that a state police officer was justified in shooting 39-year-old Jeanette Anaya. The incident happened in 2013 following a car chase in Santa Fe after Anaya failed to stop for an officer who tried to pull her over for a traffic violation.
Nine months later, the state paid Anaya’s family more than $3 million to keep it from suing over the shooting death, but the state didn’t release the details of the settlement until 2017.
Serna said having prosecutors from other districts review police shootings instead of doing it himself is a way to address concerns he heard on the campaign trail about actual or perceived conflicts of interest that might occur when a district attorney investigates law-enforcement offi-
cers with whom he works.
Serna said in an email Tuesday that 90 percent of the people he talked to while campaigning brought up the issue and said they didn’t like the grand jury process because they don’t get to see the process. Serna said people also told him there was “at least a perceived conflict of interest” in having the local district attorney make the call.
“You hear about this not only in Santa Fe, but at the national level as well,” Serna said.
Serna said the district attorneys who will review Guzman’s use of deadly force are Raul Torrez of Albuquerque; Richard Flores of Las Vegas, N.M.; Donald Gallegos of Taos; Tim Rose of Tucumcari; and Robert “Rick” Tedrow of Farmington.
Serna said the panel should be able to make a determination about the case within a month or two.
That would be in keeping with his earlier estimate that the panel would act within six months of a shooting.
Serna said he plans to use the same process to review the shooting of Anthony Benavidez, 24, who was fatally shot by Santa Fe police officers July 19, but that the next panel may have only three members.
Contact Phaedra Haywood at 505-986-3068 or phaywood@sfnewmexican.com. Follow her on Twitter @phaedrann.