Man set on fire acquitted in intimidation case
Police agent said he felt threatened by ‘throat slashing gesture’ at woman’s February trial
Ahh love. A Chimayó man never wanted his wife prosecuted for dousing his face with chainsaw fuel and setting him on fire during a domestic dispute, lawyers said at her trial, because he still loved her.
And Tuesday, a Santa Fe County jury acquitted him of threatening or intimidating a witness for making what prosecutors described as a “throat slashing gesture” at a New Mexico State Police investigator while testifying at his wife’s February trial for aggravated battery.
The lawyer for 57-year-old James Coriz told jurors that he had meant the gesture as a way to indicate he was tired of answering questions about the incident.
However, while the jury was deliberating Tuesday, Coriz told The New Mexican that he had simply been itching his neck, which is heavily scarred from the 2015 incident involving his 44-year-old wife, Layla Coriz.
Footage taken from a video camera in the courtroom showed him making the motion of drawing his finger across his throat while he sat on the witness stand and the officer sat at the prosecution table.
But the state had the burden of proving Coriz intended the gesture as a threat.
State prosecutors argued that Coriz made the gesture directly at state police agent Jessie Whittaker in an attempt to intimidate him before the lawman testified in Layla Coriz’s trial.
“I considered it to be a threatening motion,” Whittaker testified Tuesday, adding that he had pushed his chair back and moved a bag out of the way in case James Coriz decided to leave the witness stand and charge at him. “He was looking directly at me and was making eye contact with me.”
Whittaker took the stand anyway at the trial of Layla Coriz, who was found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison with 18 months suspended, a sentence
that essentially amounted to time already served while incarcerated prior to her trial.
During a lunch break in the February trial, the state police agent had told a Santa Fe County sheriff ’s deputy about the gesture and, after viewing video, the deputy filed a report, which the District Attorney’s Office used as the basis to charge James Coriz with threatening or intimidating a witness, a third-degree felony that could have landed him in jail for up to three years.
Coriz’s lawyer, public defender Kristen Dickey, said the move by prosecutors only served to further victimize her client, who had already suffered by being set on fire by his wife and then forced to testify at her trial.
After Tuesday’s daylong trial, which included testimony from jurors from the February trial, jurors deliberated for about four hours before finding James Coriz not guilty.
He declined to comment after the verdict was read, except to say he was “happy.”