New Living Treasures
The honorees this fall are restaurateur Georgia Maryol, former state Rep. Jamie Koch, and philanthropists and volunteers Bill and Jane Buchsbaum.
In the two-way race for an open seat on the state Supreme Court, the differences between Gary Clingman and Michael E. Vigil are outlined by New Mexico’s geography, judicial philosophy and professional history.
A Republican who currently sits on the state Supreme Court, Hobbs’ Clingman was appointed by Gov. Susana Martinez earlier this year to fill a seat vacated by Justice Edward Chávez, who retired in March.
His Democratic opponent, Court of Appeals Judge Vigil of Albuquerque, is making another bid for a seat on the state Supreme Court after losing in 2016 to Chief Justice Judith Nakamura.
The candidates, though collegial, offer starkly differing opinions on how far the court should go to influence policy.
“I think the judiciary’s role should be restricted,” Clingman said. “The judiciary should hear cases before it and decide those cases and not make expansive rulings.”
Though Vigil agrees there are lines the judiciary should not cross, he said he would approach the bench with a laundry list of judicial topics he’d like to explore — from the management of lower courts to potential tweaks to the state’s system for appeals.
Clingman, 67, graduated from high school in Oklahoma in 1970 and worked as a mechanic and in the oil fields for
a short time before working as a police officer. He was a cop from 1972-82, attending night school for many of those years while he worked toward his bachelor’s degree at the University of Texas, Permian Basin.
After graduating from law school at Texas Tech University, Clingman moved to Hobbs, where he spent more than a decade trying civil and criminal cases for the Maddox Law Firm, and later became the longestserving chief judge for the 5th Judicial District Court.
Clingman has lived at the same address in Hobbs for the past 32 years; he cited geographical diversity as a key reason he should be on the Supreme Court.
“It’s been 25 years since we’ve had anybody on the court who was not a product of Albuquerque or Santa Fe,” Clingman said. “The laws should be the same for anybody in the state; there is no question about that, but how those laws are implemented can have very different consequences depending on where you might be.”
He points to what he calls the “Texas doctor case” as an example.
In that case, Clingman said, the Court of Appeals ruled out-ofstate doctors could be held liable for medical malpractice against New Mexicans in New Mexico courts, even if the operation in question happened elsewhere.
That might not have had a big effect on people who have access to hospitals in Albuquerque or Santa Fe, Clingman said, but “the folks around the edge of the state” faced major consequences when Texas doctors started refusing treatment for insurance reasons. (The decision was later overturned by the state Supreme Court, Clingman said.)
As a Supreme Court justice, Clingman said he can help add a rural perspective to the court.
He added his years of refereeing high school football helped toughen him up to make fair calls.
“If you can call back the winning touchdown in front of 12,000 people,” Clingman said, “sending somebody to the pen for burglary is a no-brainer.”
Vigil has long desired a spot on the state Supreme Court. He’s hoping his third bid will be the charm.
“Recognizing and understanding and seeing the rule of law being formulated at that level, for all the people across the state of New Mexico,” Vigil said, “is something that has just kept me in awe.”
Vigil said there are a number of things he’d like the court to review. For example, he wants to help clarify rules that govern when a judge can decide to hold a criminal in jail because they could be too dangerous to release or could be considered a flight risk. As an appeals court judge, Vigil says he is intimately familiar with the nuances of those new pretrial detention rules, since he’s weighed in on many cases raising challenges with those new rules.
“What I want to do is … clarify them, simplify them, make them easy to understand, make them easy to apply,” Vigil said, “so judges that are getting this cases and the [district attorneys] that are filing these motions across the state know what they’re dealing with.”
In addition, Vigil said, he’d like to explore whether prosecutors should be able to appeal a judge’s sentence if they think it’s too light. At the moment, he said, there is no path for appeal for prosecutors unhappy about a lenient sentence.
Vigil hopes to carry over public outreach he’s done over the years, including visiting fifthgrade classes for Constitution Day and trying cases in front of high school students so they can see the judicial process in action.
Vigil lives in Albuquerque and has served on the State Court of Appeals for 15 years.