Ninth DWI equals 8 years in prison
Judge ignores mother’s leniency plea for Santa Fe man, 53, who is raising 9-year-old daughter
A 53-year-old Santa Fe man was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison and two years under house arrest for pleading guilty to his ninth drunken-driving offense.
Kevin Patrick Ortiz’s mother begged for leniency, telling the judge that incarcerating the single father of a 9-year-old girl would be a hardship for the child and the family.
Before his April arrest, after leading a police officer on a chase through the South Capitol neighborhood, Ortiz’s most recent DWI arrest had been in 2009.
But state District Judge T. Glenn Ellington said when the state Legislature decided that 10 years incarceration would be mandatory for eighth and subsequent DWI convictions in New Mexico, lawmakers were saying “enough” to repeat drunken drivers.
House arrest with electronic monitoring counts as incarceration in New Mexico.
Ortiz spent about 10 months in jail waiting for this case to be resolved and time that will be credited against his sentence.
He told Ellington the longest he had ever been incarcerated on his previous convictions was one year and that he’d never undergone inpatient treatment for alcoholism despite having struggled with the addiction for much of his life.
“I don’t know why you were never sent to treatment before,” the judge said. “It should have happened a long time ago, around the second, third or fourth. And the fact what you never served time in custody is also disturbing.”
Assistant District Attorney Todd Bullion played footage taken from the dash camera of
the arresting officer’s vehicle in April, which showed Ortiz continuing to drive for about 10 minutes after the officer turned on his emergency lights and siren.
During that time minutes Ortiz led the officer on a relatively slow-speed chase — between 25 and 30 miles an hour — running several stops signs, driving the wrong way on Don Gaspar Avenue and side-swiping a parked car along the way.
Bullion said that when Ortiz eventually pulled over, he fled on foot, forcing the officer to chase him until he caught him trying to jump over a wall.
Ortiz’s defense attorney, Robert Aragon, argued his client was a hard-working man who had battled valiantly against his addiction, at times abstaining from drinking for years at time, but inevitably continued to relapse because that is the nature of addiction.
He asked the court to spare Ortiz from going to the state penitentiary and instead impose a combination of probation and treatment that would equip his client, a master carpenter, to win his struggle with alcoholism once and for all.
“This is all caused by my drinking,” Ortiz told the judge. “I hate it and want it out of my life. I know I did a really stupid thing and broke the law and need to be punished. It’s about time I start being honest with myself and those that love me.”
Ellington said he wasn’t sending Ortiz to prison because Ortiz is an alcoholic, but because of the risk Ortiz posed to the community when he decided to get behind the wheel of a three-ton vehicle while intoxicated.
The judge likened Ortiz’ actions to shooting a loaded gun down an open road.
“If I read an obituary in the paper tomorrow morning that you had died of cirrhosis of the liver or something I would feel very bad,” the judge said. “But if I got up and read that you had killed a family… that would make me very angry.”