Plea accepted in vehicular homicide case

Ranchos de Taos man given 5 years in cannabis DWI incident that left 50-year-old man dead

A Ranchos de Taos man accepted a plea deal this week in a vehicular homicide case accusing him of causing a crash that killed a man in 2019 while he was driving under the influence of cannabis.

Jhovany Garcia, 25, was sentenced Tuesday to five years in prison and an additional five years of probation, the maximum sentence under the deal, which required him to plead guilty to the vehicular homicide charge but led to dismissal of a count of tampering with evidence.

A criminal complaint says a Rio Arriba County deputy responded to the head-on collision Sept.

27, 2019, on U.S. 285. The other driver, 50-year-old Jose Rafael Ramirez-Mendoza, was transported to an emergency room in Taos, where he died.

Garcia told the deputy he had fallen asleep at the wheel, according to the complaint. The deputy noted in the complaint Garcia’s eyes were red and his responses were slowed and delayed.

Garcia said he had smoked about a gram of cannabis an hour before being questioned by deputies. He also hid his smoking paraphernalia under a bush and covered it with dirt, the complaint says.

“I didn’t want to get in trouble,” Garcia told deputies.

Garcia’s attorney, James Plummer, wrote in a statement his client accepted the plea deal because he is deeply remorseful and wants to accept responsibility for his actions.

However, Plummer added, he was not content with Garcia’s sentence.

“Five years in prison won’t restore the community nor repair the loss this family suffered,” Plummer wrote. “Jhovany and

I are discussing the options for asking the judge to reconsider the sentence.”

State prosecutor Douglas Wood said several factors were taken into consideration when developing the plea deal, from a lack of a set metric to gauge levels of cannabis intoxication; Garcia’s cooperation and apparent remorse; and statements he made to law enforcement indicating cannabis played a factor in his “problematic driving.”

“We felt like this was a reasonable compromise,” Wood said. “We did not want to compromise it further, because it is still a DWI case and a homicide — a death by DWI case.”

Since the incident, recreational cannabis has been legalized in New Mexico. While the move had raised some concerns about whether the state would see a rise in DWI cases from increased use of cannabis, Ben Lewinger, executive director of the New Mexico Cannabis Chamber of Commerce, said he doesn’t expect that to occur.

“The decisions made by people who use cannabis are very different than the decisions made by people who are intoxicated [from alcohol],” Lewinger said. “There’s no cannabis equivalent of liquid courage” for getting behind the wheel.

Still, Lewinger, who has worked for Mothers Against Drunk Driving in the past, said people under influence of cannabis should not drive. Cannabis can cause impairment, he acknowledged. “I just don’t expect [cannabis DWIs] to be as big a problem.”