Two-time killer seeks to withdraw plea
Christopher Blattner claims he was high on LSD during court hearing
A federal judge this week rejected a request by longtime meth user and two-time killer Christopher Blattner, who said he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea to federal narcotics and gun charges because he was high on LSD when he entered the plea last October.
Blattner, who at the time of the plea hearing was imprisoned as a federal detainee at the Santa Fe County Detention Center for manufacturing methamphetamine in 2012 and carrying a Glock semi-automatic while doing so, claimed he didn’t know he had a court date the next day and had taken LSD.
When he tried to withdraw later, he said he didn’t comprehend what was going on during the earlier hearing — even though he told the chief magistrate judge 30 or 40 times that he did.
In asking to withdraw his plea, Blattner said he had eaten an inch-square paper with LSD provided by an inmate friend between 9 and 10:45 the night before the October hearing and was “still tripping.”
In testimony before U.S. District Judge James Browning in November, Blattner said that, during the plea hearing, the carpet looked wavy, as if it were liquid, people looked fake and scary, and the judge kept smiling. And then there was the federal prosecutor. “You looked like one of those dwarves from freaking ‘Lord of the Rings’ — just, wow, man. It was a scary situation, visual hallucination,”
Blattner said to Assistant U.S. Attorney Presiliano Torrez about that day.
He rebuffed Torrez’s suggestion that he could have told the judge he did not understand what was happening if he were so impaired.
“Then things would have gotten much worse,” Blattner said. “I probably would have ended up naked in some freaking psych cell. I’m scared (expletive) anyway.”
Long rap sheet
In addition to the federal narcotics and gun charges, Blattner has pleaded no contest in state court to voluntary manslaughter in the August 2012 abduction and murder of former teacher Katherine “Kathy” Paquin, 62. Her body is believed to have been dismembered and has never been located.
And he pleaded no contest to second-degree murder with a firearm enhancement in the death of George Orozco in 2007 and to aggravated assault on a peace officer in 2007. He also admits having four prior felony convictions for trafficking or possessing methamphetamine and heroin.
Acting as his own lawyer, Blattner is also trying to set aside the convictions in the Paquin and Orozco cases.
The federal plea he asked Browning to set aside in November commits Blattner to 30 years in prison. Although his state court plea to two slayings and corresponding sentence to 28 years orders that his state and federal prison time run simultaneously, issues of jurisdiction mean that will not happen, according to court documents.
Torrez suggested that was the true motive for the LSD claim, but Blattner denied it.
In the November hearing, Blattner lectured Torrez when the prosecutor asked about his previous convictions, saying they were irrelevant. And he refused to name his LSD supplier, insisting that he wasn’t a snitch and didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble.
Blattner’s refusal to name the inmate who allegedly supplied the LSD was significant in the court’s rejection this week.
Browning said it meant there was no way to verify the claim. And other witnesses during three days of testimony last fall had testified that LSD was virtually unheard of in prison, though a cornucopia of other drugs was available, as indicated by what was confiscated.
Blattner himself testified that he had used heroin, suboxone and meth while in prison. He agreed that LSD was unusual, but said that he had used enough in his life to know it was the real thing.
“That plea agreement was a big surprise for me. I walked into this courtroom, high ... on acid, and you guys slapped 30 years in front of my face right there. That’s what happened,” he said during the November hearing.
In his state legal documents, Blattner claims his lawyers sold their plea deal to him as a package and says his attorneys in both state or federal proceedings were deficient.
“The no contest plea (to the murders) was taken from the basement of the federal court via speakerphone. My state attorney failed to inform me fully on what I was agreeing to and even went as far as to verbally abuse me in a meeting one week prior as I voiced having doubts,” he says in the petition.
The state sentencing agreement called for prosecutors to drop charges against Blattner’s ex-wife, Brittany, and called for Blattner to work with Albuquerque police detectives investigating Paquin’s death, “including providing information on the circumstances of death and the location of her remains.”
But he has not divulged Paquin’s whereabouts.
The civil lawsuit
A civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Paquin’s daughter Cheri Rodriguez, meanwhile, argues that Blattner should never have been free in the first place — either when he killed Orozco in 2007 or five years later when he killed Paquin and dismembered her corpse.
It contends that the New Mexico Corrections Department and Guadalupe County Detention Center contractor GEO Group made egregious mistakes and that no one checked Blattner’s prison file before releasing him on parole on his earlier felony convictions.
Corrections officials have publicly acknowledged mistakes in handling Blattner, but the lawsuit says no one has owned up to the full extent of the mistakes and, in fact, have offered misleading or incomplete statements.
When Blattner was sentenced in 2007 for crimes two years earlier, he had 30 days to turn himself in. He didn’t. And the Corrections Department failed to notice, the civil lawsuit says.
He was arrested a year and a half later only after a “concerned citizen” called law enforcement saying Blattner was still loose. It was during this period that Orozco, 36, was murdered and his body dumped by the Route 66 Casino.
Mistaken release
Blattner was paroled from the GEO-run prison in Santa Rosa in February 2012, when he should have been incarcerated another three years.
Within months of his release, Blattner was seen at Paquin’s home, and U.S. Secret Service officials learned of fraudulent withdrawals from Paquin’s bank account.
On Aug. 14, 2012, he was tracked to a Northeast Heights home where he engaged in a nine-hour standoff with police. Brittany Blattner, who had been with him, exited the house, but Blattner stayed put. The gun used by Blattner, who as a convicted felon could not legally buy one, had been purchased for him by a straw buyer, a woman who was married to a police officer and was the daughter of another officer.
Matt Garcia, the attorney representing Paquin’s daughter, says in the court pleadings that Blattner’s prison file was fat with court records, transport orders and other documents reflecting that he had pending charges while he was still in prison, and later that he had entered a plea and been sentenced.
“Neither GEO nor (Corrections) staff ever looked at these materials, even though they were required to do so,” the lawsuit says.
GEO disputes that the mistaken early release led to Paquin’s death.
It says the murder was unforeseeable, Blattner initially complied with his strict parole conditions, and it was the Corrections and Parole Board who released Blattner.
GEO “has no control whatsoever over Blattner after his release,” a company filing says.