Suspect to serve out time
Man mistakenly released from jail wanted in murder case
ADistrict Court judge remanded a suspect into county jail Thursday — months after he was mistakenly released and had to be tracked down by U.S. Marshals. Judge Stanley Whitaker ordered Matthew Joe, 30, to serve the remainder of his sentence stemming from a plea deal on multiple stolen vehicle charges.
Whitaker originally sentenced Joe to a year in jail May 8 — only to release him hours later after a Metropolitan Detention Center employee made a “typo” in Joe’s booking sheet, which made it look like he had already served a year.
Afterward, warrants were put out for
Joe’s arrest and U.S. Marshals found him at his mother’s home near Thoreau earlier this month.
“The idea was to have him do time in MDC for a year — we haven’t fulfilled that at this point,” Whitaker said during Thursday’s hearing, pointing out that Joe had served only 106 days in jail.
Standing beside his attorney Courtney Aronowsky, Joe told Whitaker that the judge gave him “good time” — or the ability to get his sentence shortened for good behavior — during his sentencing in May.
“You weren’t going to give me good time — and I begged you if you could reconsider that and you did reconsider that,” he said.
Whitaker told Joe he couldn’t remember if good time was “authorized or even discussed” during the original hearing.
“I’ve had two hundred cases come since that time,” Whitaker said. “If that’s what we discussed, that’s where we’re going with it.”
Whitaker set a hearing for Sept. 27 to look at the possibility of Joe being given good time — which would shorten the remainder of his sentence to 59 days.
Police say Joe is a suspect in the July 2017 slaying of 36-year-old Jaime Dimas, who was trying to thwart a robbery when he was gunned down in southeast Albuquerque. A homicide detective turned over the case against Joe to the 2nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office in May, but it has yet to indict him.
DA spokesman Michael Patrick told the Journal Thursday prosecutors are waiting on a cellphone warrant before filing charges, but “are preparing for an indictment” against Joe.
The pending homicide case and mistaken release was publicized in early August and Aronowsky emphasized to Whitaker that Thursday’s hearing concerned only the stolen vehicle charges against Joe.
“Anything else that’s being discussed on the news or whatever is not relevant to what we are doing here today,” she said.
After the hearing, Joe’s sister Clara Joe and his wife Gabriella Muniz hugged each other outside the courtroom.
Muniz called Whitaker’s decision to remand Joe “a big disappointment” and said it was the jail’s fault for releasing him in the first place.
“They let him go and he was doing so good — such a big change — just to go back,” she said.