Trial attorneys seek audit after evidence lost in S.F. murder case

Prosecutor agrees with public defender that independent inquiry is warranted

Prosecution and defense attorneys agree that a judge should order an independent audit of evidence gathered in a Santa Fe murder case after the city police department admitted some items disappeared from its evidence room.

Christopher Garcia, 28, faces a first-degree murder charge in the June 22, 2017, killing of 21-year-old Selena Valencia, who was found stabbed more than a dozen times in the apartment they shared in southwest Santa Fe. Police arrested Garcia a few hours later.

Public Defender Jennifer Burrill in July asked a judge to throw out the case after police acknowledged they couldn’t find 11 pieces of evidence, including hairs found on Valencia’s body and her fingernail clippings. Prosecutors had asked for those and other evidence to be sent to a lab for testing before a scheduled October trial.

Burrill said in a motion filed Thursday that after her staff asked police about audits of the evidence room dating back to 2017, they were told no annual audits had been conducted since that time, even though department policy requires annual audits of property in the evidence room as well as unannounced semiannual random inspections.

Chief Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Padgett said in an email Friday that her office agreed to a stipulated order for an independent audit of evidence held by the police department in the case. The order, which asks for an auditor to be selected by Aug. 16 and completion of the audit within

14 days, awaits a judge’s decision.

Burrill argued that improper care of evidence goes to the heart of the judicial process.

“This is evidence … that can either convict somebody of a crime, or acquit somebody of a crime,” Burrill told The New Mexican on Friday. “That’s the basis of our entire judicial system.”

Burrill said that while the scope of her motion only included evidence in the Garcia case, a full independent audit of the Santa Fe Police Department’s evidence room may be warranted.

In an Aug. 7 written response to Burrill’s team, included as an exhibit in her filing, police spokesman and records custodian Greg Gurulé said examinations of the evidence room were made in December 2018 and February 2019.

Those were apparently unannounced semiannual random inspections in which Lt. Sean Strahon each time looked at evidence from nine different cases and found the evidence room “clean” and “orderly.” No full annual audits were documented over those three years.

“We are working to put an auditing system in place at this time,” Gurulé wrote.

Burrill wrote in her motion: “Defense counsel is hampered in its ability to raise issues of reliability of evidence, integrity of evidence, contamination of evidence, tampering of evidence, and the credibility of the officers involved in the collection and storage of evidence without knowing which evidence, collected and stored by the Santa Fe Police Department more than two years ago, is still in their custody after learning they lost 11 pieces of evidence and do not conduct the required full annual audits as dictated by their own policies and procedures.”

In a June 28 letter to the District Attorney’s Office acknowledging evidence was missing, Capt. Paul Joye, head of the criminal investigations division, said the department was addressing the issue and “revamping” its evidence room and how items are catalogued.

On July 5, the department issued a statement saying it was “deeply disappointed” by the missing evidence and had begun an internal investigation to find out why it couldn’t be found as well as to evaluate evidence management practices and reevaluate policies and procedures.

The department maintained the missing evidence “is not the only evidence in the case that shows Christopher Garcia is the person responsible for the death of Selena Valencia.”

Santa Fe police did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment on evidence room policies, the progress of the department’s internal investigation or a potential independent audit.

A hearing on Burrill’s motion to have the charges against Garcia dismissed because of the lost evidence is scheduled for late September.