First Judicial District gets new judge
McGarry must win election in November to retain seat
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Thursday appointed Kathleen McGarry Ellenwood to fill a newly created judgeship in the First Judicial District, which handles cases in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos counties.
McGarry will be the 10th judge in the district, and she’ll handle primarily a docket of civil cases when she takes the bench in the next week or two.
She has been working as a staff attorney in the First Judicial District, assisting judges with case-related research mostly in civil cases since 2018. But she has done criminal defense work, with a focus on appeals in death penalty cases, for the majority of her career.
In addition to civil cases, she’ll handle abuse, neglect and habeas cases — filed by prisoners seeking liberty — because of her experience in that area.
While in private practice she represented Robert Fry, one of the last two men on New Mexico’s death row, successfully arguing his death sentence should be set aside after the state repealed the death penalty.
McGarry, 64, is originally from
Cleveland, Ohio. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Connecticut College in 1978, according to her application for the judgeship, and graduated from Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law in 1987.
She worked as an appellate supervisor in the death penalty division at the Ohio Public Defender’s Office before moving in 2000 at the behest of her husband, a former Shell Oil executive who had purchased land in Glorieta before they married.
“He said he wanted to retire out here and I said I’ll come take a look,” she said Thursday.” My career was in full swing in Ohio, but [New Mexico] wowed me. It’s such a beautiful area.”
Between 2001 to 2018, McGarry was in private practice but took contract work for the state Public Defender’s
Office, where she handled habeas cases.
She said Thursday she applied for the new judgeship, which the Legislature approved in 2019, in part to get away from that type of work.
“I enjoyed doing the civil work as a staff attorney so much and it was a change and I probably need a change,” she said. “It’s hard to do death penalty work for as long as I did.”
McGarry must win election in the November general election to keep the job, which pays about $96,000 per year.
She said she has never held or run for public office before, and campaigning will be a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But she said her first hurdle will be reaching out to the State Central Committee for the Democratic Party to secure the nomination as the Democratic candidate in November.
McGarry said she did not yet know if she would have a Republican challenger in the race.