Jury begins deliberations in Rio Arriba sheriff’s trial
On final day, defense points out witness inconsistencies
TIERRA AMARILLA — The fate of Rio Arriba County Sheriff James Lujan now is in the hands of a jury.
A jury of eight women and four men got the case late Thursday afternoon and deliberated for about an hour and a half before going home with plans to continue deliberations Friday.
Lujan, 60, is being tried on charges of harboring or aiding a felon and bribing a witness in connection with a 2017 incident.
He is accused of helping former Española City Councilor Phillip Chacon evade police after a high-speed chase and telling a sheriff ’s deputy who witnessed some of his actions not to tell anyone.
Española police began pursuing Chacon after he attempted to back into a police vehicle and failed to pull over despite the officer’s use of lights and sirens. The chase reached speeds up to 110 miles per hour before officers abandoned the pursuit due to the danger to the community.
Lujan is alleged to have gone to Chacon’s house after Chacon evaded police, told him to gather his belongings and took him away instead of surrendering him to police, despite knowing about the chase.
Former Rio Arriba County Deputy Cody Lattin testified earlier in the week he encountered Lujan on the road and Lujan told Lattin to follow him to Chacon’s home so Lattin could help serve a restraining order requiring Chacon to leave the premises.
Lattin testified he saw Chacon emerge from the house with a duffel bag and get into Lujan’s unmarked patrol vehicle, and he believed Chacon should have been taken directly to Española police but feared for his job if he reported the incident.
Prosecutors played recordings Thursday, the second day of testimony, of phone calls Lujan made to the 911 dispatch center the night of the incident.
In one of the recordings — some of which were garbled in parts — it sounded like Lujan asked a dispatcher to call him on his cellphone to discuss the case, which a 911 dispatch employee testified was against department policy.
In another call, recorded the following morning, Lujan asked a dispatcher what the charges against him were and which judge signed the warrant for his arrest on charges of aggravated fleeing.
Ninth Judicial District Attorney Andrea Reeb, a special prosecutor, pointed to the recordings as evidence Lujan was trying to protect Chacon.
But defense attorney Jason Bowles argued the call the morning after the incident — in which he asked about the charges against Chacon — showed Lujan really didn’t know what was going on the night before.
“There is no testimony whatsoever in this case that he knew,” Bowles said in his closing argument. “And if that element goes away, the whole count goes away.”
Reeb countered the sheriff might not have known the exact charge Chacon was accused of, but he knew what he did was wrong.
“He was helping his friend out because he knew he’d been involved in this aggravated fleeing, and he was helping him get away with it,” she said.
“Any officer would be arrested for taking somebody that was wanted and getting them away from that situation,” she added. “They wouldn’t have their job.”
Bowles also pointed to inconsistencies in the testimony of some of the state’s key witnesses, including the two officers who pursued Chacon that night, one of whom did not remember the other officer being there.
“You can’t convict someone in this
country on this amount of speculation. … You can’t convict someone on a critical witness who comes in and gives two different stories,” he said.
Reeb told jurors to use their common sense when weighing the evidence against the sheriff, telling them to ask themselves whether it was reasonable to believe the county’s elected sheriff was out personally serving restraining orders at 11 or 12 o’clock at night.
“James Lujan committed the crimes of harboring a felon and intimidation of a witness,” she said. “He was the sheriff and he thought he could get away with it, and he did. For two years, he got away with it.”
Lujan is also awaiting trial on three misdemeanor counts of resisting, evading or obstructing an officer in another case involving Chacon in which he is alleged to have shown up drunk at Chacon’s house in March 2020 as police were executing a search warrant and tried to take over the operation from local officers and New Mexico State Police.
He remains sheriff but has lost his authority to carry a gun, drive a police vehicle and make arrests.
If Lujan is convicted of a felony, he will become ineligible to serve as an elected official, according to the state Attorney General’s Office. But a district attorney would have to take formal action to have him removed from office if he were convicted and did not voluntarily resign.