Incident arises from judge’s past as West Texas police officer
Man alleges future justice beat, racially taunted him in 1979 altercation
Gary L. Clingman moved on after he was fired from the Odessa Police Department in West Texas.
The young officer took a job with a local sheriff’s office. He went to law school. Now, he sits on the New Mexico Supreme Court.
That is no comfort to the man he is accused of beating and assailing with racial epithets one night nearly 40 years ago in the episode that prompted Clingman’s firing from Odessa’s police force.
“Now, he’s in a greater position to do more harm with the pen than the gun,” said Sylvester Talbert, 66.
Retired after a career in the insurance business and living hundreds of miles away, Talbert, who is black, has tried to move on with his life, too.
But he says his encounter with Clingman the night of Oct. 17, 1979, not only left him without some teeth and created an arrest record that trailed him on job applications for years, it is also seared in his memory.
Clingman, 67, calls the encounter unfortunate. Things could have been done a little different, he says. But Clingman says he did nothing that warranted termination and denies using the sort of racist language Talbert says he used.
“It was unfortunate that it happened,” Clingman said. “It did not happen the way it is being portrayed.”
With Clingman now running to keep his seat on New Mexico’s highest court, Talbert is speaking out and a liberal political action committee is making the episode an issue in the kind of race that is usually low-key. Clingman contends he has nothing to hide and says the episode was effectively public knowledge in southeastern New Mexico. Now, though, in very different times decades after the two men last saw each other, Talbert is shaking up the election with questions about race and justice.
Talbert says it all began when he left his home in Odessa one night to go running. He was new to town. Born in Louisiana and a recent graduate of the University of Albuquerque, he had started work at Texas Instruments only a few weeks earlier. His wife at the time was working at a local hospital, he says. So, after watching the Pittsburgh Pirates win the ‘79 World Series – Talbert was a fan – he decided to jog up to the hospital, where his wife was working a late shift.
Talbert says he stopped outside the hospital and was approached by a police officer. He says this was Clingman. The officer asked for his identification. Talbert says he did not have any identification because he had been running.
“I start trying to advance because he was in my way. He hadn’t said I was under arrest or anything,” Talbert says in a recent videotaped statement.
Talbert recounts that the officer struck him and then the officer’s partner approached and hit him, too. They arrested Talbert, but he says that instead of taking him straight to jail, Clingman beat him.
The officer, he says, “got in the back seat and he started punching me. My hands were cuffed. My hands were behind me. And he started beating on me.”
Clingman used racial epithets, he says.
Then, they took him to jail, where Talbert says he was beaten further, including by a guard.
“They start bouncing me off of the jail cell,” he says.
By the end of it all, Talbert says, teeth had been knocked out of his mouth, his wrist was fractured and his body was bruised. He says he lost his job, too, after he was locked up for a few days and his arrest made it into the local newspaper.
The charge: assaulting a police officer.
Clingman describes the night differently. The judge says he went to the hospital with his partner after the police department got a call about a suspicious person. Clingman says his partner approached Talbert. From a short distance, he saw Talbert and his partner, John Blanco, get into an altercation.
“I went to the aide of my partner,” the judge said.
Asked if the incident seemed like anything out of the routine at the time – an incident that would become an ordeal – Clingman replied: “No.”
But when Talbert got out of jail, he says he left town fearing for his life. He went back to Albuquerque and filed a complaint with the FBI, apparently spurring some sort of investigation.
And whatever that night, the
reported at the time that the police department fired Clingman and suspended his partner along with a jail guard. Both Clingman’s partner and the police chief at the time are deceased. The newspaper published few details, instead running a fairly dispassionate account of personnel matters. But it gave the reason for Clingman’s firing as mishandling a prisoner.
Clingman appealed, but a panel upheld his termination, according to the newspaper.
So, he went to work for the sheriff’s office in a neighboring county, later going on to law school. He practiced as an attorney in southeastern New Mexico and in the 1990s, then-Gov. Gary Johnson tapped him for a seat as a district court judge. This year, Gov. Susana Martinez put him on the state Supreme Court.
Talbert tried to move on, too. He says the charge against him was dropped. But he says the episode led to the end of his marriage, and the record of his arrest trailed him when applying for jobs.
“All of these years, I had been denied jobs and didn’t really know why,” Talbert said.
He ended up cleaning offices in the Dallas area before landing a job with an insurance company and has since moved back to the South.
Nearly a decade ago, Talbert says, a lawyer contacted him from New Mexico asking happened if he would tell his story.
But Talbert turned them down.
Now, though, he is retired, and times have changed. When another lawyer from New Mexico called him up a few weeks ago, Talbert says he thought a little harder about speaking out.
“It always seems like there was still so much wrong on one side and not enough justice and equality on the other,” Talbert said in a recent interview with
Maybe speaking out will do nothing, Talbert says. Maybe it will make him feel a little more free.
“Because for all these years I’ve been carrying this around,” he said.
So, Talbert gave a lengthy videotaped statement to a lawyer who had called him, William Carpenter. And he gave an interview to the
which published an article earlier this month about Clingman’s termination.
Since then, a liberal political action committee – Enchantment PAC – has launched a website featuring a videotaped statement from Talbert and urging Clingman’s defeat in this year’s election against Democratic Judge Michael Vigil.
While races for seats on the state Supreme Court often avoid the hot-button issues of the day, this has all injected some of the day’s most pressing contemporary issues into the contest.
Clingman sees it all as a political attack.
“It’s sad that this is the path that is being chosen for this campaign,” he said, adding the episode never came up in Hobbs.
“Those that knew about it knew about it. It was not an issue, nor was it an issue when I was appointed by Gov. Johnson,” he said.
The Governor’s Office was made aware of it again when he filled out a questionnaire before his appointment to the state Supreme Court, Clingman adds.
But in his telling, there is not much to the story. He went on to a career that led all the way to the state Supreme Court.
Should it matter to voters? Talbert is blunt about his feelings: “He does not have a temperament to deal with issues that concern citizens and especially where we are in America today, where we’re still dealing with race issues.
“He may have changed over the years,” Talbert adds. “But I have always heard over the years that spots do not change on a leopard. This man is probably the same racist man that he once was.”