The Second Judicial District Attorney’s Office has launched a new system to notify law enforcement agencies when an officer misses a hearing or a pre-trial interview.
Joshua Boone, the chief deputy district attorney, said in an interview on Tuesday that the DA’s Office started working on the system—essentially a Google spreadsheet that is populated when an attorney or paralegal in the office fills out a form—in the fall and began using it earlier this year.
“The minute we submit this form, it automatically sends an email to the court liaison,” Boone said. “Then APD created their own separate email and it will automatically send it to that designated email.”
The processes around notification of missed court hearings and interviews has been a hot topic as the FBI investigates allegations that DWI officers in the Albuquerque Police Department were colluding with a local defense attorney to get cases dismissed. (However the exact allegations are unclear and there has also been a complaint that one of the officers told a person he arrested that if he hired a certain lawyer he could “ensure that no court case would be filed in court by APD.”)
The District Attorney’s Office has now dismissed 195 cases since being notified that “multiple members of APD’s DWI unit have major integrity issues,” said spokesperson Nancy Laflin. She said prosecutors had to dismiss all of the cases where the officers being investigated by the FBI were necessary witnesses but there are some cases they can still proceed on without having to call them to testify.
When asked about whether the new system could help catch patterns of officers missing court hearings in the future, Boone said “it certainly isn’t going to hurt.”
“(Law enforcement agencies) can use it for whatever reason they want,” he said. “We use it because you don’t want to lose cases. We believe in this work, we’re trying to make sure our witnesses show up. We want to make the community safer.”
At a news conference last week, Chief Harold Medina said APD had been getting notifications from the DA’s Office when an officer missed a hearing but those stopped in September 2022. It started getting the notifications through the DA’s new system earlier this year.
Boone said he could not speak for the prior administration—Raúl Torrez was in office until the end of 2022 when he became the state’s Attorney General—but after Sam Bregman was appointed to the role of District Attorney, prosecutors would communicate with officers and other witnesses ahead of a hearing or interview to try to ensure that they show up. He said it would be “case by case” whether prosecutors would notify a supervisor if an officer didn’t show.
“We will follow up at times with the officers and be like, ‘hey, is there something that we should know about?’” Boone said. “There’s no rule, there’s no law that says once an officer misses court you must call them and find out or call their commander or supervisor. So it was left to individual DAs, sometimes that would get escalated, sometimes it wouldn’t.”
Lauren Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Torrez, did not answer questions about why notifications stopped being sent to APD in the fall of 2022.
“Every law enforcement agency is responsible for ensuring that their officers appear for scheduled hearings,” she wrote in a statement. “As a courtesy, our office provided regular updates to all of our law enforcement partners whenever their officers failed to appear, but ultimately each agency was responsible for their officers’ attendance in court.”
APD spokesperson Gilbert Gallegos said it is helpful for APD to hold officers accountable if they are notified by the DA’s Office or the courts of missed hearings and that it is “not a blame game.”
“The whole issue of whether the DA or the Courts are obligated to share information seems beside the point,” Gallegos said. “However we get the information, it helps us hold officers accountable.”
He said Medina has worked with the DA’s Office under both Torrez and Bregman to improve the process for officers to turn in evidence. And, he said, Mayor Tim Keller created the Metro Crime Initiative, which strives to improve the criminal justice system and “also included a call for dashboard where we can share data to improve public safety.”
“We have worked for the past year to get access to a court data system that now gives us more access, but it still does not include data for specific officers,” said Gallegos. “We are trying to get the courts to add that data. Once that occurs, our data system can automate the data so we can effectively track officers who miss hearings or trials.”