- Susana Martinez (left, courtesy photo) and Diane Denish (photo by Heath Haussamen)
Diane Denish’s newest TV ad attacking Susana Martinez for plea bargaining two cases involving crimes against children makes an unsubstantiated leap when it claims Martinez “allowed” child predators to avoid the sex offender registry.
In the ad, Denish highlights two cases – those involving a coach in the Hatch school district and a janitor in the Las Cruces district – who were charged with sex crimes against students at the schools where they worked.
The ad states that Martinez “cut deals” and “allowed these child predators to avoid publically registering as sex offenders.” But what if the plea bargains were necessary?
Here’s the ad:
I was a police reporter for years at the Las Cruces Sun-News. In fact, I wrote the initial articles when both Shawn Bohannon and Hector Montes – the defendants in the cases in question – were charged. I have seen how difficult testifying can be for many victims, especially children.
What if the victims in these cases were unwilling or otherwise unable to testify, and without their testimony Martinez’s office did not have the evidence to win convictions? Sure, sometimes a prosecutor can get a conviction on a sex-crime charge without a victim’s testimony, but that’s not true in every case.
If there wasn’t enough evidence to win convictions in these cases, should Martinez have taken them to trial – and lost them – just so she could say she never plea bargained with a sex offender? Or should she have done everything she could to obtain the maximum convictions possible?
Bohannon faced 29 fourth-degree felony counts of rape and molestation and other charges involving three teen girls. He admitted in his plea bargain to child abuse, a third-degree felony, and 14 counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a fourth-degree felony. (Read the case file here, courtesy of Denish’s campaign.)
The charges to which Bohannon admitted didn’t require him to register as a sex offender.
Montes was charged with one count of molesting a girl at Las Cruces High School but agreed to a plea bargain in which he instead admitted to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The conviction didn’t require him to register as a sex offender. (Read the case file here.)
Sex offender registry not for ‘use as a plea bargain carrot’
Denish’s ad states that the plea bargains resulted “because Susana Martinez didn’t do her job.” I asked Denish’s campaign staff how they know the failure to win stronger convictions was due to Martinez not doing her job instead of other factors such as victims being unable or unwilling to testify.
The response, from Denish spokesman Chris Cervini:
“Diane isn’t a lawyer, but she’s a mother and a grandmother, and she knows it’s wrong to cut deals with sexual predators that allow them to stay off the public sex offender registry. In these cases, these offenders worked at local schools. Every parent in the area should be able to look them up and keep their children away – that’s why we have the public sex offender registry. It’s not there for Martinez to use as a plea bargain carrot.”
Which doesn’t really explain how or even if Denish knows Martinez had an option other than plea-bargaining or taking a case to trial she couldn’t win.
In a follow-up statement, Cervini said this:
“(Bohannon) was charged with 41 counts of criminal sexual penetration and sexual contact with a minor, and to get him on the sex-offender list, all Martinez would have had to do is get a conviction on one count of sexual contact. But instead of getting the job done, she cut a deal that gave this sex offender exactly what he wanted – a pass to stay off the sex offender registry. That’s plain wrong and a major failure on her part. These are exactly the types of offenders you count on your DA to get – particularly if that DA has made her entire candidacy for governor about her record of locking up bad guys.”
‘The toll… testifying can take on a sexual abuse victim’
So I asked the Martinez campaign why the cases were plea-bargained. Here’s what Campaign Manager Adam Deguire said:
“There weren’t one or two school sexual abuse cases, but a series of them that shook the Las Cruces community. Susana Martinez fought for the maximum penalty in each case that the facts and circumstances would allow, and the claim that she didn’t do her job is utterly false. Sadly, it doesn’t seem Denish understands all of the circumstances that surround these cases, such as the toll a criminal trial and testifying can take on a sexual abuse victim. All of these factors must be considered by prosecutors in working to achieve justice for victims and protecting our community. Had Denish simply checked court transcripts in the case she cites in her advertisement attacking Susana Martinez, she would have seen that the victims themselves supported the agreement.”
That’s true in the Bohannon case, according to a partial transcript the Martinez campaign provided. At the hearing on the plea bargain, Chief Deputy District Attorney Susan Reidel said Bohannon’s victims “are in agreement with entering the plea in this case and they understand the point behind that.” The attorney for the victims affirmed that.
Reidel said this about the reason for the plea bargain:
“…as we prepared for trial, all parties came to a realization that for the victims as well as the community of Hatch that this would be the best thing to get in this case, to resolve this before trial and not drag everyone through this.”
You can listen to audio of the mother of one of the victims explaining why she wanted a plea bargain here.
“I’m very thankful for this plea agreement because I did not want to see her have to go through all, relive all of this stuff again,” that mother said. “She’s kind of gotten past it. She just graduated. Life’s good again, you know, we’re moving on and so we want to move on. We don’t want to have to sit here and live in that past that we have had to live through for the last three years.”
In response to Denish’s ad, Martinez unveiled her own spot that also refers to the toll testifying takes on victims. Here’s the ad, which features Jessica, a victim in another of the cases that occurred around the same time as those featured in Denish’s ad:
“Diane Denish does not understand, to attack not only Susana on this, but in a way it’s attacking the victims,” Jessica says in the ad.
Shouldn’t campaigns have to substantiate claims?
The bottom line: Denish’s new ad makes a leap it doesn’t substantiate. The claim is also not proven in the fact sheet Denish’s campaign provided to accompany the ad, or in statements provided to me.
The Denish campaign seems to believe it’s appropriate to make an unsubstantiated allegation and place the burden on Martinez to prove it wrong. This is the sort of negative, spin-based campaigning I complained about last week when I blasted both campaigns.
Shouldn’t the burden be on campaigns to back up their attacks with facts?