The New Mexico Supreme Court took over direct supervision of the Santa Fe County Magistrate Court nearly a year ago.

Chronic paperwork problems at the court had become acute and were leading to wrongly issued arrest warrants, lost and incomplete court files and a lack of hearing notice for attorneys and defendants. Because of these problems and others, people often were forced to spend time and money to deal with the court's mistakes. Some have even been wrongly incarcerated for days or weeks.

The Supreme Court's initial order appointing a "Court Improvement Team" was to last for six months — from Aug. 20 to March 20. However, Chief Justice Edward Chavez extended the order indefinitely this spring.

Arthur Pepin, head of the Administrative Office of the Courts and the man in charge of supervising the court for the Supreme Court justices, said the situation is improving. Presiding Magistrate David Segura agreed. However, attorneys who practice at the court dispute that statement and say, if anything, the situation has gotten worse.

The following cases — rife with paperwork errors and questionable actions by the court, mostly since the Supreme Court's order — suggest the court, at the very least, has a long way to go.

Jailed for a warning

Adrian Aragon would appear to have every right to be furious with the Magistrate Court. But he's not.

"I can understand how the court made a mistake," he said.

The 32-year-old Albuquerque resident was pulled over by a state police officer Sept. 25, 2008, and given a warning for not having had an annual inspection on the 1995 GMC company truck he uses for work as a dairy delivery driver. The officer initially gave him a ticket for the offense, then drew lines through that portion of the ticket form and changed it to a warning, according to a copy of the ticket.

The Magistrate Court didn't notice the ticket was a warning, and entered it as a misdemeanor offense. The court sent out a criminal summons to Aragon in December 2008 for an arraignment on Jan. 16, 2008, though the summons likely meant Jan. 16, 2009.

Whatever the date, Aragon said he never received notice of the hearing and never showed up at the court. More than a year later — on Jan. 27 — the court issued a bench warrant for him, according to court documents.

Three weeks later, a state police officer stopped Aragon in his personal car for doing 62 mph in a 55 mph zone in Pojoaque. The officer ran his name through records, discovered the bench warrant, put him in handcuffs, took him to jail and impounded his car. He later had to pay $68 to get his car out of hock, and had to borrow $255 from his mother to bond out of jail.

"I didn't really even know what I got arrested for," he said.

Fortunately for him, Aragon saved a copy of the warning/ticket and brought it to the court immediately upon his release from jail.

"I told this lady, 'Ma'am, this is supposed to be a warning not an actual ticket,' " he said. "She takes it to the judge and the judge said, 'Yeah, it's supposed to be a warning.' "

The case was dismissed, though it took months for the court to return his mother's bail money.

"I can understand why they put it as a ticket," Aragon said. "The officer didn't really mark it up. He just drew lines up and down."

Aragon said that, in the end, he lost two days of work and his mother lost two days of work.

Segura said the state police officer should not have even turned the warning into the court.

Bureaucratic bungling

Elizabeth Baker, 72, wasn't thrown in jail for the recent mistake the court made in her case. Still, she was far angrier than Aragon when she recounted her recent brush with the court.

Actually it was Baker's second run-in with the Magistrate Court's bureaucratic bungling. The first time occurred about three years ago after she was pulled over for speeding on N.M. 599. Baker said she went to the court on Galisteo Street three separate times to try and deal with the ticket, but each time clerks couldn't find a copy of it in court files.

During her third visit, court clerks advised her to go downtown and talk to a parking officer, she said. Baker, a documentary filmmaker, did as advised, though parking officials couldn't find the ticket either. Court officials later told her not to come back unless she heard from them, Baker said. Perhaps anticipating future problems, Baker was able to obtain a letter from the court saying she'd shown up to try and take care of the ticket.

A year later she was on her way to the Santa Fe Children's Museum with her granddaughter in the car when she was stopped for speeding again. That officer told her there was a warrant for her arrest and had been for the last year, but gave her a break and didn't take her to jail because her granddaughter was with her, she said. The officer took her driver's license and made her promise to show up the next day at Magistrate Court or he'd arrest her, Baker said.

Apparently, the court had, at some point, found the missing speeding ticket and issued a summons. However, Baker had changed addresses in the interim, and the summons was returned with no forwarding address.

The next day after her near-arrest, Baker produced the letter she'd received, and the court dismissed that ticket, she said.

In January, Baker was stopped again for speeding near her home. She said the speed limit is not posted there, so she told the deputy she wanted to go to court to challenge the ticket. A month later, she received a notice in the mail ordering her to court April 12.

However, Baker arrived home about 3:30 p.m. April 9 to find a letter from the court saying a warrant again had been issued for her arrest because she didn't show up for her April 8 court date. She immediately jumped into her car, made it down to the court before it closed at 4 p.m., and showed her summons to a clerk, who showed it to a judge, Baker said.

"They said, 'Oh, we made a clerical error,' " she said. One of the magistrates stayed an extra 10 minutes that afternoon and quashed the bench warrant, she said.

Three days later, Baker showed up for her original court date. She waited for two hours while the court called the name of every other person in the room but hers. As it turned out, her court file was nowhere to be found because the court still thought she'd missed her April 8 court date. Since the officer never showed up, the court dismissed the case, she said.

"(A clerk) said, 'Do you want us to mail you the (dismissal) letter or do you want to wait?' " Baker said. "I said, 'I'll wait.' It took another 45 minutes."

Baker said she doesn't understand how a court can be so dysfunctional.

"Two bench warrants in four or five years, both clerical mistakes," she said. "I could have been taken to jail. You figure it out. I would rather go to any other court than that one."

A stiff sentence

George Martinez feels the same way.

Magistrate Sandra Miera sentenced the 54-year-old homeless man to 364 days in jail in May for the offense of urinating behind a Dumpster.

"Nobody saw me pee," Martinez said in a jail interview last week. "I didn't expose myself."

Nevertheless, Santa Fe police Officer Sue Brunk cited him in February 2009 for indecent exposure. Martinez said he was waiting for his girlfriend to come out of Walgreens that night when he walked inside an 8-foot-high wall where the trash was kept to relieve himself. Brunk never saw him peeing, but cited him when he exited the enclosure, he said.

Martinez admitted he failed to appear in court twice to answer the citation, saying he "spaced it."

"I live on the streets," he said. "I'm an alcoholic."

Martinez was arrested March 23 for failure to appear in court on the charge, according to Santa Fe County jail records. On May 3, he pleaded no contest to the charge in front of Judge Miera.

Martinez said he told Miera he was homeless. The judge told him she'd noticed he was in and out of jail all the time and suggested maybe she should give him 364 days in jail, Martinez said.

"Then she asked the cop, 'What do you think?' " Martinez said. "(The cop) said, 'Give him as much time as you can.' "

Miera then sentenced him to 364 days in jail. And she didn't give him credit for the 42 days he'd already served behind bars since his arrest, meaning he isn't scheduled to be released until May 2, 2011, according to online court records.

"This place is driving me crazy," Martinez said Thursday from jail. "I'd rather be anywhere else but here."

Ethan Nissani, who became Martinez's public defender after Martinez wrote him a letter telling him of the year sentence, has been fighting to get Martinez released.

"(Martinez's sentence) struck me as extremely excessive, and it's also a waste of taxpayer money," Nissani said.

Nissani appealed the case, and on Friday the district attorney stipulated to his release for time served and state District Judge Michael Vigil agreed.

The cost of housing and feeding an inmate at the jail is $85 a day, said Warden Annabelle Romero. That means county taxpayers have spent $9,265 — up until Friday — on Martinez for the 109 days he's spent behind bars.

Miera declined to comment on the case because it has been appealed. A phone message left for Brunk was not returned.

Unheeded calls

Camela Duran tried for months to get the court to pay attention to her husband's case, to no avail.

"For me to call and never get an answer after 100 or 150 calls, that's totally inept," Duran said in a recent interview.

Richard Duran, her husband, violated his probation for a prior drunken-driving charge when he was arrested for aggravated battery in April 2009. On Nov. 10, Judge Miera ordered him to serve the remaining 213 days of his probation at the Santa Fe County jail.

Richard Duran's lawyer, Andras Szantho, filed a motion Dec. 15 asking the judge to reconsider the sentence. Miera was under no obligation to grant the motion or even hold a hearing on the matter, and could have simply denied the motion.

Camela Duran spent the next four months calling the court in vain, in an attempt to find out when the motion would be heard. Court records indicate nothing happened on the motion until April 21, when it was placed back on Miera's docket.

It was scheduled for a hearing at the court May 6 and May 11, but the court never filed a jail transport order and Richard Duran wasn't brought to the court for either hearing. Szantho said he finally waived Richard Duran's right to appear at the second hearing because a decision needed to be made on the motion before his jail sentence expired.

Miera released Richard Duran on June 9, after he served the 213 days.

Forgotten in jail

Terri Gallegos recently spent 20 days in jail because of the court's mistake.

The 43-year-old Rio Rancho resident appealed a 2005 aggravated drunken-driving case to state District Court in 2006. District Judge Stephen Pfeffer dismissed the appeal in February 2008 and remanded the case back to Magistrate Court, according to court records. The court put the case back on its docket in September 2009, but sent notice of the hearing to Gallegos' street address — where she can't receive mail — instead of her post office box, where it had sent all previous correspondence for years, said Nissani, her attorney.

Since she never knew of the hearing, she didn't show up and the court issued a bench warrant. Gallegos was arrested June 18 and taken for arraignment before Miera on June 21. Gallegos explained to the judge the reason she didn't show up, and the judge said she'd bring Gallegos back for another hearing on June 24, Nissani said.

However, the court never filed a transport order for Gallegos, who wasn't released from jail until Wednesday, according to jail records.

"I think it's potentially detrimental to people's lives," Nissani said. "Terri was worried about having to pay rent. It's a situation where the legal process is more punitive than the end result. It should be the other way around."

Miera blamed the delay in releasing Gallegos on the amount of time it takes for her clerk to prepare a release order.

Arraignment issues

Leroy Carrillo has spent 53 days in jail for two separate offenses in the last 16 months — one of them a misdemeanor — when he was legally allowed to be locked up for only 23 of those days.

The 45-year-old Pojoaque resident landed behind bars at the Santa Fe County jail from March 19, 2009 to April 1, 2009 after he was pulled over for driving on a revoked license. The only reason he was let out that soon was because he spoke to a woman from the Public Defender's Office in jail and told her he'd been there for nearly two weeks without being arraigned.

The court claimed at the time that the police officer didn't file the case in court until 11 days after Carrillo was arrested.

Carrillo said he never received the court's letters asking him to show up for sentencing on the arrest and was taken into custody again on Dec. 18 after the court issued a bench warrant for him. He was released Dec. 21.

Carrillo was arrested again Feb. 17 and charged with two counts of breaking and entering, two counts of criminal damage to property and possession of burglary tools. Carrillo said he was blacked-out drunk at the time and accidentally broke into his aunt's neighbor's house.

This time, Carrillo spent from Feb. 17 until March 25 at the county jail. He wasn't arraigned until Feb. 25. He was released from jail by Miera's order on March 25.

In both instances, a magistrate judge should have determined within 48 hours whether probable cause to detain him existed. The Administrative Office of the Courts maintains that, technically, the court has 30 days to arraign a defendant. Carrillo should have been released within 10 days of his arraignment if he wasn't able to post bond.

Romero, the jail warden, said Carrillo should have been released March 11 on his latest arrest, though it is up to the Magistrate Court to give the jail a release order, she said.

Deadly consequences

Two drunken driving cases against James Ruiz also illustrate the court's paperwork problems.

Ruiz was stopped May 6, 2008, for his fifth DWI arrest. When he was not arraigned within a few days, a member of Ruiz's family called Magistrate George Anaya Jr. and alerted him to the situation.

The court said the Santa Fe police officer didn't file the case until May 14. The officer told the judge he'd previously filed the case, though the court had no record of it. Ruiz was arraigned in the case May 15, but not released from jail until May 30, meaning he spent 25 days in jail, according to online jail records.

On Aug. 26, online court records in that case note that Ruiz was in alcohol treatment in California. He waived all time limits in the case, and on Sept. 24 the court noted that Ruiz was accepted into the treatment facility.

From there, according to online court records, nothing happened in the case until Aug. 25, 2009, when the court put the case back on the docket for a pre-trial conference. His case was then postponed for various reasons until March 5, when Ruiz and two friends went for drinks at the Blue Corn Cafe on Zia Road.

Ruiz drank three shots of whiskey and three beers before he and his friends skipped out on their $150 bar bill, jumped into a 2005 Ford F-250 pickup and, with Ruiz behind the wheel, went barreling down Cerrillos Road toward Interstate 25. With his breath-alcohol content nearly three times the legal driving limit — 0.22 — Ruiz slammed into the back of a 2007 Chevrolet Impala, killing Deshauna Peshlakai, 17, and Del Lynn Peshlakai, 19, and seriously injuring their parents.

The Navajo family from Naschitti were returning home from a high school basketball game. Ruiz has been charged with two counts of vehicular homicide, three counts of causing great bodily harm by vehicle and one count of driving with a suspended or revoked license.

Waivers ignored

Another ongoing problem at the court occurs when lawyers file waivers of arraignment. The court frequently doesn't register such waivers and schedules the defendant for an arraignment anyway.

The defendant doesn't know about the arraignment and, thus, does not show up for it. The court then issues a bench warrant for the defendant.

This happened to a Santa Fe man, Thomas X. Martinez. He was pulled over for driving with a suspended or revoked license and other charges on March 21 and later hired local defense lawyer Tom Clark, according to online court records, which refer to him as "Thomas V. Martinez."

Clark filed a waiver of arraignment on May 27, the day Martinez was scheduled to be arraigned. A week later, the court issued a bench warrant for Martinez for not showing up for the arraignment. Clark had the court quash the warrant a week after that because it was "issued in error," according to court records.

Resource problems

So why can't the problem be fixed?

"We definitely have an issue in terms of personnel resources," said Segura. "The AOC has really given us all they are able to provide."

He said the main problem is dealing with a large backlog of cases that need to be disposed of while simultaneously keeping up with the massive amount of paperwork filed daily with the court. Money for three to five additional staff members "would give us the opportunity to address the majority of it," Segura said.

"I would say we've made significant progress in (the paperwork flow) area," he said. "Is it perfect? No. But if you gauge it against six months ago or a year, it is vastly improved."

Asked to rank the court's progress on a scale of one to 10, Segura gave the court an eight in dealing with the backlog of cases and a four in dealing with the paperwork flow problems.

"Would I like to have it done more efficiently sooner?" he asked. "Yes. Is that going to happen? No."

Segura said he didn't know how long it will take for the court to become efficient.

"I would like to see it done yesterday," he said. "I don't know what the timetable is on this."

Contact Jason Auslander at 986-3076 or jauslander@sfnewmexican.com.