DA-cop chaos lucky for chronic DWIs

SANTA FE (KRQE) - Call them the poster boys for New Mexico’s drinking and driving problem.

Rodney Mascarenas, 55, and Frank Anchondo, 53, have each been arrested 11 times for DWI, according to court documents and other records.

Police have arrested Anthony Rodriguez, 44, eight times for drunken driving. And Kevin Kelly, 52, has been caught seven times.

That’s a total of 37 arrests in the last quarter century for just those four men

But a love of alcohol and automobiles isn’t the only thing that binds these men together. They’ve also benefited from the incompetence of the Santa Fe District Attorney’s Office.

“It’s bad management,” said Linda Atkinson, head of the DWI Resource Center in Albuquerque. “It’s just bad management. What it takes is coming back, and you hold them accountable every single time.”

And that is exactly what hasn’t been happening in Santa Fe. Cases involving drivers with multiple DWI arrests have been falling through the cracks for months.

“I think it’d be more like the Grand Canyon they’re slipping into because there’s so many of them,” said Atkinson, who tracks chronic drunk drivers across the state.

Santa Fe District Attorney Angela “Spence” Pacheco blamed the problem on poor police work particularly in Rio Arriba County as well as not having enough prosecutors on her staff to keep up with the caseload.

“It’s a resource issue,” she said. “If you don’t have someone there to manage a caseload, things happen.”

However, she said she’s made some changes to alleviate the problems.

In the cases of the four poster men and others, what is happening is they don’t have to pay the price for all of their drunk driving arrests. And that’s a problem because the more DWI convictions a person racks up, the harsher the penalties become.

Take Rodney Mascarenas, for example.

The Rio Arriba County resident spent nearly a year in jail on his 10th and 11th drunken driving arrests without the DA’s office knowing he was there. A District Court judge finally let him out in November.

“We had no idea this guy was in jail,” said prosecutor Peter Valencia, adding that his office never received notification that Mascarenas was arrested.

Even though the DA didn’t know about Mascarenas’ incarceration, his time in jail still likely violated his right to a speedy trial.

So Valencia tried to get what he could and offered Mascarenas a deal that called for him to plead guilty to his fourth DWI twice.

Yep, you heard it right, two pleas to a fourth DWI.

“Well, it’s legal fiction in a sense,” Valencia said. “We could have gotten nothing out of these cases.”

Fictional or not, Mascarenas, who had no assurances the judge would side with his speedy-trial argument, took the deal.

Even Mascarenas’ defense attorney had never heard of such a deal.

“Clearly two fourths is a legal fiction to anybody,” said Damian Horne. “It’s an actual fiction to anybody. There cannot be two fourths.”

Still, that means if Mascarenas gets pulled over and convicted again for drunken driving, it would legally count as his fifth, not his sixth DWI. And that means he would face lesser penalties.

Then there’s Anthony Rodriguez. He also spent months in the Rio Arriba County Jail in Tierra Amarilla without the DA’s office knowing about it.

Asked what happened with Rodriguez’s case, Deputy District Attorney Juan Valencia said, “I can’t tell you. We tried to find out. I don’t know.”

Rodriguez later pleaded guilty to his third and fourth DWIs despite the fact that he already had four drunken driving convictions on his record.

Then, last summer, Santa Fe’s main DWI prosecutor became seriously ill. No one picked up the slack, which forced a District Court judge to dismiss cases against three defendants with multiple drunken driving arrests.

Alfred Holt, one of those men, was facing his sixth DWI charge. Another, Louis C De Baca, faced his fourth.

But the most problematic was a man named John Paul Chavez.

Chavez was driving drunk when he plowed into two tourists walking near the Santa Fe Plaza in 2002. He dragged one of them five blocks.

After spending time in prison for that incident, Chavez was pulled over for drunken driving again in December 2010 and faced his ninth DWI conviction.

But because his lawyer never received discovery materials from the DA’s office, Chavez walked out of court a free man.

“What we know deters drinking and driving and reduces crashes is swift, sure certainty and severity of punishment,” Atkinson said. “And when that’s not there, we will continue to see these.”

Pacheco blamed sub-par police work, particularly in Rio Arriba County, for part of the problem.

“The quality of police work we receive translates into the quality of prosecutions we’re able to do,” she said.

Rio Arriba County Sheriff Tommy Rodella, who has had a rocky relationship with Pacheco’s office, told KRQE News 13 that Pacheco should be concentrating on flaws in her own procedures rather than trying to make his deputies scapegoats.

But beyond questionable police work, Pacheco