License Forgery Case Defendant Gets 10 Years

A naturalized U.S. citizen was sentenced Thursday to 10 years in prison for forging affidavits that let illegal immigrants get driver’s licenses – despite defense claims that she had become a political pawn in the debate over immigration policy.

Ana Hernandez, 46, who was born in Mexico, entered a guilty plea to 10 of the 324 charges in the forgery indictment returned in August 2011. Prosecutors said the 10 counts amounted to 44 illegal immigrants getting New Mexico driver’s licenses.

Hernandez also had been arrested three months before that in a different case involving an alleged heroin ring in Bernalillo County; in that case she was ordered to the jail’s community custody program at sentencing.

Her sentence Thursday to a decade in prison and five years on supervised probation was a far cry from the probationary sentence her attorney had advocated. He had argued, in part, that his client was targeted in a prosecution swept up in the politics of immigration.

District Judge Charles Brown sentenced Hernandez immediately after the plea, and she was taken into custody. She had been free on bond for the past 15 months while working at a nonprofit organization.

The counts in the plea represented her signature on Motor Vehicle affidavits of New Mexico residency when clients presented themselves at the notary public business she ran at 5809 Central NW.

“The reason I helped these people is they were desperate, and I made a decision to help them out,” she told Brown through an interpreter after entering the plea. She said she’d like to be able to stay out of prison to be with her minor children and her mother.

Defense attorney Scott Mullins noted that the affidavits, which falsely stated the applicants lived at Hernandez’s business address, do not involve economic loss or violence to any person. Forty-two other individuals are named in the indictment, but Hernandez alone was “singled out for criminal prosecution,” Mullins said in a sentencing memorandum setting out reasons she should not go to prison.

“Gov. Susana Martinez used the defendant as a vehicle to criticize the former governor’s inability to prevent the licensure of ‘illegal’ immigrants,” the document said. The state’s decision to target Hernandez “shows overzealousness (in) charging and the dangerous interference of (anti)immigration politics in the administration of justice.”

Martinez has unsuccessfully asked the Legislature three times to prohibit driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.

The governor said last year she was particularly concerned about the Hernandez case because “it appears this person was involved in a heroin trafficking ring and a document fraud ring at the same time.”

She said heroin from Mexico comes to the state because of drug cartels and that it was “reasonable to be worried about the extent to which cartel activity may be aided by New Mexico’s policy of issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.”

Mullins’ memo said an informal survey of sentencing at the New Mexico Public Defender found no cases where offenses similar to those in Hernandez’s forgery case netted an actual prison term.

Assistant District Attorney John Sugg said he would be happy to prosecute the individuals who obtained driver’s licenses with the false affidavits, but they’re virtually impossible to find since Hernandez had signed off on the addresses, knowing they were false.

“We don’t know where they live,” he said. Those persons may not have given their true names, either, he said.

Sugg compared the forgery case to the heroin case, saying, “We’re going after the source” – in this case, of false information.

Mullins said a harsh sentence for a nonviolent crime sends the wrong message to society. Sugg responded that the answer was not to bring sentences down for nonviolent offenders but to “bring the others up.”

Hernandez, he said, broke the law and should be held accountable.

Brown said he had “no doubt” that Hernandez knew what she was doing in signing the affidavits.

“I think the state has been more than generous,” he said.

He suspended five years of the sentence and ordered Hernandez to serve 10 years, concurrent with the 364-day sentence in the heroin case, in which she pleaded guilty to two counts of child abuse.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal