U.S. Attorney’s Office fights gun case decision

LAS CRUCES – The U.S. Attorney’s Office is appealing a lower court decision that granted three members of a Deming family of firearms dealers a new trial.

The move, announced in a notice filed Monday in federal court, forestalls for the moment a hearing on a request by defense attorneys seeking the dismissal of the remaining four charges against Rick Reese, wife Terri and son Ryin.

One year after their arrest in August 2011, Rick and Terri Reese were convicted of one count, and Ryin of two counts, of making false statements on federal forms required during firearms sales. On the forms, gun buyers state that they are the actual purchasers of the weapons, not a third party, but prosecutors argued that, during secretly recorded gun purchases by government informants, the Reeses knew the weapons were ostensibly headed to battling drug traffickers in Mexico.

Last month U.S. District Court Judge Robert Brack granted the Reeses a new trial after federal attorneys revealed, two months after the trial, that they had failed to share with defense attorneys potentially damaging information about a key prosecution witness.

The witness was Luna County Sheriff’s investigator Alan Batts, who had testified that Terri Reese told him one of the firearms the family sold had ended up in Mexico. Defense attorneys were not told until after the trial that Batts was the subject of a now-closed FBI investigation into allegations the deputy had stolen cash from a drug smuggler and other allegations. Batts was never charged with a crime. But the information, Brack noted, could have changed the outcome of the trial by raising doubts in the jury about the witness’s credibility.

With the government’s appeal, Rick Reese’s defense attorney Robert Gorence and Ryin Reese’s defense attorney Jason Bowles said in a joint statement that the family “will now have to endure additional delay until their inevitable vindication.”

The Reeses, including another son, Remington, were acquitted on 24 counts of smuggling and making false statements, and two counts of money laundering were dismissed.

The attorneys added: “We are surprised, to say the least, that the U.S. Attorney’s office is seeking an appeal. Judge Brack, widely acknowledged to be as fair as the day is long, clearly got it right when he found that the U.S. Attorney’s office did not abide by the Constitution and denied the Reese family a fair trial.”
— This article appeared on page C2 of the Albuquerque Journal