Court: Proper charges filed late in DWI fatality

Prosecutors missed their opportunity to charge drunken driver Alicia Gonzales with vehicular homicide in 2005, and charged her instead with child abuse resulting in death, the state Supreme Court said Thursday.

Gonzales left a bar drunk, headed south toward the Albuquerque airport, sideswiped and then plowed into the back of a vehicle on Interstate 25, killing a child passenger in the second car and injuring another.

She was indicted on charges of intentional child abuse resulting in death, aggravated DWI and leaving the scene of an accident.

A jury in Albuquerque convicted her of negligent child abuse – later reversed by the Court of Appeals for lack of substantial evidence – along with the other two charges. Prosecutors then charged her with vehicular homicide.

The Supreme Court opinion by Justice Richard Bosson said the appellate court was correct to reverse. Writing for a unanimous court, however, Bosson found different reasons for doing so – namely, that vehicular homicide had to have been charged at the outset.

The state had three opportunities to join the prospective charges of child abuse and vehicular homicide, as required by New Mexico rules, Bosson’s opinion noted, but did not.

What was originally a judicial policy became a court rule “that we clearly intended (to) have force,” the opinion says.

The rule says that similar offenses “based on the same conduct or on a series of acts either connected together or constituting parts of a single scheme” must be joined in a single prosecution and not brought piecemeal, with trials held in sequence.

The court brought up the issue on its own, since it hadn’t been raised by either side.

Compulsory joining of charges is closely related to double jeopardy, the opinion says, “two sides of the same coin.”

The reasoning behind the rule is the protection of criminal defendants from “being subjected to successive trials for offenses stemming from the criminal episode” and ensuring finality to the judicial process.
— This article appeared on page C2 of the Albuquerque Journal