Supreme Court upholds murder conviction of Hobbs man

A Hobbs man serving a life sentence for first-degree murder, armed robbery and tampering with evidence appealed his conviction to the state Supreme Court, but the Justices unanimously upheld the outcome Monday.

Ralph Prieto, 47, was arrested shortly after Hobbs police conducting a welfare check found Rick Ford, 50, lying face down in a hallway with a gunshot wound on Feb. 24, 2020. Ford was pronounced dead at the scene.

After he was identified as a suspect in the death, Prieto was traced to Fort Worth, Texas, via surveillance video and mobile phone data. According to investigators, Prieto admitted to having been at Ford’s residence, seeing Ford on the floor and taking money and other items, including Ford’s truck; but he denied killing Ford.

Prieto challenged his 2023 conviction by a jury, pointing to the fact that the initial search warrant seeking location data and communications from Prieto’s phone, as well as that of another individual, was executed without the required follow-up court filing of an inventory of property taken. One of the detectives on the case retired in 2021 and the following year, police served another warrant to the mobile service provider, which did not turn up any records.

As the trial approached, Prieto argued this was a failure to collect or preserve evidence important to his defense, and sought sanctions against the prosecution.

After the trial judge denied that notion, Prieto unsuccessfully sought a jury instruction about the missing evidence, stating that the missing records would have been unfavorable to the state’s case against him. That, too, was denied.

After the jury convicted him, Prieto was sentenced to life in prison on the murder count, plus 10 years for armed robbery and a concurrent three-year prison sentence for evidence tampering.

The state Supreme Court found that the available evidence was sufficient to convict him on all three charges, and that Prieto had not established that the failure to collect evidence was due to “gross negligence." The opinion cites court precedent holding that if evidence is missing because of a mistake or negligence, absent evidence of bad faith, sanctions are not warranted.

“We hold the evidence in this case is most consistent with the conclusion that the detectives were merely negligent and overlooked the fact that the Verizon warrant failed to result in a return of the requested records,” Justice Briana Zamora wrote in the unanimous opinion, “likely due to Detective Benavides’ retirement and his failure to anticipate that any records collected through his email address would be erased upon his departure.”

Moreover, had the evidence been produced, the court was not convinced it would have altered the verdict.

The ruling upheld the decision by state District Judge Mark Sanchez not to sanction the state over the missing records, without establishing a new precedent.