Court: DA’s Witchcraft Accusations Were a Bit Over the Line
This case is bananas," opined the reader who sent it to me, and she was not wrong.
In this case of severe and pervasive prosecutorial misconduct, exacerbated by a lackluster defense, we hold that an Assistant District Attorney who uses opening statements to expose the jury to incriminating allegations from a non-testifying codefendant, repeatedly accuses a defendant of witchcraft, and relies on inflammatory and inadmissible evidence throughout the case, has knowingly committed misconduct so unfairly prejudicial and with such willful disregard for a reversal on appeal that retrial is barred by double jeopardy under Article II, Section 15 of the New Mexico Constitution.
The facts of the case are grim. Somebody went missing in Taos in 2019, and for a year police had no leads. Then, as the court puts it, police uncovered" two suspects, a married couple, after the husband (Montoya) repeatedly stabbed the wife. When she regained consciousness in the hospital, police told her that Montoya had confessed to killing the missing person and implicated her too. Her story was this: she had encountered the now-missing person while picking up drugs, and he insulted and threatened her. She asked Montoya to kick his ass." She claimed that what was only meant to be an ass-kicking ended up being murder. She admitted she then spent several hours helping dispose of the victim-and there the details get really grim-but said she did so only because she was afraid she'd be next if she didn't help. Authorities did not believe this, and charged her with lots of things including murder.
Well, it seems entirely possible either that the wife was almost as guilty as her husband or that she was mostly innocent (except maybe for the drugs) and that he was falsely accusing her. There were facts going both ways. But there's no doubt at all that the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case was convinced that she was a bad person. Many defendants are, of course. But probably none are literally witches, an accusation the ADA repeatedly made in front of the jury:
Despite the State having removed Montoya from the witness list, ADA Ripol nevertheless used his opening statement to expose the jury to Montoya's incriminating allegations against Defendant. Bolstered with copious amounts of other inflammatory and inadmissible evidence, including allegations that Defendant was a witch" and a bruja" (a term for witch" in Spanish) who controlled Montoya through her menstrual blood, ADA Ripol embarked on a three-day-long exercise in pathos and character assassination that utterly deprived Defendant of a fair trial....
Through her what now?
There was a lot more along those lines in this opening argument:
He told the jury that the first witness would be Rodriguez, the owner of the drug house, who would testify that he watched Defendant's eyes turn black. With fury. And rage. And it was like a Hollywood movie. He could feel the wind coming out of her." ADA Ripol stated that in addition to her eyes turning black and the wind," Rodriguez would also testify that [Montoya] was like a zombie when he was around her. And that [Defendant] suggested to . . . Rodriguez on several occasions that she was a witch and that she would put menstrual blood concoctions into [Montoya's] food to control him." After a dramatic pause, ADA Ripol continued: Joseph Morgas-the son of that grieving family back there-had to be eliminated by this wanna-be witch magic woman," whom he also called this Cersei-right out of Game of Thrones."
The ADA also told jurors that he anticipated" they would hear from Montoya-even though the state had already decided not to call him and had taken him off the witness list. As a reminder, an opening statement is supposed to be limited to what you expect the evidence will show, but this one obviously wasn't, even setting aside the witchcraft allegations. As the court explained, this went on: The remainder of the opening statement was similarly rife with hyperbole, grotesqueries, name-calling, and outlandish misstatements of what the evidence would show."
You might be wondering if the defense attorney objected to any of this. The answer is no.
After opening statements, the state called its first witness, who was indeed Rodriguez, the owner of the drug house," who offered witchcraft evidence":
Rodriguez testified that when Defendant walked into his drug house, Rodriguez was getting high with [the victim] and discussing supernatural incidents," such as little dwarfs or men . . . in his house at night peeping out from the vents" and moving things around." [The victim] said something to Defendant that caused her to become angry. ADA Ripol asked Rodriguez to describe for the jury her eyes." Rodriguez testified that her eyes turned black.... Almost kind of like you see in a movie, you know, where the eyes are black. Wind. It felt almost like the wind was throwing back her hair. And the room became very heavy."
The ADA then elicited testimony-from this owner of a drug house-suggesting that Montoya was a different person" around his wife because she was controlling him with the aforementioned blood magic. I'll spare you the details of that as well as some other astoundingly awful conduct at trial by the prosecutors. And, the court notes, [i]nexplicably, defense counsel did not object to the vast majority of instances of prosecutorial misconduct that Defendant identifies on appeal." The court was at a loss to explain that, since [t]he entire trial was filled with theatrics, hyperbole, and disparaging inflammatory statements, such that the extent of the misconduct cannot be fully conveyed in this opinion." (It's not very clear why the trial court didn't shut this down, despite the lack of objections.)
Unsurprisingly, the court held this misconduct was fundamental, reversible error." The more difficult question was whether it had been so unfairly prejudicial and egregious that the state should be forbidden from retrying the defendant. This is a totality of the circumstances" analysis under New Mexico law, and if you were wondering what kind of circumstances might be required to satisfy the test, this is an example right here. There is absolutely no scenario in which it is acceptable for a prosecutor to accuse a defendant of witchcraft in a twenty-first-century court, as ADA Ripol did in this case."
Probably the court didn't mean to suggest it was acceptable last century, either. Or in the centuries before that. See, e.g., Last Salem Witch Finally Cleared" (July 29, 2022).
Related Stories