State And Federal Info
Santa Rosa prison riots: Ralph Garcia, a correctional officer, was killed during a prison riot in 1999. Thirteen men were charged in the murder, but eleven of those cases were resolved through plea deals. Robert Young and Reis Lopez were charged with capital murder, but the New Mexico Supreme Court suspended proceedings because the state has not provided sufficient funds for their defense. The cases continued when prosecutors stopped seeking the death penalty. Lopez pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 29 years in prison. Young was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to life in prison.
The Vagos Bikers case: Four men were arrested and charged in 1974 for the kidnapping, murder and rape of a University of New Mexico student, William Velten. They were released in 1975 after the real murderer confessed.
In 1986, Governor Toney Anaya commuted the death sentences of all five men on New Mexico’s death row.
In 2009, New Mexico became the 15th state to abolish the death penalty. The bill applied only prospectively, leaving two men on death row. On June 28, 2019, the New Mexico Supreme Court vacated their death sentences and ordered that they be resentenced to life in prison.
New Mexico has excluded juveniles from execution since 1975, making it one of the first states to do so.
New Mexico was the last state to adopt a sentence of life without parole, in 2009.
Crimes Punishable by Death
Dec 23, 2019
In a year of declining death-penalty usage across the United States, nowhere was the erosion of capital punishment as sustained and pronounced in 2019 as it was in the western United States. Continuing a wave of momentum from
Arbitrariness
Jul 02, 2019
The New Mexico Supreme Court has cleared the state’s death row, vacating the death sentences imposed on the state’s final two death-row prisoners, and directing that they be resentenced to life in prison. The rulings, issued by a …
United States Supreme Court
Nov 28, 2018
As federal prosecutors dropped the death penalty against a Navajo man accused of killing a police officer on Navajo land, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in a separate case on the status of a treaty establishing the borders …
Sentencing Alternatives
Nov 01, 2018
Life Without Parole Laws in States That Recently Repealed the Death Penalty…
Arbitrariness
Apr 11, 2018
Nine years after New Mexico prospectively abolished capital punishment, lawyers for the state’s two remaining…
Recent Legislative Activity
Mar 09, 2018
In Washington and Utah, bipartisan or Republican-led efforts at death-penalty repeal fell short, a month after death-penalty proponents abandoned efforts to reinstate capital punishment in New Mexico
Recent Legislative Activity
Feb 06, 2018
The latest effort by death-penalty proponents to reinstate the death penalty in New Mexico has died in a House committee. House Bill 155
Deterrence
Jan 12, 2018
States that have recently abolished the death penalty have not experienced the “parade of horribles” — including increased murder rates — predicted by death-penalty proponents, according to death-penalty experts who participated in a panel discussion …
Costs
Jun 16, 2017
In a Washington Post op-ed, former New Mexico Governor and United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson (pictured) — who in 2009 signed a bill to abolish his state’s death penalty — urged that capital punishment be abolished in …
Arbitrariness
Nov 19, 2014
In a recent editorial, the Washington Post urged Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley to commute the sentences of the four men remaining on the state’s death row, saying, “To carry out executions post-repeal would be both cr…
