At noon on July 4, as America celebrated its freedom, armed officers of the state escorted Eric Raymond Buckley into the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Facility.
The smile he wore for his mug shot is best described as nonplussed. He wasn’t the only one who saw the absurdity of his situation: The arresting officer apologized, Buckley recalls, as she ordered him into her patrol car.
The easygoing 36-year-old acupuncturist wasn’t in jail because he’d shot, stabbed or driven drunk. He hadn’t run a red light or raised his voice. He hadn’t even gotten caught sneaking a handful of granola from the bins at Whole Foods.
Three events conspired to land Buckley in jail:
1. More than a year ago, his dog ZZ, a 10-year-old black Belgian sheepdog mix who is well-behaved but afraid of thunder, ran away in a storm. “She got picked up by the fuzz, and I went and bailed her out,” Buckley recalls.
2. On the night of July 3, a Hollywood director ran over Buckley’s motorcycle, which had been parked on the street outside his house.
3. The next morning, Buckley called the police to file a report about his totaled motorcycle.
Two Santa Fe Police Department officers showed up at Buckley’s house, in a cul-de-sac near Alto Street. Officer Andrea Gutierrez took a report on Buckley’s busted motorcycle. Fortunately, the driver, Basil Grillo—production manager for the Harrison Ford film now shooting in town, Cowboys & Aliens—had left a note with his phone number.
The accident report squared away, Officer Gutierrez arrested Buckley. As a matter of procedure, the officers had checked his name with the dispatcher, who informed them that Buckley had a bench warrant.
Surprise!
The year-old warrant had been issued after Buckley failed to appear in court to answer an animal control citation, the consequence of ZZ’s brief escape.
What Buckley didn’t remember at the time of his arrest—and the officers had no way of knowing—was that he had actually paid the animal control ticket.
Buckley’s citation is dated June 2, 2009. To get his dog back, he had signed a promise to pay the $125 fee within 30 days.
Records show Buckley missed that deadline, paying the fee in person at the Santa Fe Animal Services Division on Aug. 7, a full 19 days before he was supposed to appear in court. On Aug. 23, Municipal Court Judge Ann Yalman signed a bench warrant for Buckley, although his fee had been paid three weeks earlier, and Buckley claims he never received a summons.
Even if Buckley could have shown the officers proof of payment, it wouldn’t have mattered: He was a wanted man.
(Santa Fe Police Chief Aric Wheeler and a department spokesman did not return SFR’s calls regarding this story.)
Jail records show Buckley spent three hours in detention that Independence Day. He was released after paying a $225 bond.
Ten days after his arrest, and after five hours spent waiting for his name to be called at Municipal Court, a fill-in judge whom Buckley describes as “as old as the hills” dismissed the case.
His ordeal cost Santa Fe taxpayers an estimated $50 in booking costs, plus the time wasted by clerks, guards, police officers and judges.
“Because of budget constraints, you’d think they’d want to not arrest people they don’t have to, and focus their attention on things that should be dealt with,” Buckley says. “It doesn’t surprise me, in that this is New Mexico, and people don’t seem to really care about having things done right.”
Unfortunately, for anyone who might come into contact with the law, Buckley’s case was an extreme example of a systemic problem.
“People are getting arrested when they’ve paid their tickets. It happens a lot,” Shari Weinstein, a former chief deputy 1st Judicial District attorney, now a legal adviser for the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts, tells SFR. “We recognize it’s a problem, and we need to fix it. Big time.”
The problem is well-known to lawyers, clerks, judges and police.
“Not everybody in jail is guilty. We do arrest people who are innocent,” Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano says. “I’ve got 17 years in law enforcement, and I know—I can give you a name—that I’ve arrested somebody on a bench warrant who has probably paid the ticket.”
Screwups are screwups, even when they result from poor planning, as appears to be the case in New Mexico, with its antiquated criminal procedures and uniquely onerous traffic citation form. But SFR’s reporting points to a much deeper problem with the local administration of justice: Even when the system works as designed, the outcomes are of dubious benefit—especially stacked against the time and money spent in the often futile pursuit of small fines. A merciless flood of bench warrants, most of which began with traffic or other non-criminal citations, makes fugitives of thousands of people who might simply have made a mistake.
In short, the same justice system that is plagued by errors of its own creation leaves no room for error by small-time, non-criminal defendants—who, when they do show up to court, almost never bring a lawyer.
Judges say they have little choice but to issue so many bench warrants: that without the threat of jail, some people would never pay fines or show up to court. But Buckley’s experience with the system has only lowered his opinion of it.
“I called them to assist me in my time of need, and they threw me in jail over something I had dealt with,” he says. “It’s like a big bureaucratic cog that has no regard for the humans who it is supposed to help.”
Welcome to law and order, Santa Fe style.
The smile he wore for his mug shot is best described as nonplussed. He wasn’t the only one who saw the absurdity of his situation: The arresting officer apologized, Buckley recalls, as she ordered him into her patrol car.
The easygoing 36-year-old acupuncturist wasn’t in jail because he’d shot, stabbed or driven drunk. He hadn’t run a red light or raised his voice. He hadn’t even gotten caught sneaking a handful of granola from the bins at Whole Foods.
Three events conspired to land Buckley in jail:
1. More than a year ago, his dog ZZ, a 10-year-old black Belgian sheepdog mix who is well-behaved but afraid of thunder, ran away in a storm. “She got picked up by the fuzz, and I went and bailed her out,” Buckley recalls.
2. On the night of July 3, a Hollywood director ran over Buckley’s motorcycle, which had been parked on the street outside his house.
3. The next morning, Buckley called the police to file a report about his totaled motorcycle.
Two Santa Fe Police Department officers showed up at Buckley’s house, in a cul-de-sac near Alto Street. Officer Andrea Gutierrez took a report on Buckley’s busted motorcycle. Fortunately, the driver, Basil Grillo—production manager for the Harrison Ford film now shooting in town, Cowboys & Aliens—had left a note with his phone number.
The accident report squared away, Officer Gutierrez arrested Buckley. As a matter of procedure, the officers had checked his name with the dispatcher, who informed them that Buckley had a bench warrant.
Surprise!
The year-old warrant had been issued after Buckley failed to appear in court to answer an animal control citation, the consequence of ZZ’s brief escape.
What Buckley didn’t remember at the time of his arrest—and the officers had no way of knowing—was that he had actually paid the animal control ticket.
Buckley’s citation is dated June 2, 2009. To get his dog back, he had signed a promise to pay the $125 fee within 30 days.
Records show Buckley missed that deadline, paying the fee in person at the Santa Fe Animal Services Division on Aug. 7, a full 19 days before he was supposed to appear in court. On Aug. 23, Municipal Court Judge Ann Yalman signed a bench warrant for Buckley, although his fee had been paid three weeks earlier, and Buckley claims he never received a summons.
Even if Buckley could have shown the officers proof of payment, it wouldn’t have mattered: He was a wanted man.
(Santa Fe Police Chief Aric Wheeler and a department spokesman did not return SFR’s calls regarding this story.)
Jail records show Buckley spent three hours in detention that Independence Day. He was released after paying a $225 bond.
Ten days after his arrest, and after five hours spent waiting for his name to be called at Municipal Court, a fill-in judge whom Buckley describes as “as old as the hills” dismissed the case.
His ordeal cost Santa Fe taxpayers an estimated $50 in booking costs, plus the time wasted by clerks, guards, police officers and judges.
“Because of budget constraints, you’d think they’d want to not arrest people they don’t have to, and focus their attention on things that should be dealt with,” Buckley says. “It doesn’t surprise me, in that this is New Mexico, and people don’t seem to really care about having things done right.”
Unfortunately, for anyone who might come into contact with the law, Buckley’s case was an extreme example of a systemic problem.
“People are getting arrested when they’ve paid their tickets. It happens a lot,” Shari Weinstein, a former chief deputy 1st Judicial District attorney, now a legal adviser for the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts, tells SFR. “We recognize it’s a problem, and we need to fix it. Big time.”
The problem is well-known to lawyers, clerks, judges and police.
Local acupuncturist Eric Raymond Buckley was thrown in jail over a ticket he’d actually paid.
Screwups are screwups, even when they result from poor planning, as appears to be the case in New Mexico, with its antiquated criminal procedures and uniquely onerous traffic citation form. But SFR’s reporting points to a much deeper problem with the local administration of justice: Even when the system works as designed, the outcomes are of dubious benefit—especially stacked against the time and money spent in the often futile pursuit of small fines. A merciless flood of bench warrants, most of which began with traffic or other non-criminal citations, makes fugitives of thousands of people who might simply have made a mistake.
In short, the same justice system that is plagued by errors of its own creation leaves no room for error by small-time, non-criminal defendants—who, when they do show up to court, almost never bring a lawyer.
Judges say they have little choice but to issue so many bench warrants: that without the threat of jail, some people would never pay fines or show up to court. But Buckley’s experience with the system has only lowered his opinion of it.
“I called them to assist me in my time of need, and they threw me in jail over something I had dealt with,” he says. “It’s like a big bureaucratic cog that has no regard for the humans who it is supposed to help.”
Welcome to law and order, Santa Fe style.
The judicial inanity and injustice that Corey Pein describes, as seen in the statistics, are appalling. If judicial employees and cops think it’s humorous, let’s make it really funny with a mandatory restitution penalty of $100,000 for every day a citizen is wrongly incarcerated. This malfeasance and misfeasance would stop in an instant.
Once upon a time, local sheriffs and police maintained order. Today, according to these statistics, their main job has become to enforce a myriad of statute offenses, nearly all of which are civil, not criminal, and where no harm has been done to anyone. Another sure way to stop this is to bring total numbers of police in line with other Western states. That means slashing police forces in half. This is based on TWO actual counts of police presence in five states. New Mexico could save a fortune, and a lot of civil upset at the same time.
For particularly onerous jurisdictions like Santa Fe, the scale of this raises, in my mind, fundamental constitutional liberties. As once was done with the state penitentiary, simply place the Santa Fe Police and courts under the administrative supervision of a federal court.
And when the federal administrator starts dispatching local city and county officials to federal penitentiaries, things will change fast, as they did at the state pen.
These travesties persist because those responsible can get away with it.
People of Santa Fe must be a bunch of morons to put up with this kind of treatment.
John, you said it! The truth and nothing but!! People are so used to allowing someone else take care of the problem...the work ethic and problems with these city and county employees act like business as ususal, rushing to quickly handle the situation, & leaving as soon as possible. There seems to be a lack of pride, a reckless abandon, perhaps it is being in a position of "authority" or that no one is questioning what they do or how they are doing it, unless of course, you're an attorney. The thoughtless actions of some county/city workers, leave a foul taste in your mouth and doubts on your mind; widening the gap between citizens and law enforcement. For the few who perform their job duties with courtesy and efficiency, their acts are seldom acknowledged, overshadowed by their co-workers negative deeds. Ask me...I've been threatened, incarcerated (yes, I had one of those warrants that I was not notified about for a traffic ticket); family dog has been threatened to be shot numerous times in the past three years. Recently, I was told to remove myself from the home where I've lived for the past 4 years; law enf has failed to document & file incidents of merit for the numerous times they have been notified, (leaving NO documentation for presentation at court hearings). I am told "I Have No Rights!!" So if you know of any Lawyers who want to defend my rights, contact me, I am in the process of compiling data to file legal proceedings. As an American Citizen of the United States of America, I know that I have rights! Citizens should group together with one loud voice, working to be part of the solution for better government.