Andy Lyman
The Santa Fe County Magistrate Court is cramped even without crowds of defendants and witnesses.
A trip to Santa Fe County’s Magistrate Court can feel like showing up to an appointment at any non-descript bureaucratic agency. Just inside the door stands a single metal detector, on the other side of which a smattering of lobby chairs face a row of administrative windows. To the left and right, short hallways lead to the four courtrooms, all with their own collection of movable chairs.
For lawyers and judges who frequent the court, the small lobby, short hallways and a shortage of meeting rooms mean not only a crowded space at peak hours, but also a security risk.
The first step in building a new magistrate courthouse is done, thanks to legislation that quietly breezed through both the House and Senate during the last few days of the session. Senate Joint Resolution 12, sponsored by Sen. Nancy Rodriguez, D-Santa Fe, authorized a land transfer from the General Services Department to the Administrative Office of the Courts—an important part of updating the building that the court has outgrown.
The transfer, which did not require the governor’s signature, was the first step in relocating the court from its current spot near the intersection of St. Francis Drive and St. Michael’s Drive to state-owned land behind a Department of Public Safety complex on the Southside.
Magistrate courts handle civil cases with small claims (up to $10,000) as well as a variety of criminal misdemeanors, including drunken driving and domestic violence cases, along with landlord-tenant disputes and traffic violations. Magistrate courts also sometimes serve as gateways to district courts for felony cases by holding preliminary hearings to determine probable cause.
Jason Clack, the court operations director for the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts, points to a 2019 study indicating caseloads at the time justified an additional magistrate judge and identified substandard conditions in the building.
“That staffing study showed that the Santa Fe Magistrate Court has a current need for 5.3 judges, but they currently only have four, and there’s no space to put an additional judge in the existing courthouse,” Clack says.
Clack also says the current building, an easy-to-miss Midtown structure on a dead-end road, among county and state buildings, doesn’t allow the needed distance between defendants, witnesses and judges.
“They have to take the inmates through the same hallway where the judges and staff also go to the courtroom,” Clack says. “So they’re walking by judges’ chambers, staff are walking by, going into courtrooms and going through the same hallway.”
Presiding Santa Fe County Magistrate Judge John Rysanek tells SFR the current building is “nowhere near” security best practices, partly because there’s no separation of defendants and judges, something he says a bigger lobby area could alleviate.
Moreover, Rysanek says, the need for an extra judge is becoming more evident with increasingly crowded hallways and court rooms.
“The dockets don’t ever get smaller, they only sort of grow,” he says.
A new judge position would need to be approved by the Legislature, but Rysanek says a fifth courtroom is needed before the judicial branch makes the official case for an additional judge.
First Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies, who worked as both a prosecutor and defense attorney prior to her current role, agrees the current building is outdated, though she notes even the Santa Fe District Courthouse that opened in 2013 downtown requires defendants, victims and witnesses to share hallways. But, she says, what the district court has and the magistrate court doesn’t is space for discreet conversations.
“The concern that I had when I was a defense attorney was there was really no place to privately talk to your clients [in the magistrate court building], to explain to them the charges against them, the case, to talk about their potential defenses,” she says.
Carmack-Altwies says the limited space gets even more problematic when things really get cooking.
“On most days, the dockets are 20, 30, 40, cases and especially if it’s a domestic violence docket, you have two attorneys, the victim and the defendants plus potentially other witnesses,” she says.
Although the New Mexico Supreme Court signaled in a news release last month that virtual hearings will remain in some instances, Rysanek anticipates online hearings will come to an end “at some point,” and that the current magistrate building won’t be able to accommodate dockets that are sometimes upwards of 100 cases.
“We don’t really have the space to do that, especially with the size of the courthouse and the size of the individual court rooms.”
Clack says the next step for the new courthouse is approval from the legislative Capitol Buildings Planning Commission. According to a legislative capital outlay report, about $22 million has been appropriated for construction.
