It was hard to carry on a conversation with Angela "Spence" Pacheco on Saturday afternoon at the Santa Fe Rodeo Grounds.

While the district attorney worked as a volunteer ticket-taker at the front gate of the New Mexico Gay Rodeo Association's Zia Regional Rodeo, one by one, people walked up to the 61-year-old Pacheco and gave her a big hug. One man whispered in her ear during a big embrace, "Don't let them get to you."

Pacheco knew exactly the "them" the man was referring to.

Critics of the first woman to hold the top prosecutor's post in the judicial district covering Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos counties have come out of the woodwork in recent weeks after a few high-profile missteps by her office.

"I never ran for DA to be popular," Pacheco said. "I do this because I care about what I do."

With less than a year before the 2012 primary election, Pacheco, who remains well-liked in Northern New Mexico Democratic Party political circles, has already said she will run for a second four-year term.

And while no announcements have been made about who might challenge her for the $109,000-a-year job, there seems to be plenty of ammo for political attacks against the incumbent.

While Pacheco oversaw conviction of attorney Carlos Fierro in a high-profile, fatal hit-and-run DWI case, her office failed to get a conviction in the community-polarizing vehicular-homicide trial of Scott Owens, who was driving drunk during a collision that left four teenagers dead.

And more recently there was the dismissal of a DWI case against notorious repeat drunken driver John Paul Chavez because of prosecutor error. One of her chief deputies, who had been suffering from medical issues for some time, failed to make an appearance in the case or hand over evidence for more than five months.

Pacheco was forced to take responsibility for a particularly painful screw-up on her watch. Chavez's status as a poster boy for New Mexico's problems with DWI was established well before Pacheco took office. After seven DWI convictions between 1982 and 2002, Chavez in September 2002, in what he described as a drunken blackout, drove over a Colorado couple crossing a downtown Santa Fe street, dragging Helen "Elly" Cote under his truck for several blocks. Resulting injuries left her in a six-week coma and with permanent physical and mental impairments.

Chavez had been released from prison and completed parole since Pacheco took office, and in December he was arrested again for DWI. That was the case Pacheco's office negligently handled, leading to a judge having to permanently dismiss the charge.

"I don't even know what to say anymore," Cote said when told of the Chavez dismissal. "I mean seriously. What is wrong there [in New Mexico]?" Asked if she felt more anger toward the 51-year-old Chavez or the District Attorney's Office, Cote wasn't sure. "It's neck-and-neck right now," she said.

Pacheco said she shared the frustration, saying she literally felt ill when learning of the mistake. "They have every right to be mad at us," Pacheco said. "Letting this case fall off like this office did was, simply put, inexcusable."

By next June's Democratic primary, voters could be faced with a decision on how the Chavez case — one of more than 7,200 cases her office handles each year — affects their opinion of Pacheco's handling of the office.

Chavez case errors

Pacheco and several fellow prosecutors in her office say they are conducting a thorough audit of the roughly 150 cases that had been assigned to former Chief Deputy District Attorney Charles Baldonado, who was in and out of the hospital for medical reasons over the past year before his resignation became effective last month.

Baldonado was one of the most experienced attorneys in the office, and Pacheco didn't scrutinize his work as closely as she does with many of the younger employees in her office.

Essentially, she said, when she asked Baldonado how his caseload was going during his medical issues, she took him at his word when he said he had it under control.

It cost her not only the Chavez dismissal, but also recent dismissals of two other repeat DWI cases that were facing felony charges in District Court.

"As long as you have a human factor, there will always be some mistakes," Pacheco said. "I know that. We have to strive to get as close to perfection as we can get."

And the reality is that the District Attorney's Office has been largely understaffed recently, Pacheco said.

Financial constraints that current Chief Deputy District Attorney Doug Couleur described as a "systemic problem" for the state's entire legal system have hampered the prosecutor's office.

"We are reaching a time when people are realizing the government has limitations, especially financial limitations," Pacheco said. "We aren't looking for sympathy from anyone. We're in the same boat as a lot of other agencies right now."

Call for resignation

Some locals became quite upset by the dismissal of the Chavez case. One man even requested that New Mexico Attorney General Gary King remove Pacheco from office.

Edward R. Brown wrote to King that Pacheco should be removed due to one of the following two subsections of state statute 36-1-9: "B. failure, neglect or refusal to discharge the duties of the office, or ... E. gross incompetence or gross negligence in discharging the duties of the office."

Brown bemoaned "Pacheco's incompetent handling of this matter" and even called for the removal from office of the judge in the case, Michael Vigil, also a Democrat.

High turnover, lower budget

When Pacheco took office Jan. 1, 2009, the midway point of Fiscal Year 2009, her office was provided with a $5.4 million budget. Her current operating budget is $4.5 million — a 16 percent decrease despite having to handle 500 more cases a year.

First Judicial District prosecutors between June 24 and Aug. 1 of this year handled 932 criminal cases in front of state District Judges Stephen Pfeffer and Vigil. The office did so while also having as many as eight vacancies among its 24 attorney positions.

"Having been a prosecutor," said John Day, a former assistant district attorney in Taos now with Santa Fe's Rothstein Donatelli law firm, "I can tell you that the turnover in the office is normal. People come into the office, get some experience and move on.

"From what I've seen here, I think Spence and Doug have brought in a really good, dedicated crop of young prosecutors, and I think they're nurturing them really well. But there is always going to be some turnover in a district attorney's office. When a lot hits at once, sometimes that puts a real strain on the office."

Since early June, the office has seen one attorney take a position with the Secretary of State's Office for higher pay, two attorneys move out of Santa Fe, one take a job as a Worker's Compensation judge in Albuquerque, and two take higher paying jobs with the New Mexico Attorney General's Office, plus Baldonado's resignation for medical reasons. Another attorney missed a few weeks for a medical reason but is back at work.

Replacing attorneys isn't easy, considering the caseload and Santa Fe's cost of living. The office offers new hires $43,000 per year.

Six hours per case

In addition to the roughly 7,000 open cases inherited when Pacheco took office, there are about 7,200 new cases referred to Pacheco's office per year for alleged crimes in Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Rio Arriba counties.

A fully staffed office would have 24 prosecutors to handle Magistrate and District Court matters in all three counties as well as Children's Court and pre-prosecution diversion programs. The office is short two attorneys.

If each prosecutor in the district handled an equal caseload, that would be 300 cases per attorney, per year.

The office reports the average prosecutor, after vacation and sick time are accounted for, works 221.5 days per year. Some cases must be adjudicated within six months and some others stay in the courts longer than a year. But if each case was to work through the system within a year's time — including presentation to a grand jury for indictment, arraignment, all the way through dismissal or sentencing — that would mean each attorney would be given just under three-quarters of a workday, or six hours total, to handle each case.

Obviously there are exceptions. Couleur and fellow Chief Deputy District Attorney Juan Valencia spent 39 consecutive days earlier this year on the Owens trial, not including other work preparing for that case since the tragic crash in 2009.

More than high profile cases

Including attorneys and other employees, the District Attorney's Office has 72 positions on the books, seven of which are vacant.

The office's worthless-check program has collected for area merchants more than $46,000 so far this calendar year and collected more than $67,000 in 2010 — both numbers that are higher than in previous years.

The office's move toward becoming 100 percent digital — having every case filing scanned into a computer and available on a network for attorneys to access — is nearly complete, which should help alleviate case-tracking issues (Chavez's dismissal was actually never entered into the office's case management system, though).

In addition to the two attorneys the office is still short, there are four victim-advocate vacancies and one investigator vacancy.

"I don't think people (in the district) always realize the entirety of what the District Attorney's Office is responsible for," Couleur said. "They get a look in the papers at a very small — very small — percentage of what we do, and that can distort the perception of all the work we do. The bigger issue here isn't about just this DA's Office. It's systemic all over the state. There are staffing problems at every office."

Notifying victims

Sometimes, even when the District Attorney's Office gets a conviction, it isn't enough.

One Santa Fe mom and her teenage daughter were left furious last week because no one notified them of the sentencing of a man who tried to have sex with the teen. The lack of notice was due in part to the overworked victim advocates (they average 1,600 cases per person, per year), and also because of a plain and simple failure on the part of prosecutors handling the case.

David Romero, a 28-year-old former athletic trainer at Santa Fe High School, pleaded guilty to using Facebook to try to arrange sex with a 15-year-old student. He also was sentenced the same day he entered the plea.

While the teenage girl had a statement she wanted to read to a judge and Romero, she didn't get that chance because she didn't know about the court hearing.

"You've got to be kidding me," the girl's mother said when told by a reporter about the sentencing. "I can't even tell you how angry this makes me. He's out, doesn't have to register, and they don't even tell us so we can talk to the judge and say our piece?"

Again, Pacheco didn't make excuses, instead agreeing with the mother's anger and admitting the woman should have been notified of the hearing.

Addressing issues

While her position rarely allows her to speak specifically about cases, including ones where there have been errors, Pacheco said she and her senior attorneys are focusing on addressing the recent issues that have come up for her office.

"We are constantly trying to refine the process," Couleur said. "When issues arise, we address them the best we can."

Although there are many in local law enforcement who have their issues with the DA's Office, none felt that going on the record would be wise.

While judges also wouldn't go on the record about specific cases, David Segura, chief judge at Santa Fe County Magistrate Court, said he respects how members of Pacheco's office have handled problems brought to their attention by the court.

"Any of the issues that we've raised, they've addressed," Segura said. "They're always in attendance in our regular monthly meetings where we have a brown bag with our justice partners, and they are working to make things better. Sometimes issues come up that need to be addressed, and sometimes cases are dismissed because of some issues, but I've never seen them fail to work at fixing any problems that have come up."

Case in point, Segura said, is the fact Pacheco has assigned to Magistrate Court two attorneys who show up for preliminary hearings every Wednesday.

"Last Wednesday I got through 60 cases, and that probably couldn't have happened the same way without the DA's Office making sure our preliminary hearing process runs smoother," Segura said. "I think it's safe to say the working relationship today between the DA's Office and Magistrate Court is better than when I started five years ago. That helps the whole system operate."

Coming back for more

Pacheco said recent harsh criticism over errors by her office haven't dissuaded her from plans to seek re-election.

"I am very proud of the work we have done in here and of some of the people I get to work with every day," Pacheco said. "I know there are issues that come up, and we have to own up to those mistakes and move toward making sure they don't happen again. But I believe we're doing that."

Contact Geoff Grammer at 986-3076 or ggrammer@sfnewmexican.com. Read his blog at SantaFeCrime.com.


REDUCED BUDGET

First Judicial District Attorney's Office

(Rio Arriba, Santa Fe and Los Alamos counties)

• Operating budget fiscal year 2009: $5.38 million

• Operating budget fiscal year 2012: $4.53 million

• Difference: minus 16 percent

Prosecutors in judicial districts around the state have seen decreases over that same priod ranging from 8 percent (11th district) to 29 percent (10th district).

• Budgeted for 72 employees (24 attorneys)

• Current vacancies: 7 (Two attorneys, one investigator, four victim advocates)