Former judge's lawyers fight malpractice suit

Maestas says his attorneys should have known he was exempt from prosecution

Tom Sharpe | The New Mexican

3/5/2008 - 3/6/08

Lawyers being sued by a former Española judge for mishandling his defense against criminal charges contend he shouldn't be allowed to collect damages unless he proves his innocence.

Charles Maestas, a former municipal judge, spent 21/2 years in prison on charges he got female defendants in his court to perform sex acts in exchange for lenient sentences.

After he was released, the state Supreme Court overturned his conviction when an assistant attorney general pointed out that the law under which prosecutors had charged him exempted judges.

Maestas argues his lawyers should have noticed that long before he went to prison.

Maestas was tried again last year on five counts of rape and five of bribery based on another statute.

But in July, after a jury acquitted him on nine counts and deadlocked on one bribery charge, all charges were dismissed.

Last August, the state Attorney General's Office announced it would not try Maestas again.

Martha Brown, who represents Maestas' trial attorney, Steve Aarons, and Al Green, who represents lawyer David Henderson, who handled his appeal, say only innocent defendants can sue their lawyers for malpractice.

"The basic proposition is that one shouldn't profit from one's own misdeeds," Brown said.

Maestas' current lawyer, Tony Scarborough, a former state Supreme Court justice, maintains innocence is not required for a plaintiff to recover damages for legal malpractice in New Mexico.

Last week, state District Judge Barbara Vigil said that before the malpractice case proceeds, Scarborough may mount an appeal to the state Court of Appeals on the "innocence rule."

The judge also rejected Scarborough's motion for partial summary judgment and delayed ruling on Brown's motion for summary judgment pending completion of arbitration of Maestas' complaint against Aarons.

Maestas, 44, a former probation officer whose family runs several restaurants in Española, first was elected municipal judge in 1998. Three months after his re-election in 2002, the Supreme Court suspended him from the bench after three women accused him of bribery and rape. Maestas did not deny he had sex with the women, only that it was not a quid pro quo for leniency.

During Maestas' first trial in June 2003, jurors listened to a recording that one of his accusers made secretly of her liaison with Maestas. The jury convicted him of multiple counts of rape and using his position to get sex, but later six jurors said they were confused by the verdict forms and didn't mean to find him guilty of rape. Nevertheless, the state Court of Appeals upheld the convictions.

According to Maestas' malpractice complaint, after his conviction, he was kept in solitary confinement near death row in the state penitentiary and was "frequently insulted, threatened and harassed by the guards and other inmates."

Once, he slipped in the prison shower and knocked himself unconscious, resulting in a cracked tailbone, an injured back and a lump on his head the size of a hardball, he wrote.

Maestas says he has suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and recurring nightmares from the "horrifying" experience. "I had abandoned all hope and thought I would never survive," he wrote.

By early 2004, more women came forward to say they were coerced into sexual acts through a conspiracy by Maestas and Española jail guards. The city of Española ultimately agreed to pay $890,000 to settle two lawsuits brought by 10 women.

Not until December 2006 — months after Maestas was released from prison — did the state Supreme Court throw out the convictions, based on the realization that bribery under the Government Conduct Act exempted "official acts." The rape charges were dismissed because they were deemed to be dependent on the bribery charges. The 2007 state Legislature amended the law to remove the exemption for judges.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.