District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies's four-year term in the First Judicial District has been defined by high profile cases, like the trial over a fatal shooting on a movie set and the case of the eight people arrested after pulling down an obelisk in the Santa Fe Plaza.
Now, in the primary elections, Democrat Carmack-Altwies faces a challenger in the form of her predecessor, Marco Serna, who says he would have handled things differently.
Carmack-Altwies has gone after convictions in the case of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who died on the set of the movie “Rust” after being accidentally shot by actor and producer Alec Baldwin. She said the case has so far cost about $600,000, in part because there were so many people on set.
"When you start getting up into double digits of witnesses, costs go up," she told KUNM.
The legislature assigned special funding to cover about half of that.
"It was absolutely worth it because every victim deserves justice," she said.
Her opponent Marco Serna critiqued what he characterizes as excessive spending on special prosecutors and an outside communications firm, "that the office is hemorrhaging money on because they didn't keep it in house."
He highlighted her handling of the case of eight people arrested after the 2020 toppling of an obelisk in Santa Fe Plaza, which commemorated, among other things, the deaths of soldiers who died in battles with "savage Indians," although the word savage was removed by an unknown person decades ago.
Carmack-Altwies said she has always favored a restorative justice approach to nonviolent crimes.
"We offered them pre-prosecution diversion," she said. "It required participating in the restorative justice program, community service."
They had to write an apology letter and stay out of trouble for two years.
"And then we dismissed the charges against them," she said.
Serna didn't say exactly what he would have done differently but said the office didn't communicate clearly about the case.
"I'm always in favor of restorative justice, when it applies," he said. "The reason why it didn't apply, and why it was unsuccessful in this particular prosecution, is because there was no accountability."
When asked about achievements in her four years, Carmack-Altwies pointed to lobbying for more funding to hire eight new people. She said it is hard for public prosecutors to retain attorneys who would often get paid better elsewhere.
She also said she has increased conviction rates for DWI cases to 87%. But Serna alleged that her statistics are misleading. She introduced a new system of dismissing DWI cases and refiling only if enough evidence could be gathered, and the conviction rate is based on those refiled cases rather than as a percentage of all DWI arrests.
