Familiar foes compete for district attorney position

May 4—The two Democrats vying to become the region's next district attorney already have served one term in the office — and both accuse the other of doing the job badly.

The sniping — on DWI convictions, organization, competence, transparency and more — has become central to the campaigns of incumbent Mary Carmack-Altwies and her predecessor at the First Judicial District District Attorney's Office, Marco Serna.

With no Republican in the race, the June 4 primary will decide who gets a second chance at being the region's top prosecutor and running the office that handles criminal prosecutions in Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos counties.

Carmack-Altwies and Serna are near polar opposites in most respects.

Carmack-Altwies — who was working as a defense attorney when she moved to Santa Fe in 2013 and said she decided to become a prosecutor and later run for office after seeing the poor job Serna was doing — said the office was "in shambles" when she took over in 2021.

She contended she has reformed its operations and wants to continue the good work she started.

"I just realized there was a huge lack of leadership and training going on here," she said, discussing during a recent interview her reasons for wanting to be district attorney.

At a forum in late April, Carmack-Altwies said Serna left behind a backlog of homicide cases and said under his leadership diversion programs were "at a standstill" and office morale was low. She also said she raised violent crime conviction rates, improved morale by increasing pay for staff and cleared the backlog of homicides.

But Serna — who headed the office from 2017 to 2020 before making an unsuccessful run for a seat in Congress — fired back that Carmack-Altwies has made such a mess of the job he felt compelled to run again so he could right the ship.

Serna said Carmack-Altwies' policy of dismissing misdemeanor DWI cases at initial filing to give her office time to gather evidence before refiling has allowed drunken drivers to go unpunished. He added her claims of high conviction rates associated with the policy are dishonest and indicate she's unwilling to admit mistakes.

"Let's just bring this back to an honest DA's Office that holds not only people accountable, but holds the DA's Office accountable," he said.

Serna said the backlog of homicide cases Carmack-Altwies claims he left behind was a side effect of jury trials being paused during the coronavirus pandemic and the convictions she obtained on the cases when jury trials resumed were the result of case preparation done in large part by his staff before she took office.

Serna also is critical of Carmack-Altwies' handling of the high-profile criminal cases against Alec Baldwin and other crew members arising from an on-set shooting death in 2021. He said he would have handled the cases in-house, instead of hiring special prosecutors at taxpayer-expense as Carmack-Altwies has done.

If elected, Carmack-Altwies said her top three priorities would be tackling gun violence, creating more specialized teams of paralegals within her office to handle specific type of crimes — something she said she's done with homicides — and increasing diversion programs, especially for juvenile offenders. She added the goal would be to provide early intervention services to at-risk youths before their crimes increase in severity.

Carmack-Altwies said she's received funding for the latter initiative and is preparing to launch a pilot program in Rio Arriba County.

"I'm really excited about it; it should go live by the end of this year," she said.

If he wins, Serna said he would "immediately" reverse Carmack-Altwies' controversial DWI policy in order to "bring accountability and respect back to the office."

Serna identified two other priorities: addressing the intersection between homelessness, mental illness and crime — in part by lobbying for crisis intervention training for law enforcement — and managing the District Attorney's Office's budget more responsibly than he feels Carmack-Altwies has done, particularly in asking for additional funding to prosecute the Rust shooting cases.

"I would trust in my attorneys to take that case regardless of Alec Baldwin being involved or it being a movie set," he said.

Serna — who worked in the 8th Judicial District and for the Association of District Attorneys following his unsuccessful bid for Congress — has said he'd also like to introduce a domestic violence specialty court here similar to one he helped set up in Taos, plus train law enforcement and attorneys in his office to concentrate on "evidence-based prosecution" in the cases that don't rely on victim testimony to achieve convictions.

"Because eight times time out of 10 you are going to have an uncooperative victim," he said.

The two candidates had very different reactions when confronted with criticism of their performance.

Carmack-Altwies staunchly stands by nearly every decision she's made in office, including her choice to resolve the criminal charges against defendants accused of helping pull down the Soldiers' Monument in Santa Fe's Plaza via a restorative justice process. Serna and others have criticized the move as lacking transparency.

In hindsight, Carmack-Altwies said, she wishes the process had been more transparent. However, she added, "I still stand by the decision 100%."

Serna said he's learned a lot since he was last in office and gave himself a B-minus for his previous performance. He acknowledged mistakes, including allowing the case against Robert Mondrian-Powell, charged with killing Santa Fe librarian Elvira Segura, to be dismissed on speedy trial grounds.

"No one is perfect, but it's how you react and make changes that make the difference," Serna said.

Carmack-Altwies has predicted she'll win the race by a wide margin.

Serna said he disagrees and believes he'll win the election but declined to predict whether the race would be close.