COVER STORY

TWO THEORIES

As juvenile justice reforms sweep the nation—and a high-stakes trial in Santa Fe approaches—SFR explores the systems in New Mexico

Fall trial in killing of basketball standout spotlights myriad legal issues, including self defense and juvenile justice reform

BY JEFF PROCTOR

Jurors must answer a host of thorny, charged questions in a First Judicial District courtroom come October; whether Estevan Montoya fired the shot that killed Santa Fe High basketball star Fedonta “JB” White won’t be among them.

Montoya, 16, and White, 18, found their way to the same underage drinking party in Chupadero on Aug. 1. The younger of the two shot a single bullet that struck the blue chip hoops recruit, who was likely on his way to the starting lineup for the University of New Mexico Lobos—an act that in a split-second led to impassioned calls for harsh punishment, pleas for understanding and a divided community.

None of that’s in doubt. Even Dan Marlowe, Montoya’s lawyer, concedes his young client, now 17, pulled the trigger.

But that’s where the agreement stops.

District Attorney Mary CarmackAltwies says it was first-degree murder, committed by a gang member with a history that was pointing toward a heinous crime.

“We’re going to trial, and we’re pursuing the maximum sentence,” CarmackAltwies tells SFR in her first public comments about the killing.

Marlowe says White was chasing Montoya, who was armed because he’d watched a close friend die by gunfire just two weeks earlier, and his client fired in self defense. Further, the longtime criminal defense attorney says, the boy is a member of a rap group known as the Southside Goons, which is no gang.

“He didn’t mean to kill that kid. He didn’t even know he was gonna hit him,” Marlowe says in an interview. “He just shot to scare him. And then the kid dies....I believe that it’s absolutely preposterous that they would be charging him with first-degree murder. It is all political, and there’s no way around it.”

Montoya has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, evidence tampering, negligent use of a firearm and unlawful carrying of a firearm.

Jury selection is set to begin in Santa Fe Oct. 4, with First Judicial District Judge T. Glenn Ellington presiding. The trial will take place against a thick, emotional backdrop, which for nearly a year has sometimes boiled into anger among friends and supporters of both boys on social media and in the comments sections of news stories about the case.

Additionally, it’ll be an early, highstakes test for Carmack-Altwies, a newly minted, first-time prosecutor who ran on a platform of progressive change in the criminal justice system, particularly shifting resources and energy “away from punishment and toward rehabilitation.”

Juvenile justice reform has been ascendant nationwide—and in New Mexico—in recent years, with US Supreme Court rulings that recognize people under 18 make decisions differently than adults. The rulings paved the way for more leniency, even in the most serious cases, and in this state, for proposals to change the sentencing and parole schemes for those who committed crimes as children. (See SFR’s story on the reforms on page 13.)

Carmack-Altwies was a vocal supporter of such a reform bill that nearly crossed the finish line during this year’s legislative session. However, she says, the job of a prosecutor requires a different calculus.

“We have to treat them the same-ish for these most serious crimes,” CarmackAltwies says. “But we have to take into account that down the line, they’re going to grow and develop more and change more than a 32-year-old man that commits a heinous first-degree murder.”

The seriousness of the crime

Marco Serna, Carmack-Altwies’ predecessor at the DA’s Office, made the decision almost immediately after Montoya’s arrest to charge the boy as an adult.

Serna could have chosen a different tack by setting up an amenability hearing—a process through which a judge decides whether the accused youth is open enough to treatment to be released at 21 years old.

The other path: adult sanctions, which could lead to a sentence of 30 years to life in a state prison.

“We definitely explored it,” CarmackAltwies says of whether Montoya should have been eligible for an amenability hearing. “Ultimately we rejected that based on factors I can’t disclose—both in the pending case and Montoya’s history.”

She decided Serna made the right call.

“When I came into office, I went through every pending homicide with my attorneys who were assigned to those cases, and we made decisions about every single one to see: Should this prosecution continue?” she says. “Should this be charged at a higher level? Should this be charged at a lower level? This was one where I thought the prosecution was spot-on.”

Asked for details about what, specifically, in Montoya’s background convinced her

he should be tried as an adult, CormackAltwies reluctantly declines to answer.

Her prosecutors have offered clues in the courtroom, from lengthy school disciplinary records to cellphone video they say shows Montoya firing a gun in a park.

Marlowe, the defense lawyer, has countered, saying Montoya has just two marks on his criminal history, neither of them violent.

Prosecutors have also asserted that Montoya is a “proud gang member,” citing his affiliation with the Southside Goons.

Marlowe and members of the group have pushed hard against that claim, saying the Goons are a rap collective who have been heavily maligned—and have even lost one of their own, Ivan Perez, who was fatally shot July 15 outside the Bluffs at Tierra Contenta.

Montoya was nearby when Perez, a close friend, was shot. Mario GuizarAnchondo, 17, faces an open count of murder in the killing, and Cormack-Altwies has charged him as an adult.

“But I’m reviewing that decision at this point,” she says.

Cormack-Altwies declines to comment on the Goons. But outside the context of the Montoya case, she describes her decision-making process when it comes to whether a child should face adult penalties.

First, the DA considers the seriousness of the crime. Second, she examines the defendant’s past actions.

“It’s mostly their on-paper criminal history, but we also take into account the file that the police have on that kid, if any,” she says.

‘I believe he’s not guilty all the way down the line’

Marlowe says the way Santa Fe police have handled the case is “complete bullshit.”

But he doesn’t begrudge CarmackAltwies’ charging decision.

“She doesn’t have really any choice, in my opinion,” he says, pointing to intense community pressure to aggressively prosecute Montoya, which he believes flows from White’s beloved status in the community as one of the region’s best basketball prospects in a generation.

Prosecutors’ choices and tactics are a different matter. Marlowe says the facts are not on prosecutors’ side, so they are attacking Montoya as a “gang banger.”

After the Perez killing, Marlowe says, Montoya caught wind that he would be “next.” That explains why he was carrying a gun at the Aug. 1 party.

“What are you gonna do if you see your best friend killed right in front of you?” Marlowe says. “And then you hear that you’re next? What’s that do to anybody? But what’s that do especially to a 16-yearold kid?”

White began chasing Montoya, who was trying to leave the party, and fired a wild shot under his arm and across his chest as he fled, Marlowe says. It left White dead, but it’s not a murder case.

Marlowe has appealed to Judge Ellington on several fronts: first, to free Montoya from the San Juan County Juvenile Services Center, where he’s being held after the closure of the Santa Fe County juvenile lockup last year and, later, to move the trial to Los Alamos County.

Ellington has sided with prosecutors both times.

“That’s the reddest county in the state, and you want to do a murder trial up there?” Marlowe says. “I should have my head examined for that one, but I do, because they’re fair...and they don’t have the same kind of political overflow that you would get if you were in Santa Fe County with the local star getting killed.”

Marlowe also says Montoya should have been afforded an amenability hearing.

He believes the trial’s outcome will depend on whether Ellington allows the jury to receive a self defense instruction, which could wipe away all the charges his client faces.

“I believe he’s not guilty all the way down the line,” Marlowe says. “And sure, the fact that he was 16 factors in, but from the very beginning, this was grossly overcharged regardless of how old he is.”

TOP: Estevan Montoya BOTTOM: Fedonta “JB” White Mary Carmack-Altwies plans to try 17-yearold Estevan Montoya as an adult and pursue a maximum sentence of 30 years to life if he’s convicted.

JULIE ANN GRIMM

Criminal defense lawyer Dan Marlowe says his client, Estevan Montoya, was “grossly overcharged” in the killed of Fedonta “JB” White.

COURTESY MARY CARMACK-ALTWIES

Parole loosens for 30-years-tolifers, including those sentenced as juveniles in New Mexico

BY JEFF PROCTOR

Shane Lasiter wanted honey-baked ham, fried okra and sweet potatoes.

A mundane, easily procured food order transforms into aspiration for a guy who hasn’t eaten a meal prepared in a home kitchen since he was 16.

On May 27, it happened for Lasiter, who is now 56.

A sturdy man who looks right through the back of your head when he wants to get a point across, Lasiter walked out of the Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs around 1 pm on that day, climbed into his lawyer’s Honda and got his Southern comfort food.

Four decades prior, the self-described “gullible” teen got into a different car with two older men. He hoped it would take him to California and away from the troubles he was trying to escape. He wound up in the middle of an armed robbery and fatally shot a gas station employee in Lordsburg.

Since then, Lasiter has endured traumas in the New Mexico prison system he still can’t talk about. He spent a decadeplus numbing his pain with contraband narcotics. And he turned it all around by earning multiple degrees, training dogs for service work, starting a classic-rock prison band, serving as a caregiver for a man he was incarcerated with—and, almost unbelievably, amassed a spotless misconduct record for the last 26 of the 40 years he was locked up.

A judge sentenced Lasiter in 1981 to a prison term of 30 years to life—a mandatory punishment at the time, even for children who were tried as adults—and by law, he was supposed to get a meaningful chance at release every two years once the three decades were up.

That chance was supposed to come from the New Mexico Parole Board.

Five times, from 2011 through 2019, there was no chance at all. Rather, as they’d been for nearly all of New Mexico’s “30-year-lifers” who should have been afforded a thorough review, Lasiter’s parole hearings were perfunctory affairs.

“Nobody paid attention. They were doing other things and just not paying attention,” Lasiter tells SFR, sitting in the dappled shade of a massive cottonwood in an Albuquerque park. “I had given up hope of getting out, but I hadn’t given up hope. When there’s no light at the end of

TOP: Shane Lasiter stands with his attorney, Denali Wilson of the ACLU, at an Albuquerque park days after she helped secure his release from prison on parole. BOTTOM: Lasiter, 56, enjoys his first meal as a free man in 40 years: honey-baked ham, fried okra and sweet potatoes.

the tunnel, well, you don’t think about the tunnel. So I focused on growth and spent time getting healthy.”

Everything changed last month— spurred by two recent US Supreme Court rulings and a push from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico and other advocates that forced the board to recognize long-held science showing the sections of the human brain that govern logic, decision making and more don’t fully develop until age 25.

In March, the Parole Board adopted a new rule that requires a more individualized, thorough exploration of how someone has or hasn’t changed while in prison—with far less focus on the circumstances of a decades-old crime—when deciding on release.

In May, a three-member panel granted Lasiter’s freedom.

“There was a noticeable difference,” Lasiter says of his last hearing. Before, “I was just an annoying presence. I always felt like, ‘We have to hear you, but we don’t have to listen to you.’ There were times I felt like getting up and walking out, because I already knew the answer. This time I didn’t know the answer, and I knew they had to listen. And they listened.”

More change may be coming.

A proposal that would have outlawed the sentence of life without the possibility of parole for people who committed crimes as juveniles—as several states have done—and reduced the number of years for a first parole hearing for youths sentenced to finite life sentences from 30 years to 15 passed the New Mexico Senate during this year’s legislative session, but never got a floor vote in the House as the chaotic session sped to a close.

“I think incarcerating children for life is inherently unjust,” says state Rep. Dayan Hochman-Vigil, an Albuquerque Democrat who cosponsored SB 247. “It’s almost like there’s two victims: the victim of the crime, and then we keep people in jail for the rest of their lives. Two people lose their lives. This is the first step in bringing this to light...and I’m working to see if we can get it on the governor’s agenda for the 30-day session in 2022.”

The measure drew pushback from many southern New Mexico district attorneys, who rallied victim advocates and families to oppose it, Hochman-Vigil says.

But other prosecutors, including First Judicial District Attorney Mary CarmackAltwies, testified in favor of the reform.

“I think it’s important that the law takes into account that, even if we treat juveniles somewhat the same on the front end [of the justice system, at trial], they are different,” the first-term, Democratic DA says in an interview. “I did support it, and I will continue to support it.”

New Mexico’s system for parole-eligible lifers has been fraught.

A 2017 SFR and New Mexico In Depth investigation found that this state granted release for people in that population less often than nearly any other state in the nation—just six times out of 89 hearings from 2011 through early 2017. None of those granted release was under 18 at the time the crime was committed. (Lasiter appears to be the first of those.)

That landscape emerged under former Gov. Susana Martinez, a Las Cruces Republican and former prosecutor whose punitive approach and appointment of a Parole Board chair who believed that “life means life” put New Mexico near the bottom of the list.

Since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took office in 2019, at least nine people have left prison through parole hearings after serving 30 years or more. Five of those, including Lasiter, have received favorable rulings from the board since acting chair Abram Anaya took over in March 2020.

The board’s previous practices had longtime state Sen. Cisco McSorely, who is now director of the Probation and Parole Division of the New Mexico Corrections Department, concerned.

“The Adult Parole Board, I thought as a legislator three years ago, was susceptible to being sued for its determination that it would not follow the law,” McSorely tells SFR. “We as the Parole Board do not have the power or the authority to overturn the

DENALI WILSON

BY THE NUMBERS

Since the eight years of prosecutor-turned-governor Susana Martinez ended in 2019, officials with the New Mexico Adult Parole Board say they’ve sought to follow state law and afford people serving 30-years-to-life sentences a fairer, more complete shot at parole, in particular those who committed crimes before they turned 18. Here are the numbers.

People in New Mexico prisons serving 30-to-life sentences as of June 9, 2021:

411

People serving those sentences for crimes committed as juveniles:

22*

Parole hearing results for 30-year-lifers

through the years:** 2011-2016: 89 hearings, six granted parole 2017: 24 hearings, two granted parole 2018: 16 hearings, none granted parole 2019: 26 hearings, five granted parole 2020: 15 hearings, three granted parole

*There are at least five additional 30-year-lifers serving their time out of state or in federal custody for crimes committed in New Mexico under the age of 18.

**The Corrections Department does not track hearings for 30-year-lifers based on whether the would-be parolee was under 18 at the time of their crime.

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decision of a judge and a jury. Now, we are just following the law.”

A national oversight group had given the board an F-rating in 2017, Anaya tells SFR. He wants to earn an A for the next review period.

“I believe that, as we get further and further into this justice reform and we’re taking a look at the way we’ve done business—and the way we’re doing business— that every individual needs to be based on their own merits,” he says. “We’re really trying to change the perception of the Parole Board. [With the rule change and a shift in philosophy], we’ve become a better and stronger and more fair board.”

That matches Lasiter’s experience, he says, though he believes the system needs to keep evolving. Everyone should get a fair hearing after serving a long sentence, he says, whether they were youths or adults when they committed their crimes—and even if their prison records weren’t as exemplary as his.

Lasiter paroled to a halfway house in Albuquerque. He’s noticed since his release that all the cars look the same, other than their manufacturers’ emblem, and the world moves a little faster.

He’d never touched a smartphone till the end of May.

The former inmate has plans, including opening his own small dog-training business. He speaks with reverence and empathy about dogs’ love without expectations—lifetimes past the troubled, lost 16-year-old who once pulled a trigger.

He and his fellow residents were still working on the honey-baked ham almost two weeks after his release.

“Every day feels a little bit more free,” Lasiter says.

When the county closed the Youth Development Program last year and sent accused youth to Farmington, what else did Santa Fe outsource?

BY WILLIAM MELHADO

Last March, amid pleas to stay home and not travel, Santa Fe County contacted its counterparts in San Juan with a request. Officials asked the Juvenile Services Center in Farmington to house Santa Fe youth taken into custody and awaiting trial.

A month later, the counties struck a deal and transported those in custody at the Youth Development Program to San Juan County’s youth jail. Since then, all children taken into custody on suspicion of committing crimes in Santa Fe have gone north.

Santa Fe County pitched the move to residents primarily as a way to save millions of dollars, which they say it has, but the cost of sending some of the city’s most vulnerable children off to another county doesn’t sit right with youth advocates.

“It bears asking the question,” says Matthew Cockman, a public defender who handles the majority of juvenile cases in San Juan County. “Is that reflective of perhaps a disregard for the kids and the commitment of the community to the wellbeing of the children?”

County officials say they have the kids’ best interest in mind.

“It was about providing a facility for these youths to go to that was more modern,” Santa Fe County Commissioner Anna Hansen tells SFR. “But also the cost was quite extreme for the small amount of juveniles that we had.”

Advocates and the county cited the outof-date facilities, which were originally designed to hold adults, as the primary reason the jail on Airport Road was unsuitable for children.

The youth jail in Santa Fe was one of several around the state to shut down in recent years.

Since the northwesternmost New Mexico county agreed to house youth from Santa Fe, the Farmington facility has held 44 local juveniles—three more are incarcerated there now.

The San Juan youth jail only houses pre-adjudicated inmates, presumed innocent until their court date with a judge. Their stays range from days to over a year.

Among the population is Estevan Montoya, who is being held as he awaits trial in the killing of Santa Fe High School basketball star Fedonta “JB” White.

The pressures of Montoya’s move to Farmington have kept his family from having the kind of contact they want to have, says Dan Marlowe, Montoya’s criminal defense lawyer, “and it’s kept me from having physical contact with him.”

Though, this past year, physical contact and in-person visitations were limited due to COVID-19.

There have been 16 COVID-19 cases reported at the youth jail in Farmington— seven among staff and nine among inmates.

“We didn’t have any outbreaks,” Bowen Belt, juvenile services administrator of the San Juan center, tells SFR. “No staff or children were ever hospitalized.”

Despite the lack of physical contact, the separation of vulnerable youths from their community concerns Cockman.

“We can’t just send them away to another county and then expect that there’s not anything that’s going to come of it when they come back,” he tells SFR, pointing to potential future consequences such as recidivism and a return to criminal behavior.

Cockman says it’s harder to determine the cost of these issues on a community and therefore easier to ignore.

WILLIAM MELHADO

COURTESY SAN JUAN COUNTY JUVENILE SERVICES

TOP: The now empty Santa Fe youth detention facility sits just west of the intersection of Cerrillos and Airport roads. BOTTOM: San Juan’s Juvenile Services Center in Farmington now houses incarcerated youths from all over the state, including Santa Fe.

Belt and Cockman point to remote hearings as another consequence of shipping juveniles to a different county for holding. Some may be as far as 150 miles away from their attorneys during trials.

Now, all hearings—local or not—are virtual due to the pandemic. And those young people standing trial have adults in the room to answer questions.

In recent years the number of children in custody has decreased. In the San Juan center the average number of inmates per day dropped from 19 to 16 from 2019 to 2020. It dropped again in 2021, to an average of 12.

Cockman believes the population drop is due, in part, to the work of juvenile justice practitioners hoping to keep family units together and get children out of custody.

Citing the high-profile nature of Montoya’s case, Marlowe says his client is better off in a different county.

“I can tell you he’s safer up there than he would be in Santa Fe. Estevan is the kind of kid, I’d like to see him get out on bond, but I can see why the judge wouldn’t let him out—but I didn’t make a big deal out of it because he would not be safe if he were on the street here,” Marlowe says. “And neither would his grandmother or his mother, which is who he would be staying with, be safe.”

Cockman explains the current circumstances are less than ideal because the facility is not community-based, but as far as youth jails go, the public defender believes the Farmington center is as good as it gets in New Mexico.

“You should thank your lucky stars that’s where they’ve been sent,” he says.

The worn-out Santa Fe youth jail cost the county $2.4 million in fiscal year 2020 to run. Compare that with the $559,000 it cost to maintain the building in fiscal year 2021—when no children lived there and it was instead used to store files for the county.

Instead of footing that bill, the county now pays the San Juan facility $225 per bed day—the cost of housing an underage inmate for up to 24 hours. Factoring in the minimum number of contracted beds Santa Fe children could stay in, the capital county paid San Juan just over $250,000 in the first year.

Other counties have faced similar financial decisions over the last two decades. Of the 14 facilities that were in operation 16 years ago, only four remain in operation to serve the entire state: in San Juan, Bernalillo, Doña Ana and Lea counties.

“Ideally, every community has their own juvenile detention facility right?” Belt asks. “But, you know, how often are things ideal?”