Pope calls for peace in Ukraine, Syria before overflow Easter crowd
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Monday, April 21, 2014
Page A-2
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Keeping your friends closer
Could Kepler-186f be Earth’s twin?
Facebook introduces location-sharing feature for mobile users. TeCH, A-8
The faraway exoplanet is theoretically capable of holding liquid water. LIfe & SCIenCe, A-9
Marathon makes room for those who ‘need to run’
Hatch Act sidelines would-be candidate
Leave police oversight to elected officials
T
hree members of Albuquerque’s Police Oversight Commission resigned last week in protest over their lack of power. It was a good start. Now the taxpaying public should demand that the seats go unfilled and the commission be disbanded altogether. The three Milan commissioners Simonich who quit complained that they Ringside Seat couldn’t do their work because Mayor Richard Berry’s legal department obstructed honest investigations of excessive-force complaints or other allegations of police misconduct. They should have realized years ago that they were cogs in a useless bureaucracy, not a unit capable of building a better police department. In just about every city, the police department accounts for the largest share of the budget and has the most municipal employees. Size and cost ought to be reasons enough for city councilors and mayors to devote their time and attention to the police department. Instead, elected politicians in Albuquerque and many other large cities have stood on the sidelines while powerless citizen committees have taken on the impossible job of monitoring and investigating police conduct. Worse still, voters often have absolved politicians of their basic responsibilities of making sure the police department is clean, effective and lawful. In Pittsburgh, voters created a Citizen Police Review Board in 1996. It was immediately ignored by police officers and their chief. Most times, an officer facing a complaint of unnecessarily cracking heads would simply boycott the review board. Questions that could not be asked would never be answered.
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Today Mostly sunny. High 72, low 49. PAge A-12
Obituaries Suzanne Marie LeBeau, April 19 PAge A-10
Pasapick www.pasatiempomagazine.com
April Author Series Writer Junot Díaz discusses his work, 7 p.m., Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Ave., 466-5528. More events in Calendar, A-2 and Fridays in Pasatiempo
Index
Calendar A-2
Classifieds B-5
Race organizers award special bibs to runners who were “personally and profoundly impacted” by last year’s bombings at the finish line. SPORTS, B-1
Camilla Bustamante forced to withdraw from County Commission race By Daniel J. Chacón
Guests fill Tecolote’s Café’s main dining room on Easter Sunday. The restaurant expected to serve more than 500 people on its last day of business. PHOTOS BY KATHARINE EGLI/FOR THE NEW MEXICAN
Santa Fe Trail. She said her dad was a history buff and upon visiting the town and discovering it was a major supply point for one or both sides of the Civil War conflict, he named the restaurant after the site. Tecolote is also the Aztec word for owl, which is why so many images, ceramic figures and children’s drawings of owls have long inhabited the eatery. Adkins plans to gather them all up, photograph them, download them onto a flash drive and then display them on a computer or television screen in the restaurant’s future home.
Santa Fe County Commissioner Robert Anaya won’t face a challenger in the June primary after all, guaranteeing the incumbent another fouryear term. His lone opponent, Camilla Bustamante, had to drop out of the race to keep her job. Bustamante, who works for the state Department of Health, said the state Personnel Office informed her that she’d be in violation of the Hatch Act if she didn’t withdraw. The act restricts the political activities of public employees whose job duties are connected to federally funded programs. Bustamante said her job as planning and resource manager is “100 percent funded” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency under the federal Department of Health and Human Services. “It has long been established that an officer or employee of a state or local agency is subject to the Hatch Act if, as a normal and foreseeable incident of her principal position or job, she performs duties in connection with an activity financed in whole or in part by federal funds,” according to a 2010 advisory opinion by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. Bustamante previously qualified to be on the June ballot. She said she had asked her employer whether there were any “conflicts or issues” with her candidacy before filing papers to run. It wasn’t until later that the state Personnel Office got back to her, she said. Randi Johnson, general counsel for the state Personnel Office, declined to talk about a specific employee but said whether or not the Hatch Act applies to an employee depends on whether his or her position is partially or fully funded by the federal government. “If it is partially or fully federally funded, the Hatch Act applies and they cannot run for partisan political office,” she said. “If it is not partially
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Tecolote closes its doors Cafe says farewell to longtime home; owner hopes to reopen elsewhere By Robert Nott The New Mexican
T
ears weren’t on the menu Sunday at Tecolote Café, but they were being served up all the same. Staff members cried as longtime patrons came by to bid them farewell, perhaps for the last time, as Sunday was the final day of service for the 34-year-old restaurant at its current site on Cerrillos Road. One waitress said she had been crying for two days. Another said she would cry later. But owner K.T. Adkins, daughter of Tecolote founders Bill and Alice Jennison, said she’s hopeful the restaurant will reopen soon in a new location, although she did not offer specifics. She said her parents originally opened the restaurant on June 2, 1980, so she’d like to see the new opening occur on June 2 of this year. But it’s more likely to happen later in the year, she said. Several local media outlets reported earlier this month that the building’s landlord, Jerry Honnell, was evicting Tecolote after he heard the restaurant’s owners planned to relocate to the Luna District development center. Adkins said the restaurant has been operating without a lease for at least eight years and she was negotiating a possible move, but it did not materialize. Easter Sunday’s shift for the restaurant was a good one, with about 550 old friends, recent con-
Chef Leslie Chavez prepares dough for the muffins in Tecolote’s bread baskets on the cafe’s final day of business at its Cerrillos Road location. Chavez said she plans to stay with the restaurant when it finds a new home.
verts and tourists — as well as a few regulars who had no idea the place was closing — lining up to eat breakfast and lunch. Business has been “crazy good” over the past couple of weeks, Adkins said. The running joke from customers is, “You should go out of business more often.” Adkins was 3 years old when her parents opened Tecolote on Cerrillos near Baca Street. It was once the site of an automobile repair shop, she said. Tecolote is named after a small village (now considered a ghost town) in the northeastern part of the state that once was a stopover point on the
The New Mexican
Eyewitness accounts no longer gold standard in court Police procedure can alter what people think they saw, critics argue By Nigel Duara
The Associated Press
PORTLAND, Ore. — The American legal system offers few moments as dramatic as an eyewitness to a crime pointing his finger across a crowded courtroom at a defendant. The problem is that decades of studies show eyewitness testimony is right only about half the time — a reality that has prompted a small vanguard of police chiefs, courts and lawmakers to toughen laws governing the handling of eyewitnesses and their accounts of crimes.
Comics B-12
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Crosswords B-6, B-11
Reform advocates say procedures long regarded as solid police work, from bringing a witness to a crime scene where he might see a suspect in handcuffs to the subtle encouragement of a detective during a police lineup, can fundamentally alter what people believe they saw. “It’s not the case that eyewitnesses are inherently unreliable,” said Gary Wells of Iowa State University, who has researched the field of eyewitness identification since the 1970s. “But we can make it better by cleaning up the procedures around it.” Prosecutors, however, have opposed the efforts, arguing the changes erode their powers, even as studies show that witnesses are about half as likely to choose the correct suspect out of a lineup as they are to choose some combination of
Life & Science A-9
El Nuevo A-6
Opinions A-11
Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas A. Balmer, center, questions an attorney in February at the University of Oregon School of Law, where the justices heard arguments that could reverse a murder conviction based on witness identifications in court. THE REGISTER-GUARD FILE PHOTO
the innocent fillers or no suspect at all when the correct one is present. The re-examination of eyewitness testimony comes at a time when technology and other forensic analy-
Sports B-1
Tech A-8
Time Out B-11
BREAKING NEWS AT WWW.SANTAFENEWMEXICAN.COM
sis are being given greater weight. “What we see is a fairly organized and aggressive attack on all forms of
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Two sections, 24 pages 165th year, No. 111 Publication No. 596-440