State v. Green

2015 NMCA 007, 7 N.M. 173
New Mexico Court of Appeals·Decided December 11, 2014·No. No. 34,939; Docket No. 31,787·Published·Cited by 47 cases

Opinion

OPINION

HANISEE, Judge.

This appeal follows the revocation of Defendant’s probation and his ensuing return to incarceration in order to conclude his original term of imprisonment in full. In 2003, after pleading guilty to second-degree kidnapping and murder, Defendant was sentenced to nineteen years, of which nine were suspended by the district court. In 2008, after about five years in prison, Defendant was released on probation. Within months of his release, however, the State began to allege what became a series of ensuing violations that culminated in the revocation of Defendant’s probation. Ultimately, the district court ordered Defendant to serve the balance of his sentence in prison, including a previously imposed one year habitual offender enhancement. Defendant appeals both the revocation of his probation, as well as the conditions of probation. We affirm.

BACKGROUND

In 2001 Defendant was indicted for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Kathryn Dockweiller, an Albuquerque attorney, in 1988. Defendant was allowed to plead guilty, pursuant to North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25 (1970) (holding that a district court may accept a defendant’s guilty plea despite an absence of admission to criminal wrongdoing), to second-degree murder, contrary to NMSA 1978, § 30-2-l(B) (1980) and kidnapping, contrary to NMSA 1978, § 30-4-1 (1973).1 During the plea hearing, Defendant did not oppose the State’s request that the district court take judicial notice of the grand jury proceedings and content of the indictment to establish a factual basis for the plea.

The record reveals that Detective Bill Peters of the cold-case unit of the Bernalillo County Sheriffs Department provided testimony to the grand jury that indicted Defendant. He informed the grand jury that Ms. Dockweiller had disappeared on May 12, 1988, and was found several days later in a shallow grave, still bound and gagged. The Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) concluded that the nature and manner of death had been homicide by strangulation. Pursuant to the death investigation conducted by OMI, vaginal swabs were taken from Ms. Dockweiller that revealed the presence of semen within Ms. Dockweiller’s body thathad been deposited there “at or near the time of her death.” Defendant was originally a suspect in Ms. Dockweiller’s murder, and following a report from his ex-wife over a decade later, wherein she disclosed her discovery of Ms. Dockweiller’s calendar concealed within Defendant’s vehicle, Detective Peters obtained a search warrant for Defendant’s DNA, which was found to match the DNA obtained from Ms. Dockweiler’s body. Based on this discovery, Defendant was indicted and chose to plead guilty in lieu of trial.

Following the plea colloquy, the district court observed that the murder of Ms. Dockweiller was in fact the second murder Defendant had committed. A pre-sentencing report informed the district court that Defendant had been previously sentenced to serve a twenty-year period of imprisonment in Texas based upon an unrelated homicide and attempt to commit criminal rape in 1979.2 Based on the circumstances of the instant case and in light of Defendant’s past criminal history, the district court ordered that he serve the statutory maximum penalty of nine years for the second-degree murder of Ms. Dockweiller, nine additional years for her kidnapping, and an extra year because he was a habitual offender. Due to the ten-year sentencing cap established within the plea agreement, however, the district court suspended nine of Defendant’s nineteen year cumulative sentence. It imposed the maximum available period of probation of five years, alongside two years of supervised parole. In its judgment and sentence, the district court ordered probation to be wholly conditioned upon Defendant “obeyfing] all rules, regulations^] and orders of the [probation [authorities.”

When Defendant was released from prison, he signed a sex offender behavioral contract. Although not required to register as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), NMSA 1978, §§ 29-11 A-1 to -10 (1995, as amended through 2013), Defendant was compelled to comply with various sex-offender-related terms of probation, including abstention from the purchase, possession, or subscription to “any sexually oriented or sexually stimulating material.” In the contract, Defendant agreed that probation authorities were free to examine any computer Defendant could access for inappropriate content, including, but not limited to pornography. Within months of Defendant’s release and placement on probation in 2008, probation authorities alleged that he was in violation of specific prohibitions to which he had agreed. Specifically, the probation violation report alleged that Defendant had associated with other probationers and parolees, responded to personal dating ads on the internet, and left the county withoutpermission. He was arrested on the probation violations, and the State sought revocation of his probation.

At the time, Defendant challenged the allegations on the grounds that the sex offender behavioral contract he was required to sign was not reasonably related to the charges of conviction, and that the “overbroad, pervasive, and undifferentiated restrictions” associated with sex offender probation violated his due process rights. He relied on State v. Williams, in which we held that a defendant not convicted of a sex offense under SORNA cannotbe subjected to SORNA requirements. 2006-NMCA-092, ¶ 12, 140 N.M. 194, 141 P.3d 538. The State, through the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD), filed a response, maintaining that the crimes of conviction, considered alongside what was known regarding his prior murder conviction, justified the probationary supervision he received. NMCD asserted that probation authorities have broad discretion to supervise probationers with those conditions it deems appropriate and that NMSA 1978, Section 31-21-4 (1963) requires that the post-release probationary treatment of persons convicted of crimes “shall take into consideration their individual characteristics, circumstances, need[s,] and potentialities.” Following a hearing, the district court denied Defendant’s motion to modify the terms and conditions of his probation, yet did not then revoke Defendant’s probation.

Free access — add to your briefcase to read the full text and ask questions with AI

State v. Green, 2015 NMCA 007, 7 N.M. 173 (N.M. Ct. App. 2014).

2015 NMCA 007 (State v. Green) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

Related

State v. Owen
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2026
State v. Russell
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2025
State v. Anaya
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2025
State v. Urban
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2025
State v. Reed
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2025
State v. Jones
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2025
State v. Dixon
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2025
State v. Sheppard
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2024
State v. Silentman
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2024
State v. Jackson
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2024
State v. Flores
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2024
State v. Garnier
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2023
State v. Roger II
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2023
State v. Aguilar
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2023
State v. Sandlin
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2023
State v. Stotts
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2022
State v. Daugherty
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2022
State v. Logan
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2021
State v. Ortiz
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2021
State v. Duran
New Mexico Court of Appeals, 2021