Teen Accused of Sexual Assault Will Remain on Home Arrest Following Second Detention Hearing
On September 23, a state district judge again refused prosecutors’ request for pretrial custody of a Capital High School student accused of sexually abusing two teen girls.
Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer refused prosecutors’ plea on Monday after agreeing to revisit her recent decision to release the adolescent, Alvaro Luna Huereca, on home arrest with electronic monitoring.
The District Attorney’s Office argued in a blistering statement on social media and a later court motion that the judge rushed an assistant district attorney through the initial pretrial detention hearing, endangering the community with her decision to release him. Sommer replied by arranging a second hearing.
The District Attorney’s Office intends to appeal Sommer’s decision, said spokesperson Nathan Lederman in an email following the hearing Monday.
Huereca, 18, is accused by police of attacking and sexually assaulting two teenage females near Capital High School in August. He will stay under house arrest until his trial on the criminal accusations, which have been reduced since Santa Fe police presented preliminary counts.
Huereca now faces three fourth-degree felony offenses, including two counts of unlawful sexual contact with a minor and one count of false detention, according to a court order. Prosecutors dropped two additional counts of illegal sexual contact after admitting there was no reasonable cause.
Huereca appeared in court on Monday, gazing ahead and expressionless.
Prosecutors claimed he should be held in jail until his trial because he acknowledged earlier episodes of sexual assault in an interview with a detective.
Santa Fe police Detective Ian Freeman said Monday that when he interviewed Huereca at the high school in August, the kid acknowledged to the attacks on classmates and stated that he had shot recordings of girls at the high school in recent years and groped a family member while she was asleep.
Freeman began telling the court about a journal he claimed he discovered under Huereca’s bed during a home search, but the judge overruled his testimony. She claimed that establishing a timeline for Huereca’s alleged diary entries was impossible.
Dorie Biagianti Smith, Huereca’s defense attorney, stated that there was no evidence to support several of the charges made by prosecutors and police.
“This is not the type of case where a child should be incarcerated,” she added, suggesting that home arrest had worked.
This is one of several cases in which District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies has publicly criticized Sommer’s rulings. Sommer, meanwhile, has chastised prosecutors in some cases for failing to meet filing deadlines and making mistakes in submitting evidence.
In a statement issued following Huereca’s first detention hearing, Carmack-Altwies stated that Sommer “hamstrung” prosecutors by limiting their time to submit their evidence to five minutes. Prosecutors contended in their later motion to reconsider the judge’s finding that Sommer had curtailed the use of a court interpreter.
Sommer said Monday that Assistant District Attorney Shelby Bradley was given two hours for both a preliminary hearing and a pretrial detention hearing in Huereca’s case on September 13 — more than he had requested — and his time was almost up before he could present his case for detention.
“When all was said and done, you were the one who had 10 more minutes,” Sommer told him. “How do you come to the court in good faith and tell me that it was the court’s fault that you presented your preventative detention in such little time?”
Sommer stated that Bradley had emailed an interpreter directly rather than asking one for the hearing through a court motion, as necessary. “You need to follow the rules,” she replied.
When another prosecutor questioned if a bench warrant would be issued promptly if Huereca violated his home arrest restrictions in the middle of the night, Sommer stepped in and refuted the attorney’s accusations about court delays.
“They do call the judge at whatever time in the morning,” Sommer told me. “They send both the warrant and the affidavit. I’d like you to know that the pretrial services program does not sit and wait for Monday. “It’s immediate.”