They bargained sixty-five charges down to six, which clearly annoyed the judge.
He (the judge) went pretty far beyond the bargain the defense and the State had proffered, too, and when the defense started to whinge about it, he pushed hard back.
The initial plea deal proffered would have included no jail time, no fine, no restitution beyond a comparatively small repayment, and no electronic monitoring.
When he parsed out the sentence, he did not mince words about the "why" for each item, and made it very clear that he was taking it as far as the NM code permitted. And he explicitly addressed the issue of public trust and abuse of the campaign funding process (they bargained out all the charges related to her service as Secretary of State, so he couldn't go there directly without risking a higher court review.)
His explanation of the sentence used clear language that indicates this judge is very knowledgeable about addiction-- he referred to her attempts to "rationalize" and "minimize" what she did and its effects. All of the restitution provisions as well as a couple of the punishment provisions, had a clear purpose in pushing her towards the kind of change that addicts need to make.
Would I like to see her nose rubbed in the sleaze perpetrated while she was serving as Secretary of State? Hell yes. But the State (GOPpie Goob and lege, at the moment, plus Susana Tejana's had nearly five years to "encourage" turnover and pack the bureaucracy) chose to accept the plea bargain that trashed those charges.
I can kind of understand some of the "why"-- getting together the evidence and making the case, in this environment, could have exposed and eliminated the few remaining uncorrupted or marginally-corrupted bureaucrats in the relevant offices, for one thing, and cost the taxpayers BIG bucks, for another. (And we don't have a whole lotta taxpayer bucks floating around at the moment, with the oil revenues so far off.) And still not guaranteed an outcome that would have rubbed her and her handlers' noses in it.
So this judge did his best by us.
She still has the option of repudiating the bargain, but the judge made it very clear that would re-open the whole can of worms.
Just another day in one America's most corrupt states...
wearily,
Bright
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