Legislature should toughen penalties for brutal crimes

In New Mexico, you can get away with serving just three years for stabbing your girlfriend 19 times. You can sever her nerves and tendons, puncture a lung, a kidney, her intestines, gouge her face, her back, her arm – then ditch the weapon and try to run out the prosecution clock. And if that fails, face just three years for your brutality – which is officially deemed second-degree attempted murder.

You can, in fact, empty a handgun into your frail and disabled husband, dump his body in a hole in the backyard and pour a concrete slab over it. If six years pass before anyone gets wise, you can kiss second-degree murder charges goodbye.

So in New Mexico it’s sometimes harder to be held accountable for savagery than it is to heal, or die, from it.

Leticia Sierra was stabbed 19 times by a thug who said he loved her. Orlando Trencilio faces just three years for attacking her and three for also slashing her niece, who tried to help her; the sentences could run concurrently.

Mike Snyder was gunned down by his wife, Ellen, who had racked up $475,000 in debt, who then pleaded down to voluntary manslaughter because the statute of limitations had run out on everything except first-degree murder. She got 11 years.

There’s no question it should not be easy to put someone in prison for a long time. The state’s bar for first-degree murder – prove beyond a reasonable doubt the killing was premeditated or committed during the commission of a felony – is rightly a high one.

But the drop-off after first-degree is so steep that it has victims like Sierra saying, “I’m surprised how this system works. He (her attacker) has more rights than me.”

It doesn’t have to be that way.

State Rep. William “Bill” Rehm, R-Albuquerque, routinely introduces legislation to scrap the six-year statute of limitations for second-degree murder and increase the time underlying conspiracy and tampering with evidence charges can be prosecuted.

Given the time Trencilio has spent in jail awaiting trial, he could be a free man in a matter of days. Ellen Snyder is four years into her sentence.

Yet Sierra now lives on disability and lacks full use of her neck, shoulder and arm. And Mike Snyder is still dead.

The 2016 New Mexico Legislature should finally toughen penalties for these types of brutal crimes, because it shouldn’t take longer to recover from someone’s savagery – if recovery is even possible – than it does to serve a sentence for visiting it upon someone.

— Albuquerque Journal