View Point: Governor made right call selecting Mitchell as judge

Gov. Susana Martinez had a difficult choice to make last week when she reappointed Albert Mitchell to the 10th Judicial District judge’s seat.

We think she made the right call.

Mitchell was ousted in November, receiving just 50 percent of the retention vote. He needed 57 percent to keep his job.

He then applied for the job Martinez was tasked with appointing — not to keep the judgeship he lost, he said, but to fill the opening created by his failure to be retained.

There was one other applicant for the job, former Judge Don Schutte. Schutte was appointed to the bench in 2007 by Gov. Bill Richardson, but was defeated by Mitchell in the general election of 2008.

Full disclosure: Schutte recently represented our newspaper in a public meetings case and we would not hesitate to employ him again. He is a good attorney and we think he would make a good district judge.

Schutte’s qualifications only made the governor’s decision more difficult. Was she supposed to appoint a candidate Mitchell had already defeated in a general election? Or a candidate half the voters said they wanted out of office?

A press release from her office explains that Martinez’s decision was between two very qualified attorneys, former jurists and public servants who had both lost the 10th Judicial District’s only judge seat in general elections.

No one else applied for the job.

The governor, a Republican, decided to appoint Mitchell, another Republican.

Some have cried politics weighed too heavily in Martinez’ choice. But it’s important to point out that Schutte’s appointment was from a Democratic governor.

One of the key issues that led voters to reject Mitchell in the retention election was the Tony Day case. Mitchell determined Day would be tried as a juvenile in the slayings of his adoptive mother and sister. Day was a 14-year-old boy at the time of the slayings; he’d had a history of abuse of neglect.

We feel Mitchell made the correct decision in that difficult case.

Another of Mitchell’s unpopular decisions of late gives us pause. That was his decision in 2009 to release Moses Earl Ingram from jail temporarily based on Ingram’s stated desire to visit his family. Mitchell made his decision after hearing that Ingram’s former girlfriend wanted to drop charges against him.

So Mitchell ordered Ingram to stay away from the former girlfriend, court records show.

Ingram then beat the former girlfriend nearly to death — a tragedy that could have been avoided if Mitchell had ruled with his head instead of his misguided heart. Mitchell later sentenced Ingram to more than 31 years in prison for attempted murder, kidnapping and other felonies in the case.

We hope he has learned from his mistake.

Attorney Warren Frost plans to file a protest of Mitchell’s appointment before the New Mexico Supreme Court.

If Mitchell’s appointment survives this challenge, the next will come in the general election of 2016.

We hope Schutte and other qualified candidates will oppose Mitchell in two years and let the voters of Quay, De Baca and Harding County decide which judge will preside over their courtrooms.

Until then, we support the governor’s decision to place Mitchell in this important position.