I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
New Mexico Attorney General Gary King is saying his office is free of conflict of interests that would weaken its prosecution of former Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and three other defendants.
The issue of potential conflicts came out last week when the defense attorney for one of those indicted, Elizabeth Kupfer, confirmed to NMI’s Heath Haussamen that one of two assistant attorney generals prosecuting the case was once fired by Kupfer, who worked as the AG’s administrative services director.
Kupfer’s attorney, Hank Farrah, confirmed in an interview that Kupfer carried out the firing of Assistant Attorney General Chris Lackmann sometime during the administration of former AG Patricia Madrid, who ordered the firing. Farrah would not reveal other details.
The potential conflict of interest is likely to remain a source of contention until it’s resolved. King’s office indicted Vigil Giron, Elizabeth Kupfer, her husband Joe Kupfer and media consultant Armando Gutierrez in a vast embezzlement and money laundering scheme.
But King told Peter St. Cyr this weekend in a radio interview that his office doesn’t have any conflicts of interest and that his agency specifically did an analysis to see if any conflicts were existing.
Here’s a partial transcript of what King told St. Cyr:
“With regard to allegations that there’s a conflict, my office always does a careful conflict check when we do our cases. We do not believe there are any legal conflicts that would prevent us from pursuing this case. I suspect that the defense lawyers will try and raise this in a couple of different ways and when they do we’ll address those issues. I really work hard for the Attorney General’s Office to be a good law firm and every good law firm tries to be cognizant of the fact that conflicts can arise. And we don’t ever want to operate in a situation where a conflict would prevent someone from getting a fair trial. So we’ve analyzed that and we don’t think there are any conflicts that would prevent the defendants in this case from getting a fair trial. And so they are entitled to disagree. And they’re even entitled to raise the issue with courts, or they may raise it with the bar association or something. If we get good solid information that says there is a conflict I am not aware of, we’ll analyze that and we’ll proceed accordingly.”
St. Cyr then asked King: “You’re not ready today to hand it over to a special prosecutor?”
King replied: “I don’t think it’s necessary.”
King went on to tell St. Cyr that “one of the things that I’m a little bit concerned about is some of the allegations of conflict are not factually based. So when we do get to a point where we do talk about whether there is a conflict or not, it’ll have to be based on the facts and not on some allegation that’s made by the defense attorneys.”
