Lawyers & Statistics

A few weeks ago the Albuquerque Journal weighed in on the first television attack ad on Las Crucen Susana Martinez from the Denish campaign:

"Denish's campaign used numbers provided by the state Administrative Office of the Courts to determine conviction rates. But the numbers provided by the AOC do not accurately show conviction rates for prosecutors because they do not reflect such factors as prosecutors dismissing and refiling murder charges for the same crime — which would count as two cases, with one failed conviction in the AOC numbers — or the death of a defendant, for example.

Arthur Pepin, AOC director, said that the numbers provided by his office every year are to track the caseloads of each judicial district, backlogs and other data related to how busy the court systems are. "We do not specifically set out to track conviction rates or anything like that," he said."
    The implication by the Journal's finding are that the Denish campaign extrapolated caseload data to attempt to arrive at a preconceived politically-motivated conclusion.
    The great irony of the accusations by the Denish campaign is the sheer volume of lawyers involved in funding its campaign coffers. A quick perusal of the followthemoney.org website shows that Diane Denish has received campaign contributions from more than 450 different attorneys in the last two years.  One has to wonder how many of these attorneys represented DUI defendants? And how many of the lawyers that have contributed to the Denish campaign used every expensive legal tactic at their disposal to extract plea bargain agreements from District Attorneys trying to choose their battles carefully based on limited taxpayer-funded resources.
    Despite having a good fundraising month in June it will take quite some time for the Martinez campaign to come up with the cash to compete head-to-head with television ads in response to the Denish campaign cash generating machine.

Lawyers & Statistics