Judges who ignore no-bail law may as well give you the finger
Laurie Roberts
Republic columnist
Mar. 21, 2007 12:00 AM

It's now been 17 days since Jocabed Dominguez-Torres was arrested and accused of getting drunk, running a red light and killing a 20-year-old Peoria man. Seventeen days since the courts were notified that she's in this country illegally and thus can't be released from jail under a new law approved by voters.

So what, you might ask, have our judges and commissioners done to comply with the overwhelming will of the people?

They set bail. Then they reconsidered. And lowered her bail. advertisement




In judicial speak, I think they just gave Arizona voters the finger.

It's been just over two weeks since Scott and Patty Miller lost their only son, Chris, and were ushered into the court system. Their reaction thus far?

"Complete dismay and total loss of confidence," Scott told me Tuesday. "For us to have gone through the last two weeks trying to deal with the grieving process all the while having to fight the legal system just to do what the voters said was the right thing to do to me is just unconscionable."

Chris Miller was killed just after 2 a.m. on March 4 when Peoria police say Dominguez-Torres, 22, ran a red light and crashed into the car in which he was riding. Her blood-alcohol level was 0.20 percent, 2 1/2 times the legal limit.

Peoria police notified court officials that she's here illegally and that she admitted to buying forged resident and Social Security cards on the streets of Phoenix.

Yet Commissioner Kathleen Mead set her bond at $150,000. This, despite Proposition 100.

You remember Prop. 100. It's a new law that denies bond in cases such as this to people here illegally.

It passed last November in every county of the state. It passed by the widest margin of any proposition on the ballot. It passed because 78 percent of this state's voters decreed that it shall be the law of the land.

Just not, apparently, in Maricopa County Superior Court.

After Mead set Dominguez-Torres' bond, a court spokeswoman explained to me that commissioners can't deny bond on the say-so of the police or even the suspect. They must get word from an official source, she said, which is tough given that bail must be set within 24 hours of an arrest and the people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement who could give the high sign don't work weekends.

Mead had to set Dominguez-Torres' bond on a Sunday.

The next day, March 5, the courts got that official word from ICE when they put an immigration hold on Dominguez-Torres.

"I don't know how much more official we can get," ICE spokeswoman Lauren Mack told me.

Yet five days later, Commissioner Michael Barth lowered the bond to $50,000.

On Monday, a Maricopa County prosecutor asked the court's presiding criminal judge, James Keppel, to change Domiguez-Torres' status to non-bondable, pointing out that our state Constitution now requires it. Keppel's response: "I'm not the Court of Appeals."

He's holding a hearing Thursday morning to decide whether he has the authority to overturn Barth's bond.

No word on whether anyone in the court system is worried about whether they have the authority to overturn voters.

Neither Keppel nor the court's presiding judge, Barbara Mundell, returned calls to explain how the arbiters of law can just ignore it.

However, courts spokeswoman J.W. Brown e-mailed me to let me know that judges are sworn to follow the law.

"Several times each week, they order individuals charged with serious felonies be held without bond," she wrote, "when information presented to the court shows the proof is evident or the presumption is great that the person committed the alleged offense and is in the U.S. illegally."

And yet Dominguez-Torres remains in jail on that $50,000 bond. If her family puts up $5,000, she'll be taken by ICE to a detention center, and if she doesn't fight deportation, she could be back in Mexico by April Fools' Day.

Fitting, don't you think?



Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8635. Read her blog at robertsblog.azcentral.com.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/columns/a ... 0321.html#