The Associated Press
SANTA FE – The New Mexico Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a man’s first-degree murder convictions in the 2014 killings of two Santa Fe teens as the justices set a new standard for courts to consider eyewitness testimony identifying a criminal suspect.
The justices upheld Ricardo Martinez’s convictions in the 2014 shooting deaths of 18-year-old Venancio Cisneros and Cisneros’ 13-year-old girlfriend, who the ruling identified only by initials.
The new standard precludes admission of eyewitness identifications produced by “unnecessarily suggestive” police procedures.
Martinez, who is serving two consecutive life sentences, had argued that he was entitled to a new trial because the trial court should have excluded testimony from a witness who said he had seen Martinez walking away from Cisneros’ car at the crime scene.
The ruling said the eyewitness testimony was properly admitted at trial both under the newly adopted state standard and a federal rule it replaced.
The federal standard for evaluating the admissibility of eyewitness evidence doesn’t satisfy the New Mexico Constitution’s due-process protections and has been undercut by advances in scientific knowledge of eyewitness memory, perception, and recall, the ruling said.
