SANTA FE – The state Supreme Court today vacated the convictions of a Taos woman for a 2019 killing and prohibited a retrial because of “outrageous prosecutorial misconduct” that included referring to the defendant as a witch.
The Court unanimously concluded that Desiree Lensegrav failed to receive a fair trial and that state constitutional protections against double jeopardy barred a new trial because of the misconduct. Lensegrav was sentenced in 2022 to 45 years in prison before eligibility for parole for her role in the death of Joseph Morgas.
“In this case of severe and pervasive prosecutorial misconduct, exacerbated by a lackluster defense, we hold that an Assistant District Attorney who uses opening statements to expose the jury to incriminating allegations from a non-testifying codefendant, repeatedly accuses a defendant of witchcraft, and relies on inflammatory and inadmissible evidence throughout the case, has knowingly committed misconduct so unfairly prejudicial and with such willful disregard for reversal on appeal that retrial is barred under Article II, Section 15 of the New Mexico Constitution,” the Court wrote in an opinion by Justice Michael E. Vigil. The referenced constitutional section protects against double jeopardy.
Lensegrav was convicted and sentenced in 2022 for first-degree murder, kidnapping, evidence tampering and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. Her husband, Aram Montoya, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and kidnapping in 2021, receiving a sentence of life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Montoya confessed to killing Morgas after being arrested for stabbing Lensegrav during a domestic dispute in Taos. She was taken to a hospital and later described to police how Montoya killed Morgas during a fight. The victim’s body was taken to another location where it was burned, decapitated and buried. The head was thrown into the Rio Grande. Lensegrav told police that she wanted Montoya to hurt Morgas after he insulted her at a drug house and threatened actions so she would lose custody of her child.
Shortly before Lensegrav’s trial, the prosecution dropped plans to call Montoya as a witness but Assistant District Attorney Cosme Ripol “
“Bolstered with copious amounts of other inflammatory and inadmissible evidence, including allegations that Defendant was a ‘witch’ and a ‘bruja’ (a term for ‘witch’ in Spanish) who controlled Mr. Montoya through her menstrual blood, ADA Ripol embarked on a three-day-long exercise in pathos and character assassination that utterly deprived Defendant of a fair trial that is guaranteed by the New Mexico Constitution,” the Court wrote.
The justices found it “profoundly troubling” that Lensegrav’s defense counsel did not object to most of the instances of the prosecutorial misconduct during the trial. Without an objection by the defense, the district court had no opportunity to rule on or correct what occurred. Because the defense first raised the issue of prosecutorial misconduct on appeal, the Supreme Court reviewed the matter to determine whether the misconduct rose to the level of “fundamental error” that prevented a fair trial and whether double jeopardy protections prohibited a retrial.
“Defendant did not receive the fair trial to which she was entitled, and we, therefore, vacate her convictions,” the Court concluded. “Because of the outrageous prosecutorial misconduct that pervaded this trial, double jeopardy bars reprosecution.”
The justices explained, “ADA Ripol’s misconduct in exposing the jury to Montoya’s incriminating statements in his opening statement while knowing that the State would not call him as a witness was so unfairly prejudicial and unreversible that it alone resulted in fundamental error. When the other instances of misconduct are added, the conclusion that fundamental error occurred is inescapable.”
The Court wrote: “There is absolutely no scenario in which it is acceptable for a prosecutor to accuse a defendant of witchcraft in a twenty-first-century court, as ADA Ripol did in this case. The fact that these remarks were made in the opening statement is particularly damaging.”
The prosecution introduced “foul-smelling physical evidence” from the victim’s remains, and the smell caused the judge to adjourn the trial early during the second day, according to the Court. The assistant district attorney urged the jury in his closing statements to find Lensegrav guilty “for the stench of death that permeated this courtroom.”
“The entire trial was filled with theatrics, hyperbole, and disparaging inflammatory statements, such that the extent of the misconduct cannot be fully conveyed in this opinion,” the Court wrote.
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To read the decision in State v. Lensegrav, No. S-1-SC-39542, please visit the New Mexico Compilation Commission’s website using the following link:
