Free Republic

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The first murder trial involving an on-duty shooting by an Albuquerque police officer in at least 50 years ended late Tuesday afternoon with a District Court jury deadlocked 9-3 for acquittal on charges against former officers Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez. Sandy and Perez, who showed no emotion at the mistrial ruling, left out the back door of the courtroom, away from the media attention. Sandy retired months after the shooting, but Perez was terminated when the criminal charge was filed, per city policy. A decorated Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War, Perez is now unemployed....

A new report has government officials considering setting 10 million acres of across six states in the American west off limits to mining and development to protect the chicken-like Greater Sage Grouse, which is not an endangered species. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) report found that much of the Sage Grouse’s habitat sits on top of extremely valuable deposits of minerals including gold, copper, lithium, silver, uranium and many others. The USGS report means that the government’s most restrictive grouse protection plan could kill even more than 31,000 jobs and lead to more than $5.6 billion in reduced annual economic...

Bumbling Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson wandered onto national television Tuesday to finally admit, with pride, that he does not study trivial things like world leaders and foreign nations. “If that’s a disqualifier, so be it,” Johnson hollered on CNN, echoing a line he coughed up last month after he failed to recognize Syria’s largest city. Johnson — baring bedhead hair and yelling nearly every time he opened his mouth — ostensibly appeared to defend his month of stunning ignorance about world affairs. In recent live TV appearances, Johnson didn’t know what Aleppo is and said “nobody got hurt” in...

Who cares about a state with five electoral votes? Well, you do. Clinton’s path to victory should be familiar to you at this point after months of polling. If she holds all of the traditional blue states, including and especially Pennsylvania, and tacks on New Hampshire, Virginia, and Colorado (all of which were won twice by Obama), then she’s got 271. She can lose Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, etc etc, and still eke through to a win — again, if she holds all of the traditional blue states. If just one flips, she’d be below 270 and...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds a slight lead over Republican Donald Trump among likely New Mexico voters …

Emphasizing the need for congressional action, farm groups renewed their call for reform of Clean Water Act enforcement, following release of a report documenting how federal agencies overreach their authority to regulate farmland. The report, issued last week by the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, describes numerous incidents in which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency have tried to expand their authority to regulate what crops farmers grow and how they grow them, based on the agencies' interpretation of the act.

On Friday, September 9th, 2016, a man driving a Ford Explorer hit a bicyclist in Abuquerque, New Mexico.  The driver did not stop.  The bicycle was lodged under the SUV.  About a mile further on, the driver, who has been identified as a local MMA fighter, 33 year old Henry Martinez, was stopped. He was held at gunpoint by a legally armed man who remains unidentified. From krqe.com: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – A video sent to KRQE News 13 by a viewer shows an armed man holding another man, suspected of hitting a bicyclist and fleeing, at gunpoint until...

There were two sightings of Western yellow-billed cuckoos this year, both in Delta County, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said. The secretive birds are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering designating parts of western Colorado as critical habitat for the migratory bird, including lands along the Colorado River through Mesa County. Sightings — which frequently involve people hearing the cuckoo’s distinctive “klak-klak” sound — have been recorded in Mesa and Delta counties in previous years. ... “We have changed the initial map due to comments from the proposed...

Grand Junction will no longer be home to a district Bureau of Land Management office after the agency’s Grand Junction Field Office gets transferred from the northwest Colorado district to the southwest district under a reorganization. ... Mesa County Commissioner John Justman is uncomfortable with the Grand Junction Field Office no longer being part of the Northwest District, despite Mesa County’s close economic ties to the oil and gas development that takes place in northwest Colorado. Many area oil and gas jobs are based in Mesa County. “Financially the county is much more attached to the Northwest District than the...

In an interview with ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, Johnson told host George Stephanopoulos that "we do have to inhabit other planets. The future of the human race is space exploration," as one possible solution for climate change.

Mr. Drangmeister of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association is invited to debate us (Panhandle Import Reduction Initiative) on OPEC , free trade and the price war against in the American Southwest. Apparently, he missed our presentation at the Independent Producers Association of New Mexico (IPANM) Convention recently in Santa Fe. This OP-ED is a response to his comments in a news article in this newspaper by Maddy Hayden It is not too late for him to learn that as a communications officer in an oil and gas trade association he should support an open forum of all ideas...

We thought we’d seen the last of third party presidential candidate Gary Johnson after his infamous “Aleppo” flub, but the former New Mexico governor has seemingly managed to outdo himself. Amid arguing he would poll as well as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton if he were allowed at the debates, the Libertarian party candidate bizarrely began sticking his tongue out at the reporter interviewing him seated less than a foot away.

Donald Trump now leads Hillary Clinton in several states won by Barack Obama including: Iowa, Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and is tied with Hillary Clinton in Michigan. Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway cheered the development in a series of tweets.

Republican nominee for president Donald Trump opened up a five point lead with New Mexico and its five electoral votes, according to the 141 likely voters in the Reuters/Ipsos poll released Saturday. Trump has the support of 43 percent of likely voters compared to 38 percent for his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the poll executed between Aug. 26 and Sept. 15. ... In 2012, President Barack Obama won New Mexico with 53 percent of the vote. Republican candidate W. Mitt Romney garnered 43 percent of the vote

... One state where [civil asset forfeiture] reform sailed through the legislature with no opposition is New Mexico, where a very fair law was signed last year by Governor Martinez. That, however, was not enough to put an end to an extraordinarily aggressive system in Albuquerque, where the politicians had gotten hooked on funds derived from forfeited cars and other property. The claim by Albuquerque officials that the law did not apply to the city led to a suit filed by two state senators, Lisa Torraco and Daniel Ivey-Soto, to compel the city to obey. I wrote about that case...

Mr. Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, is relying heavily on the backing of young people and independent voters disillusioned with the two major parties’ nominees. More than 70 percent of his backers are younger than 50, and over three-fifths are political independents, according to a mid-August poll by the Pew Research Center. Over all, Mr. Johnson, who will be on the ballot in all 50 states, has the backing of 10 percent of registered voters, the Pew poll found.

Officer gunned down in New Mexico by face-tattooed suspect ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - A police officer who authorities say attempted to chase down a 38-year-old man with three active arrest warrants was fatally shot by the suspect Friday after an exchange of gunfire in a southern New Mexico town. The suspect, Joseph Moreno, also was killed in the morning shootout near a trailer park in Alamogordo, police said at a news conference. The desert town of about 31,000 people is home to the White Sands National Monument and Holloman Air Force Base. Police identified the slain officer as Clint Corvinus, a...

ALAMOGORDO, N.M. - An Alamogordo police officer was killed Friday morning after a foot chase resulted in a shootout. Officers were patrolling the area of the 600 block of South Florida Avenue when they came in contact with the suspect, who tried fleeing on foot in an alley and then exchanged gunshots with the officers. Officer Clint Corvinus, 33, was transported to the Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center, where he died from his injuries. Corvinus was a 4 1/2-year veteran of the Alamogordo Police Department and was a field training officer at the time of the incident. Corivinus is survived...

The Environmental Protection is admitting to a spill from a treatment plant it set up after it dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into a Colorado river last year. The EPA said Thursday night that the spill happened on Tuesday, and officials are still attempting to determine how much and what metals were contained in the sludgy discharge, ... The Navajo Nation sued the agency over the spill last week after the EPA inspector general and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the incident a few days before the Aug. 5 anniversary of the 2015 spill. The...

The scene Wednesday morning in apartment number 808 of the Arroyo Villas complex was like something out of a horror movie. A man and a woman had allegedly drugged a little girl, then raped, killed and dismembered her. Most would expect the girl’s mother to fight with everything she had to save her daughter. But Michelle Martens, according to her own reported account to police, is not that kind of mother. In her statement to police, it appears that Martens wanted to watch as her boyfriend, Fabian Gonzales, 31, and his cousin Jessica Kelley, 31, raped her 10-year-old daughter Victoria...