Supreme Court of New Mexico Reverses Murder Conviction With Prejudice Because Prosecutor Called the Defendant a Witch Who Controlled Her Husband With Menstrual Blood

From the files of “Just When You Thought You’d Seen It All” comes the opinion of the Supreme Court of New Mexico in State v. Lensegrav, 2025 WL 558246 (N.M. 2025). The court described the facts of the case as follows:

Joseph Morgas (Morgas) went missing in Taos, New Mexico, in August 2019. Police had no leads on the case for over a year. Then, in August 2020, police uncovered two suspects, Aram Montoya (Montoya) and his wife, Desiree Lensegrav (Defendant), after Montoya barricaded Defendant in their Taos home before repeatedly stabbing her in the neck and back with a paring knife. Montoya took Defendant to the hospital and he was thereafter arrested and jailed for the attempted murder of Defendant. Defendant was airlifted to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and placed in a medically induced coma in the intensive care unit.

Thereafter, in connection with the murder of Morgas, Lensegrav “was charged with first-degree willful and deliberate murder, first-degree felony murder, first-degree kidnapping, three counts of tampering with evidence, and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.”

Montoya gave conflicting statements regarding whether he or Lensegrav murdered Morgas, causing the State to omit him from its witness list at the last second. Subsequently, according to the court,

Despite the State having removed Montoya from the witness list, ADA Ripol nevertheless used his opening statement to expose the jury to Montoya’s incriminating allegations against Defendant. 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 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. 

Having found that the prosecutor’s misconduct deprived the defendant of a fair trial, the court next had to consider whether his actions were so egregious that they precluded another prosecution. The court noted that there’s a three factor test from State v. Breit, 655, 930 P.2d 792 (N.M. 1996), for reaching such a conclusion:

official misconduct at trial will result in a double jeopardy bar to retrial when the misconduct (1) “is so unfairly prejudicial to the defendant that it cannot be cured by means short of a mistrial or a motion for new trial,” (2) “the official knows that the conduct is improper and prejudicial,” and (3) “the official either intends to provoke a mistrial or acts in willful disregard of the resulting mistrial, retrial, or reversal.”

Applying this test, the court concluded as follows:

We begin with the first prong of Breit: whether the prosecutor’s misconduct was “so unfairly prejudicial to [Defendant] that it cannot be cured by means short of a mistrial or a motion for a new trial.”…For the reasons set forth in our discussion of fundamental error, the record leaves no doubt that ADA Ripol’s misconduct satisfies the first prong of Breit….

Having concluded that the first prong of Breit is satisfied, we need not belabor the other instances of misconduct. However, we pause to note the outrageous impropriety of the prosecutor’s reliance on allegations of witchcraft. This Court has long recognized that witchcraft accusations are entirely outside the bounds of legality: as early as 1891, we recognized that the belief in witchcraft was archaic and unacceptable….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 opening statement holds a uniquely important place in the trial because it is the lens through which the jury views and evaluates the entire trial. Therefore, the prosecutor must take special care to refrain from improper comments.”…

The second prong of Breit is also satisfied: the prosecutor knew that his conduct was improper and prejudicial. ADA Ripol clearly understood that he was presenting the jury with Montoya’s incriminating allegations without calling him as a witness. However, a prosecutor’s knowledge “is an objective standard, not a subjective one. A prosecutor’s belief regarding their own conduct is irrelevant because rare are the instances of misconduct that are not violations of rules that every legal professional, no matter how inexperienced, is charged with knowing. The law simply cannot reward ignorance.” McClaugherty, 2008-NMSC-044, ¶ 49 (brackets, internal quotation marks, and citations omitted). Thus, we do not decide this prong on subjective grounds. “The law clearly presumes that” a prosecutor knows that introducing “facts not in evidence, where [the prosecutor] had no intention of trying to gain the proper admission of that material, [is] improper.” Id. ¶ 57; see also, e.g., State v. Cummings, 1953-NMSC-008, ¶ 8, 57 N.M. 36, 253 P.2d 321 (“[A] statement of facts entirely outside of the evidence, and highly prejudicial to the accused, cannot be justified as argument.”).

Finally, the third prong of Breit is satisfied. The prosecutor “either intend[ed] to provoke a mistrial or act[ed] in willful disregard of the resulting mistrial, retrial, or reversal.”…ADA Ripol exposed the jury to Montoya’s incriminating allegations without calling him as a witness. He built his case around a theory that Defendant was a witch who controlled her non-testifying codefendant through the use of her menstrual blood and caused him to kill on her behalf. He repeatedly used inflammatory language, disparaged Defendant, and improperly vouched for the credibility of witnesses. And the prosecution introduced foul-smelling physical evidence that had been attached to a burnt and buried corpse for more than a year, displayed it for the jury, and then ADA Ripol used the offensive smell to argue that the State “demands” and “requires” the jury to convict on all counts because of the offensive odor. The misconduct persisted from the opening statement all the way through rebuttal argument.

Like in Breit, “the misconduct was unrelenting and pervasive,” and “[t]he cumulative effect was to deny the defendant a fair trial.”…Like in Breit, the State’s case was weak on the crucial issue of intent to kill, and “the prosecution may have been concerned that there would be difficulties in securing a conviction.”…Particularly here, where the State knew that Montoya had repudiated his initial accusations against Defendant, it appears likely that the State’s choice not to call Montoya was a feckless attempt to avoid having the State’s star eyewitness torpedo its theory of the case. Instead, the prosecution saw fit to expose the jury to Montoya’s incriminating allegations that suited the State’s case without the risks of live testimony from the man himself. This process was antithetical to our adversarial system and deprived Defendant of a fair trial….Again, as in Breit, we determine from these facts that “[i]n avoiding an acquittal at any cost, it appears that among the costs the prosecution was willing to incur were a mistrial, a new trial, or reversal on appeal….Under minimal legal, ethical, and professional standards, we can only conclude that [the prosecutor] acted knowingly and intentionally.”

Summing everything up, the court concluded that “[t]he rule of law applies equally to prosecutors as well as everyone else. All three prongs of Breit are satisfied in this case.”

-CM