"A former Española judge who spent nearly three years in prison for crimes the state Supreme Court determined he shouldn’t have been convicted of has filed a legal malpractice lawsuit against two of his former lawyers.
Charles Maestas is accusing Santa Fe attorneys Stephen Aarons and David Henderson of negligence in their handling of his case for failing to notice that the statute his convictions were based on didn’t apply to judges. The lawsuit was filed Feb. 20 and is pending in state district court in Tierra Amarilla.
Aarons was the lead attorney representing Maestas during his 2003 trial on rape and bribery charges while Henderson represented Maestas during the appeal.
The suit names Aarons Law Firm PC and Downing and Henderson PC as defendants. Maestas is represented by Tony Scarborough, who couldn’t be reached for comment late Thursday.
A jury convicted Maestas in June 2003 on five counts of rape and five counts of accepting a bribe in connection with allegations that he used his power as a judge to compel a woman, Suzette Salazar, to give him sexual favors in exchange for a promise of lenience in her traffic case. The jury acquitted him of a number of other charges. In August 2003, he was sentenced to three years in prison.
But the state Supreme Court overturned those convictions on Dec. 13, 2006, finding that Maestas had erroneously been prosecuted under a state anti-bribery statute that expressly excludes judges. By the time the high court’s decision was handed down, Maestas had finished serving his prison term.
The question of whether Maestas had been convicted of a law that didn’t apply to judges was initially raised by an attorney in the state Attorney General’s Office. But while the Attorney General’s Office conceded that the wording of the law made judges exempt, it argued that the Legislature made a mistake and asked the court to affirm the convictions.
Henderson, who argued passionately before the Supreme Court that Maestas’ convictions should be overturned because he was convicted of a law that didn’t exist, said he was disappointed and upset that he was being sued, given that he won the appeal for Maestas. Henderson had originally based Maestas’ appeal on an argument that a faulty jury instruction had been given during the trial.
