Two compete in Democratic primary for attorney general | Local News

The winner of the primary will face Republican Jeremy Gay, who is unopposed, next month.

Torrez and Colón have some similarities — both are attorneys and grew up in New Mexico; both have become familiar to voters during their careers — but their backgrounds and vision for the office are vastly different.

Colón, 52, said he grew up in Los Lunas in Section 8 housing and noted in a recent interview “it didn’t get much better from there.”

His father and mother, Rafael and Shelly Colón, moved the family to Florida when Colón was still a teenager in hopes lower altitude would be beneficial for his father’s muscular dystrophy. But Colón stayed behind because he’d already been accepted at New Mexico State University, where he became the first in his family to attend college.

“I was living my father’s dream even though he passed away right after I got to college,” he said. “It wasn’t easy. I struggled.”

He worked his way through college via a series of odd jobs, including working at a car wash and selling newspaper advertising. He sometimes slept on friends’ sofas, once had his car repossessed and had to take several breaks from school before he was able to complete a bachelor’s degree in finance in 1998.

After earning a law degree from the University of New Mexico in 2001, Colón was named Outstanding Young Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar of New Mexico in 2004 and served as chairman of the state Democratic Party from 2007 to 2009. In the past decade plus, Colón’s quest for public office has been consistent: he was an unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor in 2010 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Albuquerque in 2017. A year later, he was elected to head the state Auditor’s Office.

His legal career has been devoted to the practice of civil law — most prominently as a partner in the Robles, Rael and Anaya firm, where Colón said he focused primarily on personal injury and wrongful death cases.

The firm secured multiple contracts from the Attorney General’s Office, headed by its current occupant, Hector Balderas.

That has drawn scrutiny from critics who question the role the personal relationship between Marcus Rael Jr. and Balderas — both Colón’s classmates at UNM Law School — played in the allocation of those contracts.

The practice of contracting with outside firms has focused scathing criticism on Balderas — and by extension, Colón, who makes no secret of his support for the current AG. In a questionnaire about the race provided to The New Mexican, he wrote: “Balderas has been a model for Attorneys General throughout the country.”

Asked what he’d do differently, Colón said he would respond to current crises related to air, water and natural resources by devoting additional resources to the AG’s Office’s environmental division and centering it within the organization, giving it “standalone capacity.”

Colón said he believes socioeconomic status and substance abuse are the sources of violent crime.

“I think drugs are a driver of violent crime, and the fact that we have communities that are severely impacted by drug addiction without any behavioral health and mental health services to treat those individuals,” he said.

“We have to be realistic. The attorney general doesn’t get a cape, but what the attorney general does get is opportunity to have a bully pulpit to get those stakeholders to the table to talk about what resources are required and then advance that agenda in the Legislature and with the executive.”

Torrez, 45, was born and raised in Albuquerque — his mother, Mary Butler, was a teacher; his father, Presiliano Torrez, is a federal prosecutor, who is about to retire after 45 years with the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Both parents, he said, helped him understand the causes and consequences of crime — lessons that have stayed with him through his career.

“The biggest long-term driver of … most crime, but in particular violent crime, is the extraordinarily high rate of adverse experiences in early childhood,” Torrez said. “When people ask me for my diagnosis of our public safety programs and what we need to do, in a lot of ways [my] mom’s work in the classroom and [my] dad’s work in courtroom are sort of bookends in the same story.”

He attended tony Sandia Preparatory School before leaving New Mexico for about a decade to pursue his education at some of the world’s top universities: Harvard, the London School of Economics, Stanford.

When he returned to New Mexico and a career in the law, however, he started from scratch, doing stints as an assistant district attorney in Valencia County, an assistant state attorney general and as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office before opening his own practice in 2013.

He was elected district attorney for Bernalillo County’s Second Judicial District — which has the highest volume of criminal cases in the state — in 2016 and again in 2020, when he was unopposed.

Asked to evaluate the current Attorney General’s Office and its effectiveness, Torrez wrote Balderas’ administration has been “too reluctant to support local prosecutors in the evaluation of officer involved shooting and too willing to outsource consumer protection cases to out-of-state-contributors,” noting Colón has received campaign donations from out-of-state law firms.

Torrez said his prosecutorial career has been marked by what he’s seen in many New Mexico homes, where poverty and violence have collided, often with terrible results.

While diversion and enforcement can have short-term effects on the crime rate, he said, “The long-term solution to the public safety challenge lies in a heavy, heavy investment in traumatized children and destabilized families.”

Torrez said he’d become more involved in shaping crime policy in New Mexico — taking an active role in ongoing debates over pretrial detention reform and examining alternatives to incarceration. Both are hot-button issues.

The thorny issue of bail reform, a controversial subject on both ends of the law-and-order debate in New Mexico, looms for the next attorney general, and perhaps, politicians throughout the state.

Torrez has been outspoken about the state’s pretrial detention system, contending it needs further tweaking. It was altered several years ago to eliminate money bonds for low-level criminals without the means to post bail. It also ended the practice of allowing judges to hold dangerous defendants indefinitely, regardless of their ability to post bail.

“Based on my review of the data, there are too many violent repeat offenders that are being released back into the communities,” Torrez said.

His conclusion is disputed by members of the criminal defense bar, who point to a 2021 UNM study which showed only 15 percent of defendants released to await trial out of custody are charged with a new offense.

Torrez unsuccessfully pushed during the most recent legislative session for a fix that would have adopted a method used federally and elsewhere, in which defendants accused of certain crimes would be automatically held without bond unless their attorney can prove they are not dangerous to the community.

New Mexico’s current system requires prosecutors show by clear and convincing evidence a defendant is so dangerous no conditions of release could protect the community from them.

Torrez said if a system akin to the federal method is implemented, he would support rules requiring cases involving defendants held without bond to be resolved within specific time frames, as is the case in federal courts.

“If the Legislature does not believe that is an appropriate solution, I am willing and eager to engage with them on what would be a more appropriate solution,” Torrez said. “What I don’t accept is that the current system is working.”

Colón said he also believes “it’s time to reevaluate and see what’s not working and make adjustments” to the pretrial detention system but said he didn’t support Torrez’s legislative push because he didn’t think there had been a robust enough discussion about all the variables.

“When you talk about shifting people’s burdens and affecting civil rights and not making sure they are…