RULING MAY SAP APD COFFERS

Drug money pays the rent for Albuquerque narcotics police. It also pays
some overtime, buys and rents their undercover cars and foots the bill for
high-tech surveillance gear.

But the steady flow of money seized from suspected dope dealers - which
totaled about $750,000 last year - could dwindle because of a recent New
Mexico Supreme Court ruling, says the Albuquerque Police Department captain
who oversees drug and vice detectives.

Capt. Ruben Davalos said APD drug detectives won't be able to keep doing
what they do without the money they have been getting from the seizures.

"We have been so self-sufficient for so long. This was a very, very major
blow to us," said Davalos, head of APD's Special Investigations Division,
which has about 60 detectives and 32 uniformed officers.

"Our job is to get people who are violating the law and arrest them. We
don't go into a case saying, 'How many assets can we get?'" Davalos said.
But "the reality is, they're making that money illegally. Sometimes, the
only avenue you have to impact these people is financially. If you don't
impact these people, they're going to go back to what they do - which is
dealing drugs."

However, Ralph Odenwald, head of the public defender's office in Bernalillo
County, said it's not uncommon for people who are acquitted of drug charges
to lose their money anyway in a separate civil seizure case.

The civil forfeiture case is usually done by the time the criminal case
comes up for trial, Odenwald said, and "if the property's been forfeited,
it's too late to undo that. It's just gone."

Odenwald said, "It presents an incredible conflict of interest" when "the
people who are snatching the property are the beneficiaries of the snatching."

The Dec. 30 state Supreme Court ruling said the state's method of handling
drug-seizure cases violated the New Mexico Constitution.

The high court's majority opinion said seizing a drug defendant's property
and also trying that person in a separate criminal case violates the
double-jeopardy clause of the state Constitution, which prohibits multiple
punishments for the same crime.

Odenwald said, "If not allowing the state to violate the Constitution has
the effect of denying the police a ... windfall, then so be it."

City Police Chief Jerry Galvin said it's too early to predict the full
effect of the ruling. But he said the anti-drug work will be funded one way
or the other.

If the seizure money dwindles, "we'd have to find funding for that
operation," Galvin said. "We're not going to stop that operation."

Assistant City Attorney Stan Harada, who handles drug-forfeiture cases,
said, "If the city has to make up for that shortfall, it's going to be a
challenge."

The Supreme Court opinion requires prosecutors to combine their forfeiture
case and criminal case into a "single bifurcated proceeding."

Civil forfeiture proceedings must be brought within 30 days of seizing
money or property. But it can take prosecutors much longer to prepare a
criminal case.

"They didn't give us a 'how-to,'" Davalos said of the Supreme Court. "They
just said, 'You've got to do it this way.'"

Before the ruling, the burden of proof in forfeiture cases fell on the
defendant to prove the seized money or property wasn't the result of drug
dealing. The ruling said the state now has the burden of proof.

The state Attorney General's Office is asking the high court to reconsider
its decision. The high court is expected to decide in the spring whether to
reconsider.

Davalos said the Special Investigations Division makes hundreds of arrests
each year. And detectives often seize relatively small amounts of cash.

"You take $300 or $500 from a guy. That's not a lot of money," Davalos
said. But "do that a hundred times a year. That is a lot of money."

State forfeiture cases aren't the only major source of seizure money for
police: The U.S. Attorney's Office also handles forfeiture cases and gives
some of the proceeds to the APD. Those cases often involve larger seizures.

Davalos estimated police get 70 percent of seizure money from state cases.

Seizure money pays the rent - about $8,000 a month - for narcotics
detectives, who often work undercover and are based at a secret location.

Because drug dealers sometimes identify undercover vehicles, officers must
switch cars frequently. The seizure money buys or leases those.

"We send people to money-laundering classes, advanced narcotics (classes),"
Davalos said of the drug money's uses. "We've purchased canines with it.
We're getting the benefits of (dealers) having such a lucrative criminal
enterprise."