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Shaharazad Booth, a defense attorney in Las Cruces and former Deming prosecutor, wants to be the next district attorney to restore a sense of safety in Doña Ana County.
“It's a real love and desire to be in this community that drives me to run,” Booth said. “I want to get back to that idea that your kids can go to the park where people feel happy, healthy and safe, while not trying to villainize those who didn't do anything wrong.”
Booth, a University of Arkansas law school graduate, is one of five candidates running to be the district attorney for the 3rd Judicial District. Anxiety around crime, concerns about dismissals, releases and repeat offenders, combined with questions about the fair execution of justice, make this race the most competitive of the 2024 primary season.
In all, six lawyers chose to run, including incumbent Gerald Byers. After a judge disqualified one for petition problems, the field shrank to four Democrats, including Booth, vying to take on Republican Michael Cain in November.
Booth made the case for why she deserved the job above her colleagues during an interview with the Las Cruces Bulletin. Booth said her driving force, not just for the election but life in general, is family.
“There's nothing I love more than them, and dealing in situations where children are getting hurt and families are being wronged; and finding no justice in the system is heartbreaking,” Booth said.
Unequivocally, Booth said the DA’s office is uniquely suited to affecting societal issues like climate change, homelessness and immigration.
For Booth, this power comes in two forms: the decisions of how and when to prosecute cases and the array of resources given to DA’s offices by the state.
For the former, she used an experience as a prosecutor in Deming’s 6th Judicial District as an example. Before cannabis had been legalized in New Mexico, Booth said the district stopped prosecuting low-level marijuana offences.
“We're not talking, you know, cars full of, or barrels of marijuana,” Booth said. “We found that personal use possession wasn't worth our resources. It was against the public demands.”
Instead, the Deming prosecutor’s office used the saved resources to push domestic violence cases. It was all at the will of the community, Booth said.
But it works both ways. Booth added that, when trying to affect something like climate change, the DA’s office can prioritize prosecutions of illegal dumping, for example.
“By prosecuting them and taking them seriously, you can start to show that these are things we care about. Then you get into federal issues like immigration. We have no state crime for immigration, we have no business bothering with it,” Booth said. “But what we can do, though, is help with marginalized communities.”
“It's about educating people on their visas and all kinds of immigration statuses that we can earn for people that will help them feel comfortable coming in (to report a crime.) But also, you know, there are victims and they're victims first, and making sure that we're punishing those who are victimizing people in our community, regardless of their status.”
The district attorney’s office has experienced turnover at a high rate for most of the last two terms.
The causes are many. As Byers has pointed out, the office cannot compete with salaries at large private firms and the district fishes from the same pool of lawyers as other district attorneys’ offices in New Mexico.
But challengers – including Booth – have also said the current administration has forced people out or failed to vigorously recruit replacements. According to Booth, there’s a pool of qualified attorneys still in the community willing to fill the prosecutor’s office if change at the top occurs.
Next up, Booth said creating peer support in the office plays a major role in recruitment and retention. Whether that’s in a high profile murder case or a low-level DWI case, Booth said that she or another prosecutor would play a pivotal role as mentor.
“I come from the mentality that leadership is showing support, comfort and showing up,” Booth said. “It's not, ‘I haven't paid attention to a thing that's gone on,’ and then when something goes wrong, you get fired because you had no clue what you were doing was wrong.”
New Mexico state law states the role of the District Attorney is to lead an office in prosecuting criminal cases in a specified area. But the experience of doing so provides the officeholder with unique experiences. A district attorney, in theory, could use that experience and the office’s resources to push for change in Santa Fe.
Booth said this was not only possible, but a task on which she would embark.
“If I believe very deeply in an area of law that is driven by my political ideologies, then I can affect change by showing what that means,” Booth said.
One place Booth mentioned she’d want to see changes is the state’s animal abuse statutes.
“Animal abuse is probably one of the earliest precursors that we have that somebody is going to be violent and violent against family members, children, things of that nature,” Booth said.
Booth answered the questions by drawing a line between the often-conflated groups of people without shelter and people committing nuisance crimes like vandalism or trespassing.
“Being homeless is not illegal. So, the way that the question reads are where I get concerned, because I have no intention of making homelessness illegal,” Booth said. But she said was not dismissing concerns regarding “a significant population of repeat release offenders.”
“Let me be clear, I'm not saying a significant population of homeless people, I'm saying that there's five or six that are committing a lot of our crimes that are happening in our community,” Booth said.
She added that it was important for the DA’s office to focus its prosecutorial efforts on them – not the larger population of unhoused people.
“When we're dealing with (a group) so small, to me, it feels like a breakdown in cooperation, that we're not together trying to figure out how we fix those people,” Booth said.
To support people without shelter, Booth said the DA’s office should support organizations in Las Cruces better suited to addressing those needs.
Appearing in court is one of the best parts of being a lawyer, Booth said. Moreover, she said appearing in court and sharing in the caseload was key to showing support to the rank-and-file attorneys in the office.
But Booth also said that she didn’t foresee being able till to do that until year three of the job.
“Will I be prosecuting cases day one? No, but I'll be in court, we'll go and help and be part of and mentor and be there,” she said.
Booth said she’d run the DA’s office with an open door. That would be in contrast to how Booth described the current office.
“I believe in creating a system where people feel comfortable being part of the system,” she said.
She acknowledged that codes of ethics prevent prosecutors from speaking publicly about ongoing cases or from criticizing certain aspects of the judicial systems. But that doesn’t mean the office can’t be public with results of cases and statistics around case dismissals and convictions.
Additionally, Booth said her office would communicate to the public why they choose – or choose not to – prosecute certain cases.
“Being accessible to people allowing for that level of access, I think will truly start opening up the office,” Booth said.
A note on these questions: The Las Cruces Bulletin solicited questions from our readers to determine what to ask the candidates. The above questions were a synthesis of roughly 100 responses.
