BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
Los Alamos Magistrate Court Judge Pat Casados on Friday upheld her dismissal February 12 of charges against Gabriel Wadt of driving under the influence and resisting in connection with an August 2020 arrest.
Although Court staff confirmed early Friday that the telephonic hearing on the motion to reconsider the dismissal was set for 11 a.m., apparently arrangements had been made in advance with Assistant District Attorney Heather Smallwood and defense attorney Jerry Archuleta to hear it earlier in the morning meaning the Los Alamos Reporter was not present. According to Archuleta, Judge Casados in denying Smallwood’s motion to reconsider the dismissal order, said she had offered Smallwood more time in at a December 4 status hearing to provide requested information to Archuleta when she took over the case, but Smallwood had declined. As well as a reversal of the dismissal, Smallwood had asked Judge Casados to extend the time by 30 days for commencement of Wadt’s trial.
At a telephonic status hearing February 12 on Wadt’s case, Archuleta told Judge Casados that he had made several attempts to obtain cell phone numbers for Los Alamos Police Department officers he wished to speak to for preparation for Wadt’s trial. Archuleta obtained hundreds of pages of cell phone records for LAPD through an Inspection of Public Records request and was seeking to determine who officers called during the traffic stop when the audio function of LAPD videos of the incident was turned off. He apparently requested phone numbers so that he could determine who advised officers at the scene that they had probable cause to obtain an arrest warrant for Wadt. Archuleta’s motion indicated that he began requesting those numbers in August 2020 from the district attorney’s office but as of the February 12 hearing, he had only received two of the numbers and that pre-trial interviews with the officers had not been set up.
Archuleta maintains Smallwood’s request to reconsider the dismissal of the charges was an attempt to deflect from mistakes made by the district attorney’s office in the case, which he said included not checking her emails about the pre-trial interviews and the requested phones and not remembering to reschedule pre-trial interviews in January.
Smallwood’s motion lists evidence submitted as “pictures of the car and scene, statement by the witness Gary Krugger, the police report regarding the incident, and five digital video disks”. She maintains there is adequate evidence to convict Wadt of the DWI and that Judge Casados “exercised an abuse of discretion upon granting the order of dismissal”. She called the dismissal of the charges “an extreme remedy”.
The Reporter’s original story of Wadt’s arrest from last August may be read at https://losalamosreporter.com/2020/08/21/espanola-police-officer-gabriel-wadt-arrested-in-los-alamos-charged-with-dui-and-evading-police-officer/.