Prosecution, defense urge court to accept plea deal for embezzler

Jul. 23—Prosecution and defense attorneys are urging state District Judge Jason Lidyard to accept the third plea they plan to offer Henrietta Trujillo, a former Northern New Mexico College official who has admitted embezzling more than $80,000 from the school about a decade ago.

Trujillo, the college's former financial services director, faces one count of embezzlement over $20,000 and is accused of stealing cash and checks meant to be deposited in the college's bank accounts over 2 1/2 years between 2012 and 2014.

Lidyard has rejected two proposed plea deals agreed to by the defense and prosecutors since 2019 as too lenient, saying Trujillo's punishment should be on par with penalties imposed on other defendants convicted of theft involving similar amounts of money.

Those, he noted at a hearing in 2020, often include jail time and aren't easily plead down to probation and restitution.

The attorneys, however, seem reluctant to put the 66-year-old Corrales woman behind bars.

Both previous plea agreements would have allowed Trujillo to serve a sentence of probation and/or electronic monitoring or house arrest.

While the latest proposed plea has not been made public in full, recent motions in the case indicate it also would not include jail time.

That's because Trujillo's health is precarious, her lawyer Ben Ortega said Friday.

"Some folks can go to jail or go to prison and they will be OK," he said. "Henrietta Trujillo is infirm; any little thing that happens to her could lead to a disastrous outcome for her. I don't want going to jail to become a death sentence for her health wise."

Trujillo has hip and knee issues that will require surgery, suffers from anxiety that in the past has caused her to be hospitalized, and is the sole caregiver for her husband who has lung disease, according to court records.

Ortega said the latest plea does contain a longer period of confinement than the one Lidyard rejected in July 2020, calling for Trujillo to spend at least a year and possibly two on house arrest and/or electronic monitoring, as opposed to 90 to 182 days as presented under the previous plea proposal.

Whether Trujillo would be allowed to work while serving the sentence would be up to the judge, Ortega said.

The defense lawyer argued in a recent motion house arrest is technically incarceration, and Trujillo's age and health make her unlikely to reoffend.

Settling the case before trial would also save the court resources and allow Trujillo to direct money she might spend on legal fees to paying restitution of about $86,000, about $4,000 of which, Ortega said, would be paid to the state Department of Taxation and Revenue to cover the cost of its investigation.

Northern New Mexico College interim President Barbara Medina said Friday that the school had been briefed on the proposed plea and agreed with the proposed terms of restitution but had no position on whether Trujillo should be incarcerated in connection with the plea.

"My opinion and that of the Board of Regents in conversation with legal counsel is that we wanted to move forward," she said Friday. "Our most important consideration was our ability to move forward."

What's also different about the plea, Ortega said Friday, is it includes a forensic psychologist's report that offers new details about what drove Trujillo to take the money, her likelihood to reoffend and her amenability to treatment.

"Her sister and mother were both in need of Ms. Trujillo's financial assistance," the report says. Prior reports indicate they both had cancer. Her pregnant daughter also needed assistance, the report says.

"Ms. Trujillo was falling behind in her mortgage payments," it says. "Family automobiles were breaking down. Ms. Trujillo also owed federal income taxes, as a result of cashing our her pension from her previous employer, Los Alamos National Laboratory."

The report says "her guilt, shame and remorse" indicate she's unlikely to reoffend and would be amenable to treatment in the form of counseling.

"Given Ms. Trujillo's age, her lifelong pattern of moral conventional, and pro-social behavior, and her underlying anxiety and depression, incarceration will create powerful stress on her strained capacity to hope and result in serious, negative long-lasting psychological damage," the report concludes.

Ortega said he wrote the motion and memorandum in support of approving the plea agreement — which the District Attorney's Office has also stipulated to — because at the last hearing he wasn't able to present his full argument before Lidyard moved to reject the plea. Ortega said he wanted to be able put his opinion on the record.

Earlier this month, Deputy District Attorney Douglas Wood III also urged the judge to accept the new plea, noting that it calls for 384 hours of community service not required by the previous agreement.

The plea is appropriate, Wood argued, because it takes in to account not only Trujillo's breach of the public trust but the nonviolent nature of the crime and her lack of criminal history.

"Ms. Trujillo made very poor decisions as to how to address her ongoing family and financial problems and her gambling addiction, but the picture before the Court is not of an individual setting out to act maliciously but, instead, an individual who, like many addicts unfortunately, convinced herself that she could dig her way out of these problems on her own," Wood wrote in a court filing.

Trujillo has denied having a gambling problem, despite police having verified that she spent more than $500,000 at area casinos during the approximately 10-year period she worked for the Española-based college, according to previous reports.

Wood and Ortega filed a request for a hearing in the case June 22. The court had not set a hearing date as of Friday, but Ortega said the court has requested a copy of the psychologist's report referenced in his motion.

Jake Arnold, executive director of the NNMC advocacy group La Sociedad Venceslao Jaramillo, named for the college founder, said Friday that, having heard Lidyard's comments in past hearings, he's not sure the judge would accept the plea.

Arnold said his recommendation would be that Trujillo serve six months in jail.

"Jail time and assured restitution, those are the two things that have to be in any kind of plea deal I think," he said.