A judge recently denied former Las Cruces police officer’s request to remove his ankle monitor

Joshua Bowling, Source New Mexico

This article was originally published by Source New Mexico.

As a former Las Cruces police officer previously convicted for killing a Black man accused of stealing a beer awaits a possible new trial, his ankle monitor will remain on.

In 2022, Las Cruces Police Officer Brad Lunsford responded to a 911 call that alleged someone had stolen a beer from a gas station convenience store. Lunsford attempted to arrest 36-year-old Presley Eze as bystanders filmed the interaction with their cellphones. Lunsford, who had been involved in prior police shootings, alleged that Eze grabbed his Taser during the struggle. Lunsford drew his service weapon and shot Eze once in the back of the head.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez first filed criminal charges against Lunsford in late 2023. The filing marked the first time in nearly a decade that a police officer anywhere in New Mexico had faced criminal charges for a fatal shooting — the most recent instance was the trial of Keith Sandy and Dominique Perez, the Albuquerque officers who in 2014 killed James Boyd in the Sandia Foothills. Their case ended in a mistrial.

The Eze killing led Southern New Mexicans to be “rightly concerned about whether or not justice is equal in this country,” Torrez said when he announced the criminal charges in 2023.

A jury convicted Lunsford in February of this year.

In October, though, Sixth Judicial District Judge Jim Foy ordered a new trial, which has yet to be scheduled. Foy said he had inappropriately substituted two alternate jurors and dismissed two regular jurors before deliberations began because at the time the court was using a form that incorrectly listed which jurors were alternates. 

Foy also said that newly discovered evidence showed one juror held anti-cop bias. Upon his decision, the National Police Association went so far as to publish the headline, “Did an Anti-Police Activist Lie to Get on the Officer Brad Lunsford Jury?”

Torrez pushed back. His New Mexico Department of Justice in October appealed Foy’s decision to the state Court of Appeals and argued that the juror’s answers to pre-trial questionnaires, which included a disclosure about affiliation with the Southern Poverty Law Center, did not seem to alarm Lunsford’s attorneys at the start of his criminal trial. The juror’s academic works about race in early education and parenthood and podcast appearances are all easily accessible by a simple Google search of the juror’s name, lawyers with Torrez’s New Mexico Department of Justice argued.

Foy’s call for a new trial “set aside the jury’s finding of guilt (that) has devastated Presley Eze’s family and further undermines the public’s faith in New Mexico’s criminal justice system,” Torrez said in an October statement. “The presiding judge…has repeatedly mischaracterized the factual record, improperly weighed in on the strength of the state’s case and committed numerous procedural errors that prejudiced the prosecution.”

Torrez’s department filed its arguments in appeals court earlier this month. A decision remains pending.

On Nov. 21, Foy denied Lunsford’s request to modify the conditions of his release, which sought to remove his requirement to wear an ankle monitor and to post a $10,000 bond, pending the appellate court’s decision.

“Our goal in the new trial is to ensure Officer Lunsford receives a fair proceeding before an impartial jury that hears all of the evidence and correctly applies the law,” Lunsford’s attorney Matt Chandler wrote in an email to Source NM. “We remain confident that, in a fair trial, the evidence will show that Officer Lunsford’s actions were lawful, that he was protecting his own life and the life of his fellow officer from a violent, aggressive attack by the suspect, and that he should be acquitted.”

Joshua Bowling is a senior reporter for Source New Mexico. He's reported in New Mexico, where he broke stories of lavish spending at Western New Mexico University and more, since 2022.