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Thursday, February 7, 2008

Deputy District Attorney Back Home After Foreign Service

By Laura Nesbitt
Mountain View Telegraph
    Tim Cornish, fifth generation New Mexico native and returning Torrance County deputy district attorney, has come back to a job he left and an area he loves because of homesickness— or what he calls cabanga.
    Cornish returned to this country after working with contractors to the U.S. Agency for International Development for 14 years in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama and Mexico "running justice reform projects." Cornish speaks Spanish fluently.
    From 1981 through 1985 he worked as county deputy district attorney, and then as special prosecutor and director of investigations for the attorney general's office until 1992.
    On Jan. 14, he returned to his old job in Estancia and was happy to find some of the same people still working in the office, including the court liaison for the sheriff's office Dick Ness, Chief Medical Examiner and Estancia Fire Chief Wayne Granger, Supervising Secretary Diane Gomez and Judge Edmund Kase III were all working when Cornish originally left the job almost 23 years ago.
    "I started in Socorro 30 years ago and Kase had been on the bench about four years," Cornish said about one of the oldest district employees.
    When Cornish had the post of deputy district attorney in the 1980s, he said that filing 50 felonies a year was a lot. He traveled to Estancia from Socorro once a week and only handled "high profile cases." But now, he says, the "nature of criminality has changed" in the county.
    "There's more violent crime. There's certainly more meth," Cornish said.
    And unlike 20 years ago, Cornish has two assistant district attorneys working for him— Ray Sharbutt is senior trial attorney and Wes Jensen is trial prosecutor. Both attorneys are responsible for "around 100 to 110" caseloads at any one time which he called "an acceptable case load."
    Cornish called the District Attorney's office "the first legal bastion of constitutional guarantees," and said he wants to focus on regaining the public's confidence in "the law enforcement establishment" and addressing issues that affect public security.
    "Meth labs, domestic abuse, property crimes— things that make citizens feel unsafe in their homes," Cornish said.
    He is happy that adult drug court is "coming to Torrance County and (Judge Kevin) Sweazea is the leader."
    Rep. Rhonda King recently introduced a bill that asks the state Legislature for an appropriation of $50,000 in 2009 to the 7th Judicial District to begin a drug court in Torrance County.
    Staff from the Moriarty Magistrate Court have been selected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to attend a DWI drug court training.
    Drug courts are designed to reduce repeat offenders and substance abuse while increasing the likelihood of successful rehabilitation.
    Cornish's experiences away from this country working in Latin America have only made him appreciate the American form of justice more.
    "When I was in Panama, there was a huge scandal because 20,000 cases had disappeared," Cornish said. "A huge rain fell and that's not uncommon, but a false ceiling fell down and almost killed some people. They had put them in the ceiling because they couldn't humanly handle the caseload the law imposed upon them."
    Cornish said the American system of justice is much more practical.
    "There's a whole panoply of discretionary things ... to make sure that the system doesn't get clogged. Because if we tried every case the system would collapse in a month," Cornish said.
    Cornish believes that the American adversarial system of justice is "genius."
    "They may be mad at us. We may be mad at them. But in the end there's an impartial judge that's sitting up there deciding who's right and who's wrong," Cornish said. "I don't think there's ever been a better system of justice."