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Copyright © 2018 Albuquerque Journal

When the District Attorney’s Office earlier this month asked for a 22-year-old man facing auto-theft charges to be held in jail until trial, a judge denied the motion, determining he was not a danger to the community.

But a little over a week later, police say Charles Taylor kicked in a woman’s door in broad daylight before beating her, tying her up and raping her at a southeast Albuquerque apartment complex.

Taylor’s defense attorney says the judge made the right decision to release him, while the 2nd Judicial District Attorney Raúl Torrez called the case another example of a “fundamental disagreement” about who qualifies as “dangerous” and should be held until trial.

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When Taylor stood before state District Judge Charles Brown on April 10, he was facing charges of receiving and transferring a motor vehicle and, on the public safety assessment, was recommended for release to pretrial services with maximum supervision meaning drug and alcohol testing by request and avoiding all contact with witnesses or offenders. Brown also authorized the use of GPS tracking but it was not utilized by pre-trial services.

District Court spokesman Sidney Hill said Taylor’s attorney argued against preventative detention because prosecutor Richard Reed had not presented evidence pointing to Taylor being dangerous.

“When asked by the judge if he wanted to respond to that argument, the (prosecutor) said he had no further arguments to make,” Hill said in a statement emailed to the Journal in response to questions about the case.

According to court documents, Taylor had previously been charged with receiving stolen vehicles. In that criminal complaint, police say he broke into a home on Jan. 31, threatened the homeowner with a knife and then stole the victim’s truck.

But none of that showed up on the court’s assessment tool because the case had been dismissed in Metropolitan Court and had yet to be filed in District Court.

The public safety assessment tool provides background information to help judges make a decision on whether a suspect should be released while awaiting trial.

Regardless of the assessment tool, a judge has discretion on whether to allow pre-trial detention.

Hill said the DA’s Office did not “raise the issue” of the earlier, more serious case at the April 10 preventative detention hearing and did not indict Taylor on any charges in that case until April 18, nearly three months after the incident and over a week after the detention hearing.

In that indictment, he is charged with aggravated burglary, bribery of a witness, false imprisonment and receiving or transferring stolen motor vehicles.

A spokesman for the DA’s Office, when asked why Reed did not make the judge aware of that case, said the prosecutor requested the judge take judicial notice on Taylor’s previous cases, which would have included the criminal complaint involving the home invasion.

Another piece of Taylor’s history that did not show up on the assessment tool was the fact that Taylor had been placed in pretrial services multiple times since his Jan. 31 arrest. In each instance, he failed to meet the conditions, was rearrested, only to be released again.

Maxwell Pines, Taylor’s defense attorney, said he agreed with Brown’s decision.

By his recollection, Pines said the state, which only presented a criminal complaint on the April 4 auto theft in support of its request for pre-trial detention, did not produce “clear and convincing” evidence that Taylor’s release would put the community in danger.

“In this case, they didn’t,” Pines said. “Judge Brown was right to hold the state to that level of proof.”

But 10 days after being released, Taylor was back in jail, this time accused of raping a 59-year-old woman who suffers from multiple sclerosis in an attack that spanned two hours.

Police say fingerprints left on a Gatorade bottle inside the woman’s home led detectives to Taylor, whom they arrested and charged with criminal sexual penetration, kidnapping, aggravated battery with great bodily harm, aggravated burglary and robbery.

Torrez’s office has once again requested preventative detention for Taylor with the hearing set for this morning.

Torrez said, unfortunately, his office has seen a lot of “push back” from the District Court in cases such as this one.

Last year, Torrez said his office sought preventative detention in 16 percent of cases and were denied about half the time. Of those released, he said 33 percent picked up a new charge.

“When you have one-third of the people not detained committing new crimes, something is wrong,” he said. “Something isn’t working.”

So far in 2018, Torrez said they have bumped the number of preventative detention motions to over 26 percent of cases, with no intention of stopping.

“We’re not going to back down – the consequences of us failing to do otherwise are just too serious for the community,” he said. “Our hope is we’ll start winning more of these cases.”