Lt. Gov. Diane Denish (Photo by Heath Haussamen

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Diane Denish attacked her Republican opponent earlier this year for plea bargaining cases involving sex crimes as the district attorney in Las Cruces. At the time, a Denish spokesman said avoiding the sex offender registry should not be used “as a plea bargain carrot.”

Denish isn’t using the same harsh rhetoric in the case of a plea bargain entered into last week by a Democratic district attorney who allowed a defendant to avoid the sex offender registry. In fact, Denish isn’t commenting on the new case at all.

Denish attacked the GOP’s Susana Martinez in June in a TV ad for plea bargaining two cases involving sex crimes against children. Plea bargains in both cases allowed the defendants to avoid the sex offender registry.

I asked the Denish campaign at the time to explain how it knew the plea bargains weren’t necessary because of possible factors such as victims who were unwilling to testify. Denish spokesman Chris Cervini responded by saying that Denish “isn’t a lawyer, but she’s a mother and a grandmother, and she knows it’s wrong to cut deals with sexual predators that allow them to stay off the public sex offender registry. In these cases, these offenders worked at local schools. Every parent in the area should be able to look them up and keep their children away – that’s why we have the public sex offender registry. It’s not there for Martinez to use as a plea bargain carrot.”

Which, at the very least, implied that Denish thinks those who commit sex crimes against children should never get plea bargains that allow them to avoid having to register as sex offenders – even if victims don’t want or are unwilling to testify.

Cervini also spoke specifically about one of the two cases Martinez’s office plea-bargained, saying the defendant faced 41 felony counts that would have required him to register as a sex offender, and Martinez only needed a conviction on one to require registration.

“But instead of getting the job done, she cut a deal that gave this sex offender exactly what he wanted – a pass to stay off the sex offender registry,” he said. “That’s plain wrong and a major failure on her part. These are exactly the types of offenders you count on your DA to get – particularly if that DA has made her entire candidacy for governor about her record of locking up bad guys.”

The father of the victim in the other case later came to Martinez’s defense, saying that he did not want his daughter to testify in the case and the plea agreement was in his daughter’s best interest.

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Kristina Bibb

With that as the backdrop, Kristina Bibb pleaded no contest last week to a felony count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after being charged, as a former staffer at a private Christian school in Santa Fe, of having sex with a 17-year-old student at the school on five occasions in 2009.

The plea bargain allows Bibb to avoid having to register as a sex offender and comes with a conditional discharge – meaning if she completes five years of unsupervised probation, it won’t even show up as a conviction on her record after that.

That’s an even more lenient deal than Martinez allowed in either of the cases for which Denish attacked her.

The Albuquerque Journal quoted the district attorney in Santa Fe – Angela “Spence” Pacheco, a Democrat – as saying the teen and his parents didn’t want to see Bibb go to jail. That, Pacheco said, was the “most important factor” in allowing the plea bargain.

I asked the Denish campaign if the Democratic gubernatorial candidate thought the Bibb plea bargain was inappropriate. Here’s the response from spokesman Chris Cervini:

“Generally speaking, sex offenders should appear on the registry. When we ran ads about the registry and Martinez’s cutting plea deals, we did so after a thorough review of the cases and consulting attorneys and retired judges. We have not reviewed the details of this particular case, nor have we asked legal experts to help us review the case as we have done with other cases, so we cannot comment on this case.”

Interestingly, Martinez also refused to comment on the Bibb case. Here’s her statement:

“As a prosecutor, I have specialized in child abuse cases. My first priority has always been to seek justice for the victim. No one should ever be above the law by birth or by status. No one. I am simply a bystander in the case of Kristina Bibb. It is a sad case, especially for the young man, and my thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.

“As a litigator, I am obligated to make decisions based on thorough and careful examination of all the facts in each case as well as what is in the best interests of the victim, and being that I have not been privy to all of the information related to this matter, it would not be appropriate for me to weigh in concerning how it was handled.”