Courting Trouble
In this week's episode of Reported, Katherine Lewin takes you into Santa Fe's municipal court system and the judge, running uncontested and facing a whistleblower lawsuit and some serious allegations.
Municipal courts have also come under intense criticism in recent years, most notably in Ferguson, Missouri, where the city court threw gasoline on already existing racial tensions by criminalizing and intentionally gouging millions of dollars out of black and minority residents there.
But that is something Santa Fe's muni court refuses to track because Vigil says it's not possible for the court to be prejudiced—something a national expert called "naive at best."