Henry Valdez
It was on a bone-chilling cold day during the Christmas/New Year’s school break in 1971 that Henry Valdez, at the age of 14, made the career decision that was to change his life. He was not going to be a plumber.
He had been expected to join his family’s plumbing business, which was founded by his great-grandfather in the 1930s in Santa Fe, New Mexico. On this bitter December day, with the temperature ranging between sub-zero and single digits, Henry was helping his father on service calls, thawing frozen pipes.
“When people think of Santa Fe,” he says, “they usually think of desert. But the area also is mountainous, and you can run into some pretty extreme weather at 7,000 feet.
“It was frigid to begin with as we started on our jobs,” he recalls. “When you thaw pipes, they usually expand and break. Then you get wet and colder. I made an instant decision that day. I was going to go to college and law school.”
He has never regretted that decision.
Today, Henry Valdez, 45, is district attorney of the 1st Judicial District of New Mexico and an NDAA state director. He supervises a staff of 70, including 27 attorneys, in a sprawling, diverse jurisdiction that includes three counties: Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos. The population of approximately 200,000 is spread over more than 7,000 square miles—almost as large as the states of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island combined—with a terrain that ranges from valleys and desert to the 12,000-13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range.
Each of the jurisdiction’s counties is distinctive. Santa Fe County, site of the nation’s oldest state capital city (settled in 1610), is a famed tourist center, known for its artists. Los Alamos County, in the mountainous country, is defense-oriented and birthplace of the world’s first atomic bomb. Rio Arriba County is largely a rural, agricultural and ranching area.
Like most prosecutors, Henry Valdez considers drugs his major problem. But unlike many jurisdictions, the drug of choice in New Mexico’s 1st Judicial District is not methamphetamine, but heroin. In fact, Rio Arriba County leads the nation in heroin overdose deaths.
“It’s a terrible problem,” he says, “and we have all the other problems associated with heroin, including distribution, violence and property crimes.” Valdez has special units working on the heroin situation, and, in addition, is working with the community to establish prevention programs. One of the causes of the problems in Rio Arriba County is that the area has been economically depressed for years. Valdez is working with other community leaders to provide job training for young people, “so hopefully,” he says, “by learning some skills, they can find jobs.”
Valdez believes the biggest challenge facing prosecutors today is keeping up with ever-increasing caseloads and the public’s increasing expectations, without a corresponding increase in resources.
“I think everybody is holding prosecutors more accountable and demanding more from them,” he says. “When I first started working in this office, it consisted of lawyers and secretaries, and maybe an investigator or two. But when you look at prosecutors’ offices now, you find directors of diversion programs, victim advocates, community prosecutors and many more people doing things that weren’t contemplated 20 years ago.”
Henry Valdez’s most memorable case? “Clearly it was the State v. Ricky Abeyta. It was, at the time, the biggest mass murder case in New Mexico’s history.” Abeyta was charged with killing seven people, including two police officers and a six-month-old baby, and attempting to kill an eighth person.
“It was a difficult and challenging case,” Valdez says, “not only from the evidentiary standpoint, but also from the logistical and emotional standpoint.” But Valdez won a conviction after a three-month trial and Abeyta was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 46 years. Since Abeyta will have to serve 30 years of each life sentence, plus 46 years, before becoming eligible for parole, Valdez likes to point out that “Obviously he’ll never get out.”
After making his decision to become a lawyer instead of a plumber, Valdez attended New Mexico State University, where he received his B.A. degree, and the University of New Mexico School of Law, where he received his law degree in 1982.
“Becoming a prosecutor was the furthest thing in my mind when I went to law school,” Valdez says. After completing his first year he received a summer internship in the Santa Fe DA’s office that he now heads. He was assigned to work with prosecutors on cases resulting from a major prison riot in which 33 inmates were killed.
“I saw that the prosecutors were hard-working, dedicated individuals and came to admire them more than some of the lawyers I had worked with previously. That’s when I decided that I wanted to be a prosecutor.”
After he received his law degree, Valdez went to work in the Santa Fe DA’s office as an assistant DA. Six years later he was named chief deputy DA. In 1993 he ran for DA, was elected and has been re-elected ever since.
In reflecting on why he chose to become and remain a prosecutor, Henry Valdez says, “It boils down to the fact that as a prosecutor you get to do what you think is right—not occasionally or even frequently, but each and every time. There’s a great deal of satisfaction derived from the fact that you’re helping your community and you’re making the community in which you live and raise your children a safer place.”
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