Darlene Collins, et al. v. Charles W. Daniels, et al.

Well before New Mexico’s history as a territory and a state, wherein money bail or bail by sufficient sureties was the primary and for a long period the exclusive means of preserving the person’s (accused of a crime but not yet convicted) innocence. Even before the Framing and adoption of the Eighth Amendment, bail was recognized as the tool to protect the idea that “liberty is the norm and detention prior to trial is the carefully limited exception” United States v. Salerno 48 U.S. 739, 755 (1987). For decades in New Mexico, if not since before statehood, monetary bail was the manner in which the accused’s “right to freedom before conviction” by release both prior to arraignment and prior to trial was preserved. Stack v. Boyle, 342 U.S. 1, 4 (1951). In 2016 the citizens of New Mexico, acting first through their representative citizen legislature, and then at the ballot box, reaffirmed the criminal justice system’s use of monetary bail to protect the presumption of innocence and an accused’s pretrial liberties. Unfortunately, unsatisfied with the will of New Mexico’s citizens, in 2017, the New Mexico Supreme Court adopted bail reform policy, passed by the state of New Jersey through her legislature, by rulemaking. Petitioners sought to address the impacts to New Mexicans’ constitutional rights by litigation in the Federal Court system, to which the Respondents reacted to drive any criticism of them forever from the courts by seeking and achieving sanctions against one of the counsel that would dare challenge their immunities or enter the political arena they had already occupied. 1. Was the application of legislative immunity to actions of the New Mexico Courts to