Bernalillo County DA rolls out judge pretrial detention dashboard
The Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office has launched an online dashboard tracking how often individual judges grant pretrial detention motions. District Attorney Sam Bregman said the tool is meant to give the public access to data his office already shares with the legislature and executive branch.
“Pre-trial detention motions are filed on keeping people in who we believe are going to be dangerous to the community,” Bregman said.
Within hours of an arrest, Bregman said, his office decides whether to file a pretrial detention motion asking a judge to hold a suspect until trial. If a judge grants the motion, the suspect stays in custody until trial.
“I want the people to know they have a right to know what goes on in the courtroom. So that’s why I’m posting these statistics, the same statistics that we give the legislature and the executive branch; we’re posting them on our website so the whole community can see them,” Bregman said.
The dashboard shows how often judges sided with the prosecution in 2026, with some judges agreeing to hold suspects around 50% of the time. It also shows that from 2023 to 2026, judges granted pretrial detention 55% of the time.
The New Mexico Law Offices of the Public Defender said the data can mislead the public. “People need to understand that these are people who have not been convicted of a crime. They’ve only been charged. And if they are going to be punished, that happens after the conviction, after some determination has been made,” said Chief Public Defender Bennet Baur.
The NMLOPD said about 7% of people who are released are accused of committing a crime again, and 4% are accused of a violent crime, according to Bregman’s office.
In a statement, Karl Reifsteck, director of the Administrative Office of the Courts, said the data show judges applying the legal standard in each case.
“The data released by District Attorney Bregman show judges doing what the law requires: weighing the evidence and applying the legal standard in each case before the State may jail a person who has not been convicted of a crime,” Reifsteck said.
Reifsteck said grant-and-deny totals alone do not describe the work of the justice system.
“The law does not establish a quota or benchmark for how many detention motions should be granted or denied. Each case has a different set of facts and each defendant is different. A judge’s responsibility is to fairly and impartially apply the law and make decisions based on the evidence presented to them, not on whether it will be publicly popular to hold someone in jail to await trial,” he said.
Reifsteck added that the dashboard does not include information about the final outcome of the prosecutions of people the state sought to detain pretrial, or how many people counted under “reoffending charges” were found guilty or had cases dismissed.
