DA Candidates Address Demo Party

I had a chance to hear two of the DA candidates at the El Paso County Democratic Party meeting the night before last and there is a major difference between the two.

Eddie Holguin's candidate is Karen Dykes. Holguin said he was staying out of the DA race, but like I said, you can't believe anything that comes out of Eddie Holguin's mouth these days.

But hey, don't take my word for it. There is always a tell when someone is Eddie's candidate. He usually will roll out his slate of candidates to show up and take pictures with the new candidate. His favorite to roll out is Oscar Leeser.

But you can also tell she's his candidate by the fact that he's actually hiding in the back of the room in this picture.

I don't know Ms. Dykes at all. I've never done any vetting on her at all. So I'm basing this solely on the one time I've heard her speak. She's very charismatic and engaging.

But she sounds like she is confusing the DA's office with the Public Defender's office. She spoke a lot about "righting wrongs" and the wrongfully accused etc...

I don't know anything about how good of a lawyer she may or may not be. My main take away from her speech was that she sounded more like a defense attorney.

But when we are hiring a DA, we are hiring some who is going to (hopefully) aggressively prosecute crime - which is how we keep our community safe. Pretty much all the candidates for DA I have heard are for some kind of sensible policy on marijuana reform.

As Assistant District Attorney James Montoya said, (also a DA candidate that spoke at the meeting) and I'm paraphrasing, the DA's office should be focused on higher-level crimes and not get bogged-down with minor possession of the sticky-icky.

The reason the fact that Dykes sounded like a defense attorney stood out in my head was because she started off by talking about how she was endorsed by the sheriff's union and Commissioner Carl Robinson - another one of Eddie's clients.

I thought it was interesting for someone endorsed by the SO's union to be talking about the wrongfully accused etc. I don't know that it was overtly anti-cop, but it certainly isn't something law enforcement are regularly supportive of.

Someone asked her what she does currently and she explained that she was the lawyer for CLEAT - which makes it even stranger to me that she was talking about the wrongfully accused and sounding like a defense lawyer. When she said that she was CLEAT's lawyer, the person said, "oh, no wonder you got the endorsement."

Everyone laughed at that remark.

Dykes said she had to work for the endorsement.

Lol, no she didn't.

Y'all remember Yvonne Rosales? What ever happened to her campaign? I'm starting to wonder if she dropped out or something. Haven't heard anything from that camp in a really long time.

I haven't heard anything from Roger Montoya, so I assume he hasn't shot any trees lately. Which I guess is an improvement? Yeah lets call it an improvement. I'm a look-on-the-bright-side kinda vato.

Seriously though, this race is for the head prosecutor for this community - something painfully underscored after the August 3rd shooting. And other than James Montoya, all the other candidates are defense lawyers. Collectively they have almost no experience in prosecuting crimes, much less major ones.

You're hiring the next DA. Experience matters! You'd never vote for a sheriff with almost no experience. You wouldn't even let someone with no experience work on your car or give you a filling in a tooth.