New Mexico Supreme Court upholds Farmington sex crime conviction

The New Mexico Supreme Court left standing the sex crime conviction of Farmington resident Joshua Shane Freeman, ruling that a San Juan County trial judge’s off-the-record communications with jurors outside Freeman’s presence were improper but harmless.

In a unanimous opinion written by Justice C. Shannon Bacon, the court said Freeman had a constitutional right to be present when the district court responded to two jury notes during deliberations. But the justices concluded the mistake did not affect the outcome because the judge’s replies did nothing more than send jurors back to the instructions they already had.

The case, State v. Freeman, No. S-1-SC-40593, grew out of a prosecution in San Juan County District Court before Judge Daylene A. Marsh. Freeman was charged under NMSA 1978, Section 30-9-11(E)(1), with criminal sexual penetration in the second degree. The Court of Appeals opinion in the case said the allegation involved Freeman’s stepdaughter, who was 17 at the time.

After the jury retired to deliberate, it sent two questions to the court: whether the CSP charge was comparable to statutory rape, and for the legal definition of “physical force.” The district court responded, with defense counsel present but Freeman absent, by telling jurors to refer to the instructions they had already received.

The Supreme Court said that exchange did not qualify as a ministerial matter and did not fit the procedural rule for a question-of-law conference. Even so, the justices held the error was harmless because the responses did not steer the jury toward a new interpretation of the law or otherwise influence the verdict.

For San Juan County, the ruling is a reminder of how difficult it remains to overturn a serious conviction once a jury has spoken. The court recognized a breach in the process, yet still found the conviction reliable enough to stand. That distinction matters in Farmington courtrooms, where defense lawyers and prosecutors alike regularly watch how carefully judges handle jury contact, especially in sensitive sex crime cases.

Freeman was later sentenced on June 20, 2023, to five years in prison followed by 10 years of supervised probation. His family publicly maintained his innocence after the conviction, but the Supreme Court’s June 4, 2026 decision kept the judgment intact.