SANTA FE – The state Supreme Court today reinstated the child abuse conviction of a religious group's co-leader for medically neglecting a 12-year-old boy who died at a compound in rural Cibola County.

In a unanimous opinion, the Court reversed a district court's decision that granted a habeas corpus petition by Deborah Green, who led the Aggressive Christian Missionary Training Corps along with her husband.  The district court set aside Green's plea agreement and dismissed the child abuse charge against her.

The justices concluded there was not "substantial evidence" for the district court's determination that Green was actually innocent of the child abuse charge.

Green pleaded no contest in 2018 to a charge of reckless child abuse resulting in great bodily harm and two counts of evidence tampering. She was sentenced to 18 years in prison. She later filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus, claiming that she was innocent of the child abuse charge because she was not responsible for what happened to the boy who had an untreated illness.

The district court held an evidentiary hearing and granted the petition, ordering her release in 2022. The district court determined that Green had caused the boy's condition to worsen by failing to seek medical care for him but the evidence did not support the first-degree felony charge of child abuse.

A habeas corpus petition allows inmates to challenge the legality of their imprisonment after courts have resolved their direct appeals.

In today's opinion, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that protections in the New Mexico Constitution allow defendants convicted by a plea agreement – not just those convicted by a jury trial – to later assert a claim of innocence and obtain relief through a habeas proceeding.

 "In all, the principal policy objective underlying a freestanding claim of actual innocence – to honor the constitutional imperative 'prohibit[ing] the imprisonment of one who is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted' in order to further 'the central purpose of [our] system of justice[,] … to convict the guilty and free the innocent' – applies with equal force to convictions obtained through plea agreements as it does to convictions after trial," the Court wrote in an opinion by Justice C. Shannon Bacon.

In rejecting Green's habeas claim of innocence, the Court explained that her petition "relies exclusively on a misguided legal argument" on whether testimony by medical experts met the requirement for proving her conduct caused great bodily injury to the boy. The opinion refers to the boy by his initials, E.M.

The boy lived at the group's compound with his mother and four sisters. He and other compound residents became ill with the flu but his condition worsened. He eventually became partially paralyzed, went blind in one eye, experienced seizures and could not speak. He died in 2014. No professional medical treatment was sought for the boy.

Green was considered by members of the Corps to be an "Oracle of God," and she controlled much of the lives of people living at the compound, including their finances and access to medical care.

The Court found that Green's habeas petition failed to provide "new affirmative evidence of innocence" proving she did not commit the crime of child abuse.

"And substantively, the district court's express finding that Defendant's 'fail[ure] to seek medical attention for [E.M.] in a timely manner … caused[d] the child's condition to worsen' – and, by logical extension, resulted in the great bodily injuries that E.M. undisputedly endured – was incompatible with a finding of actual innocence," the Court wrote. "Far from exonerative in nature, the district court's unchallenged causation finding directly implicated Defendant in the commission of the crime."

Green signed the plea agreement on the same day she was separately sentenced to 72 years in prison for jury trial convictions of kidnapping, sexual abuse and other crimes involving a young girl at the compound. The convictions were set aside in 2020 and a new trial was ordered because prosecutors had failed to disclose certain evidence to the defense. The state later dismissed the charges because of the unavailability of key witnesses.

In a specially concurring opinion, Chief Justice David K. Thomson agreed with the "reasoning and conclusion" in Green's habeas case but outlined his concerns about a previous Court decision on the legal standard to prove medical neglect caused a person's death or injury.