DA adds experience to his roster

Copyright © 2009
By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — The McKinley County District Attorney’s Office in recent days has been getting a noticeable Farmington flavor.

This is because of a decision by District Attorney Karl Gillson to add two new staff members, both of whom have worked at the DA’s office in Farmington.

In fact, one of them, Lyndy Bennett, who is now the senior trial attorney in the office, was the DA in Farmington until Dec. 30. The other new staff hire is Dan Cleavinger, who was a former assistant DA in Farmington specializing in domestic violence, DWI and juvenile cases. He will be handling domestic violence cases here as well.

Gillson said this brings his staff up to 10 attorneys, all of whom are needed to handle the 3,000 or so cases that come before his office each year. He also pointed out that it was half the number of attorneys that the Farmington DA has.

The DA’s workload is expected to get a lot heavier now that a new law took effect on Jan. 1 which will require the DA to get involved in more minor cases in the magistrate’s office.

Up until Jan. 1, Gillson said, someone who had a dispute with his neighbor would have to file the case himself in magistrate court and handle the legal representation himself but the new law requires the DA’s office to step in and provide representation.

There’s going to be a problem, however, if both sides come to the DA’s office for representation. Since one DA can’t battle another DA in court, the question will come up as to whom the DA will represent, and Gillson said it may come down to the question of which party the DA’s office decides is “more innocent.”

Bennett won’t have to worry about this since he will be assigned to handle major felonies, which he said is fine with him because one thing he didn’t like about being DA in Farmington was that he spent most of his time dealing with administrative and personnel issues.

He ran for re-election and lost in the primary by 300 votes out of 6,000 cast and knew that when the new DA — Rick Tedrow — took over that his time at the Farmington office was over. He said he had several other offers but decided to take the job down here — partly because he knew and respected Gillson and partly because he wanted to stay close to his 84-year-old mother who still lives in Farmington.

Although he never lived in Gallup — he grew up in Farmington and attended Shiprock High for a year as well — there is a Gallup connection. His father worked for 20 years for the BIA’s Johnson O’Malley Program in Gallup and his father’s office was just a block from where Bennett’s office is now located.

All of his background has been in law enforcement, having served as a police officer in New Mexico and California for 14 years before coming back to Farmington at his wife’s request to work in the DA’s office.

For now, he said, his plans on to enjoy doing trial work. “Prosecution is in my blood,” he said.

In contrast to Bennett, Cleavinger has spent most of his career as a civil law attorney, handling things like wills, estates and divorces.

Born in Albuquerque, he decided to join the Peace Corps after graduating from St. John’s College in Santa Fe. He was assigned to Peru and spent not quite two years there.

His most vivid memory of that period was the May 30, 1970, earthquake which devastated many of the villages in the country, killing more than 60,000 people, which included four Peace Corps volunteers. In fact, the only thing that may have saved him and his then wife, he said, was the fact that earthquake occurred on Sunday afternoon. If it happened at night, he faced serious injury or death because a chunk of his wall collapsed and destroyed the foot of his bed.

After returning to the United States, he went to law school, graduating from the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1974. After a couple of years of private practice and working for the U.S. Department of the Interior, he went back to school and got a master’s degree in taxation from Boston University with plans to stay on the East Coast and possibly work for the IRS.

That didn’t happen. Instead he moved back to Santa Fe, where for the next 23 years or so, he worked in Española and Tierra Amarilla as a private attorney. In 2003, he became a public defender — the first time he got any criminal experience — for six months and then went to work for the Farmington DA’s office.

In 2007, a new magistrate judge position was created in Aztec and he was appointed to the position but he ran and lost in 2008, stepping down on Dec. 31.

When he heard that a position for an assistant district attorney was open in Gallup, he said he joined at the chance because he though Gillson would be a good boss and because he had worked under Bennett in Farmington.