BY DAVID GRANT LONG

A 40-year-old Cortez man accused of selling speed to a police informant was sentenced to 90 days in jail as part of a three-year probation during a hearing in district court Thursday after he pleaded guilty to a charge of possessing a controlled substance.

Jose Luis Moncado was originally charged with three counts of distributing small amounts of methamphetamine during an undercover operation conducted by the Cortez police in the fall of 1998.

Those more serious felony charges were dismissed under a plea bargain made with the district attorney’s office in December that also included a guarantee the DA wouldn’t oppose probation for the defendant.

Moncado was alleged to have sold quarter-grams of methamphetamine, or $25 "papers," to police informant Jesse Lynn Massey during transactions conducted at the defendant’s residence in Elmwood Trailer Park.

Because the trailer park is just across the street from Montezuma-Cortez High School, Moncado was additionally charged with a "sentence enhancer" that provides for stiffer penalties for drug sales that take place within 1000 feet of a public school, but this charge was dismissed as well.

Massey later picked out Moncado from a photo line-up, but the defense had challenged the validity of this process, arguing it was "unnecessarily suggestive" because the six photos used included only two of Hispanic men, and that the other was of another suspected drug dealer also known to the informant.

This plea bargain was far different than one prosecutors claimed the defendant had accepted last spring, according to court documents, under which he allegedly agreed to a 15-year prison sentence.

Public defender Suzanne Carlson emphatically denied this agreement have ever been made, however.

"The statement made by the DA upon which the court relied regarding a plea agreement is incorrect," Carlson said in a motion submitted in July in which she pointed out that Moncado had no previous criminal history other than traffic offenses.

In requesting the jail time, District Attorney Mike Green argued that Moncado wasn’t a "great candidate" for probation because he’d failed to comply with the conditions of an alcohol-related driving offense four years ago and hadn’t accurately portrayed his use of drugs.

"Ninety days will make him real serious about the consequences" of not complying with the terms of the probationary period, Green said.

Public defender Frank Viehmann conceded during the hearing that a jail sentence could be imposed as a condition of the new agreement but asked Judge Sharon Hansen not to do so. He said incarceration would make it more likely that Moncado, a Mexican national who lives and works in the United States under a 20-year green card and has four children, could be deported by the U.S. Immigration Service.