By Wheeler Cowperthwaite
Special to the SUN

An Española man will spend nearly four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to federal domestic violence charges.

Federal District Judge Matthew Garcia sentenced Isiah Gutierrez-Arquero, 30, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, on March 3 to 46 months in prison on charges of assault of an intimate partner by strangulation and assault resulting in serious bodily injury. Once out of prison, he will be on supervised release for three years.

Gutierrez-Arquero pleaded guilty to the two charges on Aug. 8 and he has been held without bail since his arrest on Jan. 10.

As part of the plea deal, prosecutors agreed to dismiss a single count of assault resulting in substantial bodily injury, but the sentencing was up to Garcia. He faced a theoretical maximum sentence of 20 years, 10 years on each charge.

According to the plea deal, Gutierrez-Arquero wrote that on Sept. 21, 2023, he got into an argument with his girlfriend at his home within the exterior boundaries of the pueblo.

“During this fight, I punched Doe with my fists and kicked her,” he wrote in the plea deal. “I kicked Doe when she was on the ground. I threw her against the walls of my bedroom, which resulted in a hole in the wall. I sat on Doe’s chest and strangled Doe with both of my hands.”

He wrote that he agreed that his attack resulted in “serious bodily injury” including bruises, cuts and swelling.

According to the deal, prosecutors agreed to “recommend a sentence at the low end of the guideline range” and that Gutierrez-Arquero agrees that he has accepted responsibility for his conduct.

His defense attorney, Hadley Brown, asked for a sentence of two years, according to the clerk’s minutes of the sentencing hearing, but what prosecutors argued for is not included.

According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of New Mexico, Garcia recommended that he complete a residential drug abuse program.

Brown filed two motions to extend the time she had to write a sentencing memorandum, outlining her request for that two-year sentence and why it should be granted, but it does not appear in the court docket. It is unclear if it was ever filed or if it was sealed against the court’s own rules.

While Gutierrez-Arquero spent more than a year in jail between his arrest and eventual sentencing, prosecutors waited a little less than a year to bring the initial charges, and five months after a grand jury indicted him to arrest him. A federal grand jury indicted him on Aug. 27, 2024, following the attack on Sept. 21, 2023.

Court documents don’t outline what evidence prosecutors posited would make him a threat to the community.

Unlike New Mexico, which has a right to pre-trial release in the constitution, the federal courts have no similar right to bail.

Gutierrez-Arquero only has one state criminal charge, for criminal damage to property in Albuquerque in 2020, for allegedly throwing his girlfriend’s phone at a wall during an argument, shattering the screen. That case was subsequently dismissed.