How to read a New Mexico court docket

District, magistrate, metropolitan and municipal courts do different jobs. Here is which is which, and what a hearing on the calendar actually means.

By GotBusted News · August 14, 2026

<p>The court calendar is the other half of the public record, and it is the half most people have never looked at. It is also the one where the vocabulary trips everybody.</p> <h2>The four kinds of court</h2> <p><strong>District courts</strong> are New Mexico's trial courts of general jurisdiction. Thirteen judicial districts cover all 33 counties. Felonies are tried here, as are appeals from the lower courts.</p> <p><strong>Magistrate courts</strong> handle misdemeanors, traffic matters, and the early stages of felony cases — the first appearance and the preliminary hearing — before a felony moves up to district court. Most counties have one.</p> <p><strong>Metropolitan court</strong> exists only in Bernalillo County and does the work that magistrate courts do elsewhere, plus a good deal more.</p> <p><strong>Municipal courts</strong> handle violations of city ordinances. They are city courts, not state courts, and they are not part of the statewide calendar.</p> <h2>What a docket entry is</h2> <p>A docket entry says a case is scheduled to be in front of a judge at a time. That is all it establishes. It is not a finding, not a plea, and frequently not even a contested matter — a large share of any criminal calendar is scheduling, status conferences, and administrative business.</p> <h2>Why someone can be on a criminal calendar without ever being arrested</h2> <p>This is the most common misreading. A criminal case can begin with a summons in the mail, a citation written at the roadside and released, or a grand jury indictment. None of those involve a jail. A person can appear on a docket having never been booked, and a booking record will never exist for them.</p> <p>That is why we keep bookings and dockets as two separate databases and two separate counts. Merging them would inflate an arrest number with people who were never arrested.</p> <h2>Reading the case number</h2> <p>New Mexico case numbers encode the court and the year. The letter prefix identifies the court type — D for district, M for magistrate, T for metropolitan traffic, and so on — followed by a location code, the year, and a sequence number. The location code is the part worth knowing if you are trying to work out which courthouse a case sits in.</p> <h2>What is not in the public calendar</h2> <p>Sealed cases, most juvenile proceedings, and matters a judge has restricted do not appear. Nor does anything filed in tribal or federal court, which are separate systems entirely.</p> <h2>The court is always the authority</h2> <p>We read the public calendar and republish it. Calendars change, hearings get vacated and reset, and cases resolve between the moment we read the docket and the moment you do. For anything that matters, the court's own record is the one to rely on.</p>