The front door of the New Mexico Supreme Court in Santa Fe in Feb. 2022. (Photo by Austin Fisher / Source NM)

The New Mexico Supreme Court announced Thursday its verdicts on three high-profile homicide cases, including an alleged murder-for-hire plot that the court overturned.

Victims in the other two cases were a 2-year-old child and an 86-year-old woman. The court upheld convictions of the defendants charged with murdering them.

Read a summary below of each of the cases, according to news releases from the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts:

Cardenas was sentenced to life in prison, plus 24 additional years, for the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Mario Cabral. Cabral and his girlfriend, Vanessa Mora, were found shot to death in their Doña Ana County home in 2018.

A jury found Cardenas guilty of ordering a hit on Cabral and Rodriguez and helping to kill both, according to the Las Cruces Sun News. Cabral and Cardenas shared a child and were involved in a custody battle at the time, the newspaper reported.

But Cardenas argued in an appeal that the prosecution's questioning about that child's drug test, which was positive for methamphetamine, unfairly prejudiced the jury against her. The court, in a split decision, agreed that the trial court made a mistake in allowing prosecutors to go down that line of questioning.

"The evidence of defendant's guilt, although substantial, was circumstantial," Justice Michael E. Vigil wrote in the court's majority opinion. "The error affected an important issue in the case -- credibility."

The court determined that nothing in Cardenas' testimony up to that point should have opened the door for that line of questioning, especially given rules that prohibit introduction of testimony about a defendant's character used as proof of guilt.

In a dissent, Chief Justice David K. Thomson wrote that the drug test was admissible as "proper rebuttal evidence," and that the trial court did not err in allowing that line of questioning.

The court upheld a lower court's ruling against a Lincoln County man convicted in the death of his 2-year-old son in 2018.

Ricardo Soto was taking care of his son Jeremiah Nevarez during a visit away from the custody of the boy's mother. Nevarez was rushed to a hospital after suffering a seizure, ultimately dying in an El Paso Hospital.

Prosecutors' medical experts testified that the boy's skull was fractured in two places, causing fatal brain swelling. Soto's lawyers said the fractures could have resulted from an earlier playground injury.

The appeal centered on the court's use of statistical predictions about the cause of the boy's injuries. The court, in ruling to uphold the conviction, provided guidance about medical testimony in cases where people are charged with intentional child abuse.

"We therefore caution trial courts to avoid unduly restricting the testimony of medical experts, especially by precluding testimony explaining the process by which they used differential diagnosis to rule in or rule out diagnoses," Justice Briana Zamora wrote in the court's unanimous opinion. "It will be for the opposing party to attack the weight and sufficiency of the evidence through cross-examination and the introduction of competing expert evidence, if available."

The court also unanimously upheld the conviction of an Albuquerque man sentenced to life in prison plus 45 additional years for killing his 86-year-old aunt and stealing almost $100,000 from her.

Craig Talbert Smith appealed the conviction on grounds that a judge should have ordered a mistrial when a juror became ill and that his lawyer provided ineffective legal assistance.

Smith was convicted of suffocating his aunt Josephine Ortega with plastic bags in 2017.

The trial occurred in 2022 when protocols were in place to protect jurors and others from contracting COVID-19. A day after deliberations started, a juror reported having a fever. A judge then suspended deliberations for a week. When they resumed, two jurors said they'd been exposed to family members who tested positive for COVID-19.

It took jurors an hour to find Smith guilty when deliberations finally resumed.