BACKGROUND: "Lawrence Times: July 2, 2024 Article headed "The truth finally came out. Attorney's allege Douglas County DA's office lied about investigation. (Link below): "Attorneys have alleged in a wrongful conviction case that the Douglas County district attorney and her legal counsel falsely asserted that a murder investigation was ongoing in order to delay proceedings and withhold documents. A jury in 2018 found Carrody Buchhorn guilty of reckless second-degree murder of a 9-month-old boy who had been in her care at a Eudora day care. The Kansas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in April 2021 largely because Buchhorn’s trial attorneys had failed to challenge coroner Dr. Erik Mitchell’s theory of how the boy died, which top pediatric neurologists called “absolutely false,” “made up” and “fantastical. DA Suzanne Valdez’s office continued to prosecute the case, however, until a judge dismissed it in December 2022 because prosecutors had failed to seek a new expert opinion in time. The DA’s office pledged to appeal the dismissal but announced in January 2023 that their new expert pathologist’s report found that the boy had died from a heart defect and other natural conditions. The DA’s office’s press release stated that they did not have sufficient evidence to continue prosecution. (Read more background on the case at the links below.) Buchhorn in February 2023 filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit. Altogether, Buchhorn spent more than 5 1/2 years in custody of the Douglas County jail, Topeka prison and on house arrest before her case was dismissed. The lawsuit seeks, as outlined by state statute, about $369,000 in total damages for Buchhorn’s time in custody; attorneys’ fees of $25,000; counseling; tuition assistance; state health care; a certificate of innocence; an order expunging and purging her conviction and any other relief to which she’s entitled. The civil case has dragged on with motions, discovery and legal arguments, including the state’s accidental disclosure of some portion of 50,000-plus pages of discovery that they did not intend to disclose. In a hearing on March 11, attorney Holly Dyer, representing the DA’s office and then-Deputy DA Joshua Seiden, told the judge that there was a need to reinvestigate the criminal case, and keep the case open “because Mr. (Bill) Skepnek filed this lawsuit.” “There has been developed additional information that has caused the district attorney to classify this case as an ongoing investigation, meaning that there is the potential that charges could be refiled,” Dyer said. Neither Dyer nor court documents elaborated on what “new evidence” had been developed in the case. Skepnek, who represented Buchhorn for her appeal and now for her civil case, and co-counsel Quentin Templeton wrote in a motion filed Monday that Valdez answered in her deposition on May 22 — over objections from her attorney, Gregory Goheen, and Assistant Kansas Attorney General Shon Quolseth — that there was no ongoing investigation. “Asked if the repeated representations to the Court of an active investigation were true, Ms. Valdez to her credit truthfully testified that they were false,” the motion states.The motion alleges that this was willful improper conduct and intentional lies made to the court in order to gain an advantage in the litigation. “They were offered to deceive the Court into making the rulings which could not, and knowingly were not, supported by the truth,” the motion states."
COMMENTARY: "Let’s hope that this is the last season of ‘As the Douglas County DA’s Office Turns,’ by Melissa Henneberger, on July 3, 2024. (Melinda Henneberger is The Star’s metro columnist and a member of its editorial board. She won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2022 and was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary in 2021, for editorial writing in 2020 and for commentary in 2019.
GIST: "Previously on “As the Douglas County DA’s Office Turns,” District Attorney Suzanne Valdez seemed to have only been pretending to have reopened a murder investigation into the 2016 death of 9-month-old Ollie Ortiz.
You know, to avoid having to answer questions in the civil suit alleging that former Eudora day care worker Carrody Buchhorn had been wrongfully convicted in that case.
Now, Valdez has admitted in a deposition that there is no active investigation of Buchhorn, who already served more than five years in jail, prison and on house arrest for a murder that didn’t happen, because Ollie died of natural causes.
At least, the DA recently said under oath that there’s no investigation, contradicting her previous statements that yes, there was.
Her legal team said that it was Buchhorn’s civil suit that had prompted the investigation, so was this whole ruse just an attempt to pressure Buchhorn into dropping her suit?
Buchhorn’s attorney, William Skepnek, thinks so, and has filed one of the most blistering motions I’ve ever read: “They have used the claim of an ‘active investigation,’ he said, to successfully persuade the Court to restrict Mrs. Buchhorn’s civil discovery rights in this case.
But this was all a lie. And they almost got away with it,” until, he says, Valdez slipped and told the truth in her deposition.
It would make sense that nobody is now, or has at any point since January of 2023 been looking into anything more than backside-covering on this case.
That’s when Valdez finally dropped the idea of retrying Buchhorn, after the DA’s own expert said that Ollie had died of a congenital heart defect.
But “sense” and this office have not often met.
A week ago, Valdez’s deputy Joshua Seiden left his job as The Lawrence Journal-World prepared to run a story, confirmed by Sheriff Jay Armbrister, about Seiden “seemingly impersonating a controversial public commenter.”
What? Honestly, it’s so crazy that I don’t know what more to say.
In case you’re wondering who might hire someone who’d pulled a stunt like that, well, we’ll see, but Seiden then interviewed for a deputy’s job in the Wyandotte County district attorney’s office.
Unfortunately, this is not some haha story about the wacky doings of a DA who has, if nothing else, united the courthouse.
(At a three-day state disciplinary hearing of complaints about Valdez last December, Judge Stacey Donovan testified that judges generally try to avoid meeting alone with Valdez, and prefer communicating in writing, for fear that whatever they say will otherwise be misrepresented later.
They never know, Donovan said, what is going to “set off something else.”
This sounds like the kind of scary household where every day, the kids wake up whispering about what Mom or Dad’s mood is that day so they can plan how to tiptoe around most safely.)
None of this is funny: Just in this one case, a little boy died, a family was left grieving and the wrongly accused woman’s life was changed forever.
Yet to the DA and the AG’s office, which is also defending this wrongful conviction, this once again seems to be more about winning than about justice or what actually happened.
I have been writing about this case since 2021, have watched the video of the shameful original autopsy, in which the completely discredited medical examiner essentially asked who his results should incriminate, and have also read the depositions and court filings in the criminal and subsequent civil case.
If you did, too, you’d be heartsick over the many ways that taxpayer money is being spent defending mistakes and egos.
Over and over, Josh Seiden in his recent deposition in the civil case refused to answer what exactly the state had on Buchhorn that pointed to her guilt.
“Everything,” he kept saying. “Yeah, but ‘everything’ is nothing,” Skepnek said. “What pointed to guilt? That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
Seiden said he’d heard nothing more specific from the original prosecutors, but “more along the lines of, you know, it — she’s guilty; the whole file shows that.”
Pressed further, Seiden said that the autopsy was proof because “it corroborates her being the adult that had access to the child at that time and found the child.”
He also cited a photo of the dead child.
“How does that support that conclusion?” Skepnek asked him.
“I mean, it’s the child as he lay there,” Seiden answered. “That’s — I mean, the photo speaks for itself.” If only. There’s new evidence in the case, the state says lately. When no, there’s a new expert, which legally speaking is not the same thing.
‘BIGGER PROBLEM OF HONESTY IN THE COURTROOM’
The bottom line should be that Carrody Buchhorn did not kill this child.
And if anyone really thought otherwise, then she’d already have been retried.
That’s never going to happen, because the state does not have a case.
Yet on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Valdez emailed me that yes, the murder investigation actually is still ongoing.
So, was the DA confused in her recent deposition when she said that it was not?
Again, this would all be tedious and silly if it didn’t involve both a death and a life.
“This is about the bigger problem of honesty in the courtroom,” Skepnek told me. “Why would the government do this?”
He has asked that all of those involved be harshly sanctioned by the court.
And though he’s right, I’m sorry to say that the system mostly marches on, protecting itself more reliably than it protects any of the rest of us.
Thankfully, though, it will soon be up to Douglas County voters to decide whether this particular surreality show is renewed for another season.
And after four years of high drama and poor results, that’s unlikely.
Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/melinda-henneberger/article289719834.html#storylink=cpy
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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