photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, left, Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden, and attorney Steven Angermayer are pictured Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2023, outside the hearing room at the Kansas Judicial Center in Topeka, where Valdez was attending her disciplinary hearing. No cameras were allowed inside the hearing room.

On day two of a disciplinary hearing for Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, she testified through tears that she was sorry and embarrassed over the case that brought her before the hearing panel.

Her deputy, earlier in the day, said he regretted a press release that the office sent out in 2021, but disagreed that the release accused Douglas County’s chief judge of being a liar.

The case against Valdez, whose testimony was cut short on Tuesday due to time constraints, largely stems from her interactions with Chief Judge James McCabria. She’s been accused of calling him a liar and a sexist after a dispute about resuming jury trials in 2021; implying that he was racist; sending him inappropriate texts saying he should be “ashamed” of himself; and yelling and cursing about him to the extent that multiple attorneys in her office resigned under the stress.

At the end of the day Tuesday in Topeka, Valdez testified that the investigation into the complaint had lasted almost the entirety of her term as district attorney, which began in 2021. She said she had attempted to set up several meetings to connect with McCabria and the other judges to apologize, but they had declined her invitations.

“I’ve lived with this shame for three years. I regret all of it,” Valdez said.

She said that she didn’t want to be at the hearing and that she was embarrassed by the whole ordeal. She also said she didn’t realize earlier that employees were leaving her office because of her interactions with McCabria, and that the employees who left never told her how those interactions affected them.

There wasn’t enough time Tuesday for Valdez to complete her testimony, and she is set to resume testifying on Wednesday. But before her testimony began, Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden fielded questions about interactions the DA’s office had with the court — and about a public press release that Valdez issued in 2021 about McCabria.

In response to questions from Stephen Angermayer, Valdez’s attorney, Seiden described the DA’s office and Douglas County District Court as having a functional relationship. He also testified that the attorneys who left the office after the conflict with McCabria did so because they were “burnt out,” not because of Valdez’s actions.

Special prosecutor Kimberly Bonifas, of Wichita, asked him about the press release that he and Valdez issued in 2021.

As the Journal-World has reported, the dispute in 2021 started only two months after Valdez took office and was originally about the resumption of jury trials during the COVID pandemic. After McCabria said he had consulted with all stakeholders to ensure safety at trials, Valdez disputed that she had been consulted properly. She issued a press release that said that the court did not consult with her office to make the decision, and that her office would have voiced concerns about resuming during the pandemic and using “makeshift” courtrooms at the county fairgrounds.

On Tuesday, Seiden said he didn’t agree that the release insinuated that McCabria had lied. Seiden said the release was not about McCabria, but just the decision to resume trials, and that it merely highlighted the difference between someone “being told” how something was going to happen and “being consulted.”

However, he also testified that he regretted editing the release for Valdez and sending it out, and that it “took longer to load the email contacts list than it did for them to write and issue the release itself.”

“In hindsight, we should not have sent this (release) out,” Seiden said. “It is accurate, but it put a lot of people in positions we didn’t want to.”

Bonifas asked about whether the judges had listened to Valdez’s concerns about resuming jury trials before they made their decision in 2021; Seiden said he believed that the judges had listened to the concerns but that they didn’t consider those concerns when making their decision to resume trials.

Then, Bonifas asked Seiden if it would have been better for Valdez to say she disagreed with the decision, and not to say that she wasn’t consulted.

Seiden replied, “I wish I never clicked send on it. I think about that all the time.”

Bonifas also asked about the references to Valdez’s gender and ethnicity and McCabria’s gender in the release and subsequent social media posts that Valdez made. Seiden replied that he thought Valdez was speaking from “her perspective” and that it wasn’t intended to imply McCabria was sexist or racist.

Judge Blake Glover, Judge Mark Simpson and former Assistant District Attorney Alice Walker also testified on Tuesday. Both of the judges said that Valdez’s actions made certain interactions between the courts and the DA’s office difficult; they said that instead of the court working with the office to solve problems, the court sometimes had to just find solutions on its own.

Walker testified that she regularly appeared in front of McCabria while with the DA’s office, and that after Valdez issued the press release, she immediately feared for her standing with the court.

“I was concerned that she spoke for the entire office and how I might be perceived walking into his courtroom,” Walker said.

Walker, who began working at the DA’s office in 2011 under then-DA Charles Branson, said that she was already looking for new work when the press release came out. She said there were other things in Valdez’s new office culture that made her question staying, and that she applied for her new job at the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator on the same day that Valdez started a “fight with the chief judge in public.”

“I had to get out of that office,” Walker said.

Valdez, 54, has denied that she has acted unprofessionally and has attributed the turnover in her office to employees’ refusal to get on board with her new office policies.

The formal complaint specifically alleges that Valdez — a Democrat elected in 2020 — violated four parts of the state code governing attorney conduct:

• Making a statement that the lawyer knows to be false or with reckless disregard as to its truth or falsity concerning the qualifications or integrity of a judge;

• Engaging in undignified or discourteous conduct degrading to a tribunal;

• Engaging in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice;

• And engaging in any other conduct that adversely reflects on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law.

The hearing — in the Court of Appeals Courtroom on the second floor of the Kansas Judicial Center at 301 SW 10th Ave. in Topeka — will resume at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Several witnesses still have to testify, including two more Douglas County District Court judges, Judge Sally Pokorny and Judge Stacey Donovan. The hearing is open to the public, but the panel has ordered that it will not be livestreamed and that no cellphones or computers may be used in the hearing chamber. Additionally, the press is not allowed to take photos.

A panel of three attorneys with the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys will render a decision in the case. Those panel members — all Wichita-based attorneys — are Stacy Ortega, Gaye Tibbets and Sylvia Penner.