Left to right: Senior Assistant District Attorney David Greenwald, District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, Cory Elkins

A complaint filed by a rape survivor against the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office has been dismissed after a finding that the conduct of the DA and her assistant — failing to notify rape survivors about a sentencing hearing — was a “mistake” but not unethical.

The decision has left the woman angry, sad and incredulous — not the least because the conduct she complained of as unethical is also, on its face, a violation of the Kansas Constitution and state statute, which direct that victims be given notice of sentencing hearings.

“I cried so hard yesterday, harder than I have in years,” she told the Journal-World about the day last week when she received the letter from the Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator. “And honestly, I just wanted to punch the wall because it’s just so baffling.”

The woman, whom the Journal-World is identifying only as Sasha because she’s the victim of a sex crime, filed the complaint earlier this year after District Attorney Suzanne Valdez’s office, represented by Senior Assistant District Attorney David Greenwald, failed to notify her and other women that their rapist, Cory Elkins, was going to have a hearing at which his 48-year prison sentence would be cut by about 30 years.

Sasha found out about the resentencing only because she happened to look at the Kansas Department of Corrections website and noticed that his release date had been changed to sometime in 2025, as the Journal-World has reported.

That was the first devastation for Sasha: He will be out soon.

The second devastation was that no one had told her or the other women whom Elkins had brutalized: “I still wouldn’t know about this if I hadn’t happened to look online,” she said of the resentencing.

She wouldn’t know, among other things, that the University of Kansas’ Innocence Project had decided to represent Elkins and had successfully fought for his earlier release based on a miscalculation in his criminal history score that changed his position on the state’s sentencing grid.

The third devastation, Sasha said, was the DA’s office’s public explanation for not telling the women: The women would be better off not knowing — a conclusion the office reached based on what a victim-witness coordinator had allegedly told prosecutors. Knowing would only “retraumatize” them, they determined.

That decision was devastating, as Sasha previously told the Journal-World, not only because it violated directives in state law, but also because it was “condescending” to the women and took away their voices. She personally had never said she didn’t want to be notified, a notion that struck her as preposterous, given her own role in bringing Elkins to justice. And even if the women couldn’t have changed the outcome of the resentencing, Sasha said, they could at least have been apprised, present and heard.

In addition, Sasha has reason to doubt the DA’s explanation for why she wasn’t told. She has spoken to the victim-witness coordinator, who disputes the DA’s office’s explanation: “My memory of the events is not the same as what the DA is reporting. My past shows that I value victim notification,” the coordinator, now retired, told Sasha.

The coordinator declined to speak to the Journal-World, but the Journal-World has viewed correspondence between her and Sasha.

In an effort to get to the bottom of how the decision to not notify was made, the Journal-World asked the DA’s office if the decision existed in writing. The DA’s office declined to answer the question. When the Journal-World filed an open records request in May pursuant to state law, the DA’s office acknowledged receipt of the records request, but has not produced any records. In June, the office, when asked about the records, said staff who could prepare a time and cost estimate for producing the records were then busy with trials. Three months later, the time and cost estimate for the records still has not been provided to the newspaper.

The fourth devastation for Sasha came last week when Deputy Disciplinary Administrator Gary West informed her that he did not find the failure to notify unethical: No one, Sasha learned, would be held accountable.

“How is that ethical?” Sasha asked. “How can they think that not notifying victims of brutal rapes is ethical? It feels like I’m standing there and letting all of the people involved take turns slapping me in the face and saying ‘get over it.'”

While West acknowledged that Sasha had endured a “horrific and violent attack” and that she was “rightfully upset” that the DA’s office had not notified her about the resentencing, he concluded that Greenwald’s admitted “mistake” in not notifying the women was an isolated incident that did not rise to the level of an ethical violation. In a letter dismissing a complaint against Valdez herself, West said the same rationale applied.

“If not notifying victims was a regular practice or even an often occurrence,” he wrote in a letter to Sasha, “such would certainly not be in keeping with the spirit of the directive of K.S.A. 74-7333 and could constitute” an ethical violation.

West wrote that “it appears the District Attorney’s Office has taken measures” to ensure that directives in state law are “more closely adhered to,” but he did not tell Sasha what those measures were.

West additionally noted, as Valdez’s office has previously stated, that K.S.A 74-7333, which is the Bill of Rights for Crime Victims, declares that victims have rights but provides no mechanism for enforcing them nor punishments if they are violated.

The lack of muscle in the law is especially aggravating for Sasha because it was almost exclusively through her efforts that Elkins was brought to justice.

Elkins’ crimes:

Sasha does not like to dwell on the details of her attack, and she’s aware that they are upsetting to read about, but she believes it’s important for people to understand what survivors have endured and what they continue to endure throughout their lives.

“It stays with you forever,” she said.

In the mid-1990s, Sasha was staying in Lawrence, when Elkins, a stranger, broke into the home and jumped on her back as she lay in bed. For the next several hours, he beat, blindfolded and suffocated her as he raped and sodomized her repeatedly. She believed she was going to be murdered, as her only sibling had been less than two years earlier.

But she survived. She reported the crimes and pursued justice for years, getting the Lawrence Police Department to reopen the case based on new DNA technology. In 2008, Elkins, accused of raping two other women as well, was brought to trial, convicted and sentenced to 48 years in prison.

Sasha believed that he’d remain behind bars until he was a very old man, but a few years ago, as the Journal-World reported, the KU Project for Innocence and Post Conviction Remedies took up Elkins’ case and got his sentence reduced by decades based on the miscalculated criminal history score. It turned out that a felony unrelated to the rapes was misclassified as a person felony instead of a nonperson one and that he was entitled to a lower sentence.

It’s unfathomable to Sasha and the other survivors that the KU Innocence Project went to bat for a serial rapist to get his sentence reduced, though on some level they understand that Elkins was the Project’s client and that attorneys advocate zealously for their clients.

What they don’t understand is: Who is advocating zealously for them? “Who cared about us enough to even tell us what was going on?” Sasha asked. “Who cared about our rights?”

To this day, Sasha says the only communication she has received from the DA’s office is communication that she initiated — a circumstance that bewilders her, given Valdez’s oft-proclaimed commitment to protecting crime victims and supporting women.

For now, Sasha said she would like to ask West, the deputy disciplinary administrator who made the finding that nothing unethical had occurred, some questions: “These are just yes-or-no questions. Do you have a wife, a daughter, a mother, a sister? Yes? OK, if they had been brutally raped, would that upset you? If they went to court and the perpetrator was put away, and they found out by searching the internet that he was getting out, would it upset you? If the female in your world was not notified that he was being resentenced and getting out of prison decades earlier than expected, would that upset you? Would that be ethical?”

Sasha won’t get a chance to pose those questions to West, however. The same week he sent the dismissal letter to her saying that he understood why she was “fed up with the criminal process,” he resigned from the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator.

When the Journal-World reached out to Valdez’s office regarding the dismissal of the complaint against her office, her spokesperson, Cheryl Cadue, noted only that the complaint had resulted in no discipline for Valdez or Greenwald, and she referred the Journal-World to previous statements Valdez has made on the DA’s website on May 15 and Aug. 17.

While Sasha’s case was dismissed, Valdez has been the subject of other complaints with the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator. In the most serious of them, a special prosecutor has accused Valdez of violating four sections of the code that governs attorney conduct, including making false statements about a judge, engaging in undignified or discourteous conduct and engaging in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice. A hearing on that complaint has been scheduled for Oct. 12-13, as the Journal-World has reported.

In another case, Sheriff Jay Armbrister filed a complaint against Valdez alleging misconduct in the way Valdez handled her office’s Brady-Giglio policy, which deals with the obligation of prosecutors to disclose information that may be favorable to criminal defendants. As the Journal-World reported, that complaint was dismissed but Valdez was issued a letter of caution.

A letter of caution is issued when the conduct of an attorney, while not the basis for discipline, is deemed in some way to be out of step with accepted professional practice.

Despite the letter of caution, Valdez’s office issued a statement claiming that the sheriff’s complaint was “frivolous” and chiding him for “publicizing” it.

That statement concluded with: “The DA’s Office will remain committed to ensuring the administration of justice for the people of Douglas County.”