photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, right, is pictured Monday, Dec. 18, 2023, outside the hearing room at the Kansas Judicial Center in Topeka, where she is attending her disciplinary hearing. No cameras were allowed inside the hearing room.

Two judges testified Monday during an ethics hearing for Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez that when she publicly called Chief Judge James McCabria a liar, she called into question the integrity of the entire court at a critical time during the pandemic.

A disciplinary hearing for Valdez began Monday and is set to last through Wednesday in Topeka, where a special prosecutor argued that Valdez violated multiple rules of professional conduct.

As the Journal-World has reported, the allegations against Valdez largely stem from her interactions with McCabria, including that she called him a liar and a sexist in response to the court announcing plans to resume jury trials in Spring of 2021. She is alleged to have implied that he was racist, sent him inappropriate texts saying he should be “ashamed” of himself, and that she yelled and cursed about him to the extent that multiple attorneys in her office resigned under the stress.

McCabria testified Monday to a panel of attorneys with the Kansas Board For Discipline of Attorneys where special prosecutor Kimberly Bonifas of Wichita asked him to tell his side of the story and how Valdez’s public statements denigrated the court’s reputation among the public.

McCabria said by the time he issued his first press release on resuming trials in March of 2021, he and the other judges in Douglas County had spent months conferring with relevant stakeholders including the sheriff’s office, health officials, local attorneys, and the then-District Attorney, Charles Branson.

He said he had also spoken with then DA-elect Valdez shortly after she won the primary. The two had even exchanged cellphone numbers and developed a comfortable rapport where he encouraged her on her path to go from a lawyer working in academia at KU to becoming a prosecutor in the county.

So, after he issued the release that trials would resume, he was “disappointed and confused” when Valdez issued her own press release claiming she was never consulted, effectively calling the judge a liar, and then attacked him further on social media and directly to him in private text messages.

“It was so contrary to what had occurred,” McCabria said Monday.

McCabria said that he had consulted Valdez time and again informally before she took office and again in meetings after she took control of the office from Branson. He said in their initial meetings after she took office, her concerns with resuming trials were not related to COVID-19 but rather that the office was understaffed and she needed more time to prepare.

But in their next meeting, Valdez’s story changed from needing more attorneys to safety concerns, he said. Not just in regards to the virus, but also because she thought the Douglas County Fairgrounds, where trials were set to resume with new social distancing guidelines, would make her and her prosecutors “easy targets” for anyone who might choose to attack them, and she claimed the sheriff had told the office it would not be able to protect them, despite the sheriff’s office having previously assured the court that security was not at issue.

“I have never said that publicly, but it is a personal belief that this was just an excuse,” McCabria said. He said he thought Valdez’s office still wasn’t ready due to staffing issues but that she didn’t want to admit she was still struggling and instead blamed the virus and the fairgrounds to delay trials further.

McCabria said Valdez’s public statements not only misrepresented the work that he and the other judges had done up to that point but that it misled the public, which was his primary concern when making the announcement.

“The credibility of the court was under attack and I wanted to respond,” McCabria said.

He said that the public was the only stakeholder left in the equation that mattered as they would be the ones called to serve on jury duty. When Valdez put the court’s integrity into question, she put that doubt into the mind of every resident in the county who might be called.

“The real analysis was how it would affect the integrity of the proceedings,” McCabria said.

McCabria released a counter-press release, and Valdez issued another release in response. After the public tit-for-tat McCabria was discussing the matter with his fellow criminal division judges, all four women, and they saw Valdez’s actions as an affront to the court as a whole and asked who among them should file a complaint with the state, each of them individually or together as a district.

McCabria said he then called the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator and expressed his concerns over what he saw was a violation of attorney conduct by releasing a false statement about the court. He said Stan Hazlett, then disciplinary administrator, said that McCabria need not file a complaint but that the office would handle the filing itself.

Following McCabria’s testimony was Judge Amy Hanley who said she was asked by state officials to head up a task force to establish protocols for state courts to resume trials during the pandemic. She said that task force worked for six weeks before issuing general guidelines that were “flexible” enough for counties to create plans of their own within those parameters. She said that put Douglas County in a great position to create a plan since she was at the forefront of creating the protocols.

“(It was) a thoughtful process that took some time,” Hanley said.

Months later, when the plans were finally in place with input from relevant parties within the county, she said she was “shocked” and in “disbelief” that Valdez would issue a press release that was so false. However, it wasn’t the first time she saw Valdez and Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden show McCabria and the court an unequaled level of disrespect.

She said less than a month prior to the court announcing that trials would resume that spring, she and McCabria met with Seiden and Valdez to discuss their final concerns. It was the same meeting McCabria said Valdez had come to make excuses instead of admitting she wasn’t ready.

Hanley said that at that meeting she was prepared to hear concerns about trials but instead Seiden and Valdez aired a list of grievances that was “hostile from the very first second”.

“I’ve never seen an attorney treat a judge that way in or out of a courtroom,” Hanley said.

She said during the meeting she looked to see if McCabria would just walk out and said that he would have been in the right to do so.

That hostility has never gone away, Hanley said. And while the court has managed to work with the DA’s office in the years since, judges are not quick to reach out to the office because that hostility seems to rear back up at the most inconvenient times.

“It brought the quality and reputation of Douglas County (in the legal community) down,” Hanley said.

Other witnesses include former DA employees Emily Hartz and Eve Kemple.

Hartz said she was Valdez’s friend prior to being hired in January of 2021 and expected to join the office in a more administrative position and to help build a special victims unit, but when she took on the title of assistant district attorney, she was assigned to be solely a sex crimes prosecutor, with no seat at the table for administrative and program development.

She said that within months her health had declined and she was unable to sleep at night. She said she would have been able to work with victims, but the office environment was overwhelming. It wasn’t long before Hartz decided it wasn’t going to work out and she wanted to put her resignation in, but she was afraid of how Valdez would react. And rightfully so, she said. When she worked up the courage to resign, Valdez cut her off professionally and as a friend, refusing to look at or speak to her, Hartz said, adding that Seiden piled on too.

“Seiden treated me like a child. Harassing me about ‘closing my files’,” Hartz said.

She said he was condescending and indignant and despite her having been an attorney for over two decades, Seiden treated her as though she was going to cut and run on the office. She said Seiden beat her to the punch though and unexpectedly pushed up her last day at the office.

Kemple testified that she left Valdez’s office specifically because Valdez had called McCabria a liar. Kemple said that after the public spat, Valdez could regularly be heard walking the halls of the courthouse grumbling about McCabria.

Both Kemple and Hartz said that they never experienced or thought that McCabria was sexist, racist, or a liar.

Two witnesses who worked on the investigation into the complaint also testified, Debra Hughes, former deputy disciplinary administrator, and investigator Ron Wurtz.

Hughes testified via video conference and said that she worked on the investigation early on and that she confronted Valdez about Valdez’s social media posts referencing an “insecure man” and that “women of the world should be prepared” to be oppressed. Hughes said Valdez misled investigators and tried to say that the post on her personal Facebook page could be referring to any man she had interacted with, not McCabria specifically.

Hughes said that Valdez grossly mischaracterized that post and that while the statement was made on her personal page, it shared the press release from the District Attorneys Facebook page that specifically referenced McCabria and that no reasonable person would believe Valdez was referring to just any man.

Wurtz testified that his first interview with Valdez in May of 2021 was emotionally charged and that he thought then that Valdez needed an attorney to help her get through it. He said she initially denied that she called McCabria a liar but later in the interview passionately said “but he is a liar” through the course of their discussion.

The hearing panel asked Wurtz to go into further detail of the investigation but Bonifas asked the panel not dig too deep into some areas of Wurtz investigation because he was investigating additional complaints against Valdez that are unrelated to Monday’s hearing. The panel heeded Bonifas’ request.

Valdez, 54, has denied that she has acted unprofessionally and has attributed attorneys leaving her employ to their refusal to get on board with her running her office in a way that voters “commanded” when they elected her. She is also arguing that her comments about McCabria are protected speech under the First Amendment.

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.

Remaining witnesses include four more Douglas County judges, additional former and current members of Valdez’s office in Lawrence and an employee of the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator, who was recused from her role of counsel for the panel overseeing the disciplinary complaint after Valdez alleged that she had a conflict.

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

Valdez is represented by attorney Stephen Angermayer, of Pittsburg.

The hearing — in the Court of Appeals Courtroom on the second floor of the Kansas Judicial Center at 301 SW 10th Ave. in Topeka — 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. It is set to resume Tuesday at 8:30 a.m.

Editor’s note: This article was corrected to clarify that Judge Amy Hanley was asked by state officials to head up a task force to establish protocols for state courts to resume trials during the pandemic.