photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Carrody Buchhorn, right, watches her attorney, William Skepnek, address Chief Judge James McCabria at an Aug. 19, 2024, hearing in her wrongful-conviction lawsuit in Douglas County District Court. Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez's attorney, Greg Goheen, is in foreground.

A federal lawsuit filed Monday claims that officials in Douglas County “schemed” and conspired to frame a woman for murdering a baby at a Eudora day care by fabricating a fictional cause of death, withholding evidence and propagating false narratives of guilt for years.

The lawsuit, filed by Carrody Buchhorn and her family, specifically targets Douglas County’s former coroner, Dr. Erik Mitchell; Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez; Valdez’s former deputy DA, Joshua Seiden; the Douglas County Commission; and the City of Eudora.

Buchhorn was convicted of and imprisoned for the 2016 death of 9-month-old Oliver Ortiz, but her case was later overturned and was eventually dropped by the Douglas County DA’s Office in January 2023 after an expert forensics report declared that Oliver had died from natural causes, specifically a congenital heart defect. Despite dropping the case, however, Valdez and Seiden continued to publicly implicate Buchhorn — maliciously and without evidence, the lawsuit says.

photo by: Journal-World

Clockwise from left: Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez, Carrody Buchhorn (center), Buchhorn’s attorney Bill Skepnek, Chief Judge James McCabria, Deputy DA Joshua Seiden.

The civil rights suit, filed by attorney Bill Skepnek and others, claims that Mitchell, who had a documented history of unethical conduct in New York before moving to Kansas, wholly invented a theory of “depolarization” to explain Oliver’s death, claiming that Oliver’s head had been stomped on by Buchhorn, even though there was no sign of brain trauma.

Mitchell in a later proceeding admitted that he could not supply evidence of anyone having died from head trauma with no apparent injury to the brain and that he had no statistics to back up his theory — which the lawsuit characterizes as meaning that Mitchell previously committed “perjury.”

The suit also claims that Mitchell falsely claimed Oliver’s heart was normal, even though he could not have examined the heart because it had been removed the day prior to the autopsy for the heart valves to be donated. A pathologist who separately autopsied the heart said that it was defective, but that evidence was “suppressed,” the suit says.

Buchhorn’s case was originally tried by former DA Charles Branson’s Office, and it was later overturned on appeal due to ineffective assistance of counsel by Buchhorn’s trial attorneys. Valdez appealed the appellate court’s ruling to the Kansas Supreme Court and lost, but she vowed to retry Buchhorn. Eventually a Douglas County judge dismissed the case in December 2022, citing Valdez’s failure for more than a year to produce an expert regarding Oliver’s cause of death after Valdez said her office would not rely on Mitchell’s testimony.

Valdez shortly thereafter dropped the case, citing a report by a forensic pathologist declaring that Oliver had died of natural causes, not abuse.

Despite that finding, after Buchhorn sued for wrongful imprisonment, Valdez and Seiden asserted that the case was open and that they had what the suit refers to as “secret evidence” of guilt — evidence hinted at publicly but never disclosed or turned over because it doesn’t exist, the suit says.

The suit also alleges that the “municipal defendants” — Douglas County and the City of Eudora — failed to properly train officials and to properly oversee actions that led to misconduct against Buchhorn, but it doesn’t address the fact that Valdez and the county sheriff are elected officials, not employees.

Another trauma mentioned in the lawsuit is that Buchhorn, while in the county jail, was made to bunk with a mentally ill mother who had driven her children into the Kansas River, causing her daughter’s death. That woman was on suicide watch, and Buchhorn was made to “baby sit” her — an experience that she discussed with the Journal-World after her case was dismissed.

Buchhorn is seeking compensatory as well as punitive damages in the lawsuit for the “devastating injuries” suffered by her and her family, though no amount is mentioned. The suit says that Buchhorn suffered physical pain and anguish, humiliation, the loss of family contact, severe psychological damage, financial loss, other harms and, most importantly, the loss of her freedom.

“Since the first false allegation was levied against her, Mrs. Buchhorn and her familial co-Plaintiffs were stripped of the various pleasures of basic human experience, from the simplest to the most important, which all free people enjoy as a matter of right, including the fundamental freedom to live one’s life as an autonomous human being without fear that the government will falsely tell the public that you murdered a baby and falsely convict you for that crime which did not even happen in the first place,” the suit states.

Buchhorn has a separate wrongful-conviction lawsuit pending. She is seeking about $400,000 in compensation, plus attorney fees, for the more than five years that she was incarcerated in some form — either in jail, in prison or under house arrest.