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.

An attorney is asking a district court judge to sanction District Attorney Suzanne Valdez and others for claiming that a murder investigation had been reopened against a Lawrence woman, then later admitting in a deposition that no such investigation exists.

The “lie” about the investigation being reopened, as Bill Skepnek, the attorney for Carrody Buchhorn, has described it in a motion filed Monday, was meant to impede Buchhorn’s ability to pursue a wrongful-conviction lawsuit against the state and to “extort” her with the threat of a renewed prosecution as she pursued her innocence claim, Skepnek argues in his filing in the case.

Buchhorn was convicted of murdering 9-month-old Oliver Ortiz in 2016 at the Eudora day care where she worked, but her case was ultimately overturned, and Valdez eventually dropped the case in January of last year for lack of evidence after having vigorously vowed to retry it.

Valdez’s dismissal came after she acknowledged that a medical expert determined that Oliver had not died by homicide but by natural causes.

In his motion asking for sanctions, Skepnek notes that through more than a year of litigation in the wrongful-conviction lawsuit, the state had never mentioned an open investigation into Buchhorn. In his filing, Skepnek says that “the lie” of an active investigation began as a delay tactic to successfully limit depositions of Valdez and her then deputy, Joshua Seiden, and other discovery in the case — a falsehood that he says has compounded injury to Buchhorn.

In his motion, Skepnek includes an exchange from a sworn deposition with Valdez on May 22 where he asks, “So is there now an active investigation?” And Valdez says, “No.”

Two months earlier, Valdez’s office said it had reopened the case, claiming new evidence warranted an investigation, but when asked by the Journal-World at the time what type of new evidence had been found and whether it implicated Buchhorn or another suspect, Valdez’s office declined to comment. When asked for comment Tuesday on Skepnek’s motion, Valdez’s spokeswoman, Cheryl Cadue, said, “We do not provide comment on ongoing legal matters.”

Skepnek’s motion requests that the court impose sanctions under a state law that requires, among other things, that factual claims to a court have evidentiary support and are not being presented to harass or delay.

He names Valdez and Seiden, their attorneys Holly Dyer and Greg Goheen, and Assistant Attorney General Shon D. Qualseth, who is arguing on the state’s behalf in Buchhorn’s wrongful conviction lawsuit, as deserving of the sanctions. He also requests an assortment of monetary punishment for the attorneys and financial relief for Buchhorn, which would be determined by the court, and a judgment in favor of Buchhorn’s innocence claim, as well as the overruling of any remaining claims of “confidentiality” that the DA’s office has put forth as reason to delay or deny proceedings, such as the taking of Seiden’s deposition.

Seiden is no longer employed by the DA’s office after having abruptly departed less than two weeks ago, as the Journal-World reported.

In her wrongful conviction lawsuit, Buchhorn, who spent nearly six years in jail, in prison or on house arrest, is seeking — pursuant to state law — nearly $400,000 from the state and a formal exoneration. She told the Journal-World in 2022 that she had spent about half a million dollars and lost her family home as part of her ordeal to prove her innocence. That figure does not include legal expenses that have mounted in the years since, which she is trying to recoup.

The state has vigorously fought Buchhorn’s efforts to clear her name and gain statutory compensation for her years in custody.

As the Journal-World has reported, despite having pursued prosecution against Buchhorn, Valdez and Seiden have contended that they were not familiar enough with the case to testify about what information the office had relied on to prosecute Buchhorn prior to her case being dismissed.

The office said it would not rely on the testimony of the coroner in the first trial who posited a controversial theory of “depolarization” as the cause of Oliver’s death, but then failed to produce an expert who would say Oliver’s death was a homicide. That failure led a judge to dismiss without prejudice the retrial effort before Valdez ultimately publicly acknowledged that a forensic pathologist had determined that Oliver had died of natural causes and that she was accordingly ceasing prosecution.