photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Albert Wilson appears at a hearing on Jan. 29, 2024, in Douglas County District Court.

Albert Wilson’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment lawsuit, which has sat in limbo for months, may now hinge on something the judge earlier said was irrelevant: why prosecutors chose to drop their rape case against Wilson in 2021.

On Tuesday, 10 months after evidence and arguments were presented in the civil trial in Wilson’s suit, Judge Carl Folsom III turned back the clock on the case by reopening discovery. That will give Wilson a chance to depose Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez and other prosecutors about their reasoning.

The decision was based on a recent ruling from the Kansas Supreme Court that says that claimants in cases like Wilson’s, in order to be compensated under the state’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment statutes, need to prove that their criminal charges were dismissed specifically because the prosecution believed they were actually innocent.

It’s the latest twist in a legal saga that’s taken many sharp turns since Wilson was first accused of raping a 17-year-old girl he met at a bar near the University of Kansas campus. Wilson, as the Journal-World has reported, was convicted of rape by a Douglas County jury in 2019. But on appeal, in February 2020, his conviction was vacated and his criminal case was sent back to Douglas County District Court on the grounds that his trial attorney was ineffective.

After that, in December 2021, Valdez dismissed the criminal case, and he filed his wrongful conviction suit in 2022. In total, Wilson was incarcerated for about two years.

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The bench trial in Wilson’s wrongful conviction suit opened in January of this year, but Folsom wasn’t going to make his decision right away. Instead, he gave the parties until March 1 to present additional findings of fact or conclusions of law that they wanted the court to consider, and said he would issue his ruling in writing sometime after that.

But that “sometime” would be pushed back even further in August, when the Kansas Supreme Court ruled on a different wrongful conviction case, known as the Doelz case.

Like Wilson’s case, the Doelz case involved a claimant whose criminal case was sent back to prosecutors on appeal and was subsequently dropped. But the justices ruled that in a case like this, it wasn’t enough to just show that the prosecution had dropped the case. Instead, they said, a claimant has to prove that the reason the case was dropped was because the prosecutors thought the person did not actually commit the crime.

Folsom was still weighing Wilson’s case at the time of the Doelz decision, and the Doelz ruling was much different than what Folsom had ruled in Wilson’s case more than a year earlier. He had ruled in 2023 that the prosecutor’s reasons behind the dismissal were not relevant to the case; all that Wilson had to do, in his view, was prove by a preponderance of evidence that he was innocent.

“The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with me,” Folsom said.

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With that in mind, Wilson’s attorney, Laurel Driskell, said it would only be fair for the court to hit rewind on the case, reopening discovery and allowing Wilson to depose Valdez, former Deputy DA Joshua Seiden and any other prosecutors connected to the decision to dismiss his criminal case.

Assistant Attorney General Shon Qualseth, representing the state, disagreed. He said Valdez and Seiden had been listed as witnesses throughout the entire case, and Wilson would have had plenty of time to depose them before the civil trial began.

Driskell said the reason she didn’t seek to depose Valdez prior to the civil trial was that Folsom had ruled that the prosecutor’s reasoning wasn’t relevant.

Qualseth also submitted an affidavit signed by Valdez, in which Valdez explains her reasoning for dismissing Wilson’s case. The affidavit said that when the criminal case was sent back to Douglas County in March of 2021, the DA’s Office at first could not proceed because the alleged victim in the case was unavailable. It said the office was eventually able to contact the woman and engaged in a “restorative justice” process, and that the charge was dismissed after that process was completed.

But Driskell said that the affidavit alone wasn’t enough, because it didn’t give Wilson the opportunity to cross-examine Valdez.

Ultimately, Folsom sided with Wilson and Driskell in deciding to reopen discovery.

He asked the parties to create a timeline for when and how the case would proceed in light of this change. And then Qualseth revealed one more twist — he informed the court that he would not be representing the state in future hearings. He said that he was leaving the Kansas Attorney General’s Office to take a position as lead counsel for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment later this month.

Qualseth’s departure will likely have an impact not only on Wilson’s case, but also on another Douglas County wrongful conviction lawsuit, that of Carrody Buchhorn. Buchhorn’s case has been inundated with delays and legal wrangling in part because of ongoing issues with the DA’s office, as the Journal-World has reported.

Wilson is seeking the maximum amount of damages Kansas law allows for wrongful conviction and imprisonment, including $65,000 for each year he was imprisoned plus attorney fees, and a certificate of innocence.