photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Carrody Buchhorn, right, appears with her attorneys, Bill Skepnek, left, and Quentin Templeton, Monday, Oct. 27, 2025, in Douglas County District Court.

The State of Kansas spent millions of dollars prosecuting an innocent woman and subsequently defending itself against her wrongful conviction lawsuit, and now taxpayers may be on the hook for millions more as a judge decides whether the state also has to pay her attorneys more than $4.5 million in fees — an amount that could have been under $25,000 had the state not aggressively fought the claim for years.

Attorneys William Skepnek and Quentin Templeton submitted their bill earlier this week in the case of Carrody Buchhorn, and a judge will soon determine what they will be paid for the thousands of hours they worked — at their own expense — to get her exonerated.

Buchhorn, whom the state relentlessly portrayed as a baby killer, was granted a certificate of innocence in July after a nearly decade-long legal fight to clear her name in the death of 9-month-old Oliver Ortiz.

Oliver died in 2016 at the Eudora day care where Buchhorn worked. The state claimed she murdered him, but an expert forensic pathologist — hired by the state itself — found that he had died from a congenital heart condition.

Judge James McCabria, in granting a certificate of innocence to Buchhorn, said in his July ruling that “the only objective, measurable, credible and testable evidence presented in this case indicates a natural cause of death.”

Under the state’s wrongful conviction statute, McCabria awarded Buchhorn $368,000 for her 2,072 days of imprisonment during the ordeal. The law allows $65,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment.

The statute also allows up to $25,000 in attorney fees “unless a greater reasonable total is authorized by the court.”

McCabria acknowledged that such fees in Buchhorn’s case “would far exceed $25,000,” but the specific amount won’t be determined until after a November hearing on the matter.

Skepnek and Templeton are requesting $4,655,692 in fees, plus pre-judgment interest of $129,295 and post-judgment interest in an amount to be determined. That total includes a sum of $1,551,897 multiplied by three to account for risks in taking on the litigation, such as the possibility of never being compensated and having to forgo other legal work. The “risk multiplier” is also intended to “disincentivize” the state from frustrating the purposes of the wrongful conviction statute by “needless complication of the litigation process.”

The fee amount covers 2,200 hours that they say they spent on the case, a quantity that could have been greatly reduced had the state not insisted on “litigation of all conceivable issues,” they wrote.

In a declaration attached to the fee motion, Skepnek, who had successfully appealed Buchhorn’s conviction, said he believed the state could not reasonably dispute Buchhorn’s innocence — especially given that Coroner Erik Mitchell’s cause of death theory had been discredited — and that the wrongful conviction case would be quickly resolved and that attorney fees would not exceed $25,000.

To this end, Skepnek said, he gave “the entire record” to Assistant Attorney General Shon Qualseth, who initially represented the state. After asking for time to review the record, Qualseth simply responded with a general denial, prompting a protracted and costly battle for legal discovery, Skepnek said.

The state also hired attorneys to represent former Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez and her deputy DA, Joshua Seiden, who continued to paint Buchhorn as a baby killer even after their own expert, Dr. Jane Turner, said Oliver had died of natural causes and after Valdez had consequently sent out a press release saying she was ceasing prosecution.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Former Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez leaves the witness stand Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025, at the wrongful conviction trial of Carrody Buchhorn. Buchhorn’s attorney Bill Skepnek is at left.

Valdez would later combatively testify at the wrongful conviction trial that she never spoke to Turner about her findings and did not even understand medical terms in Turner’s report, such as patent foramen ovale — a reference to the hole in Oliver’s heart that Turner said contributed to his death.

“The time and labor required in this [wrongful conviction lawsuit] was largely driven by the State’s defense and nonparty intervention by Douglas County, Ms. Valdez, and Mr. Seiden,” Buchhorn’s attorneys wrote.

Despite Valdez’s belief in Buchhorn’s guilt propelling the state’s defense in the wrongful conviction lawsuit, Judge McCabria, in his exoneration ruling, found “the opinion of Suzanne Valdez as to the innocence or guilt of Carrody Buchhorn so lacking in legal and factual understanding of the evidence as to merit no weight whatsoever.”

Templeton, Buchhorn’s other attorney, also provided a declaration with their fee motion. Based on open records requests, he determined that the state had paid four different law firms a total of $801,093 in fees and $86,020 in expenses. This figure does not include the value of the work by lawyers in the Attorney General’s Office, like Qualseth, which Templeton estimated to be $821,721 — for a total of $1,622,814.

Templeton and Skepnek also recently won a wrongful conviction lawsuit for a man in Geary County, Christopher Lyman, who was convicted of first-degree murder and child abuse in the 2013 death of a baby. In that case, Kansas taxpayers had to pay out more than a million dollars: $614,205 to Lyman and $498,077 in attorney’s fees. Skepnek told the Journal-World that the Lyman case took far less time than the Buchhorn case — only about a year compared to three and a half years.

He said that case also involved needless litigation but nothing like the Buchhorn case, which he described as a series of “endless” and “mind-boggling” battles that wound up costing taxpayers extraordinary sums of money.

In addition to the wrongful conviction lawsuit, Buchhorn also has a lawsuit pending in federal court claiming that the state “schemed” and conspired to frame her by fabricating a fictional cause of death, withholding evidence and propagating false narratives of guilt for years. Skepnek and Templeton are representing her in that litigation and have also begun discovery in a federal lawsuit for Lyman.