Let’s hope that this is the last season of ‘As the Douglas County DA’s Office Turns’ | Opinion

Previously on “ As the Douglas County DA’s Office Turns ,” District Attorney Suzanne Valdez seemed to have only been pretending to have reopened a murder investigation into the 2016 death of 9-month-old Ollie Ortiz. You know, to avoid having to answer questions in the civil suit alleging that former Eudora day care worker Carrody Buchhorn had been wrongfully convicted in that case .

Now, Valdez has admitted in a deposition that there is no active investigation of Buchhorn, who already served more than five years in jail, prison and on house arrest for a murder that didn’t happen, because Ollie died of natural causes.

At least, the DA recently said under oath that there’s no investigation, contradicting her previous statements that yes, there was. Her legal team said that it was Buchhorn’s civil suit that had prompted the investigation, so was this whole ruse just an attempt to pressure Buchhorn into dropping her suit?

Buchhorn’s attorney, William Skepnek, thinks so, and has filed one of the most blistering motions I’ve ever read: “They have used the claim of an ‘active investigation,’ he said, to successfully persuade the Court to restrict Mrs. Buchhorn’s civil discovery rights in this case. But this was all a lie. And they almost got away with it,” until, he says, Valdez slipped and told the truth in her deposition.

It would make sense that nobody is now, or has at any point since January of 2023 been looking into anything more than backside-covering on this case. That’s when Valdez finally dropped the idea of retrying Buchhorn, after the DA’s own expert said that Ollie had died of a congenital heart defect.

But “sense” and this office have not often met.

Ex-Deputy DA impersonating commmenter

A week ago, Valdez’s deputy Joshua Seiden left his job as The Lawrence Journal-World prepared to run a story, confirmed by Sheriff Jay Armbrister, about Seiden “ seemingly impersonating a controversial public commenter. ” What? Honestly, it’s so crazy that I don’t know what more to say.

In case you’re wondering who might hire someone who’d pulled a stunt like that, well, we’ll see, but Seiden then interviewed for a deputy’s job in the Wyandotte County district attorney’s office.

Unfortunately, this is not some haha story about the wacky doings of a DA who has, if nothing else, united the courthouse. (At a three-day state disciplinary hearing of complaints about Valdez last December, Judge Stacey Donovan testified that judges generally try to avoid meeting alone with Valdez, and prefer communicating in writing, for fear that whatever they say will otherwise be misrepresented later. They never know, Donovan said, what is going to “set off something else.” This sounds like the kind of scary household where every day, the kids wake up whispering about what Mom or Dad’s mood is that day so they can plan how to tiptoe around most safely.)

None of this is funny: Just in this one case, a little boy died, a family was left grieving and the wrongly accused woman’s life was changed forever. Yet to the DA and the AG’s office, which is also defending this wrongful conviction, this once again seems to be more about winning than about justice or what actually happened.

I have been writing about this case since 2021, have watched the video of the shameful original autopsy, in which the completely discredited medical examiner essentially asked who his results should incriminate, and have also read the depositions and court filings in the criminal and subsequent civil case.

If you did, too, you’d be heartsick over the many ways that taxpayer money is being spent defending mistakes and egos.

Over and over, Josh Seiden in his recent deposition in the civil case refused to answer what exactly the state had on Buchhorn that pointed to her guilt. “Everything,” he kept saying.

“Yeah, but ‘everything’ is nothing,” Skepnek said. “What pointed to guilt? That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

Seiden said he’d heard nothing more specific from the original prosecutors, but “more along the lines of, you know, it — she’s guilty; the whole file shows that.” Pressed further, Seiden said that the autopsy was proof because “it corroborates her being the adult that had access to the child at that time and found the child.”

He also cited a photo of the dead child. “How does that support that conclusion?” Skepnek asked him. “I mean, it’s the child as he lay there,” Seiden answered. “That’s — I mean, the photo speaks for itself.” If only.

There’s new evidence in the case, the state says lately. When no, there’s a new expert, which legally speaking is not the same thing.

‘Bigger problem of honesty in the courtroom’

The bottom line should be that Carrody Buchhorn did not kill this child. And if anyone really thought otherwise, then she’d already have been retried. That’s never going to happen, because the state does not have a case.

Yet on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Valdez emailed me that yes, the murder investigation actually is still ongoing. So, was the DA confused in her recent deposition when she said that it was not?

Again, this would all be tedious and silly if it didn’t involve both a death and a life.

“This is about the bigger problem of honesty in the courtroom,” Skepnek told me. “Why would the government do this?”

He has asked that all of those involved be harshly sanctioned by the court. And though he’s right, I’m sorry to say that the system mostly marches on, protecting itself more reliably than it protects any of the rest of us.

Thankfully, though, it will soon be up to Douglas County voters to decide whether this particular surreality show is renewed for another season. And after four years of high drama and poor results, that’s unlikely.