KU Law professor to run for Douglas County DA, says Branson is ‘asleep at the wheel’
A University of Kansas law professor whose student was charged last year with making a false report of rape has filed to run for the office of district attorney in Douglas County.
Suzanne Valdez, the former president of University Senate at KU and special prosecutor in Wyandotte County, said she believes the current district attorney, Charles Branson, has been “asleep at the wheel” and become complacent after more than a decade in office.
Valdez said she and Branson were in the same graduating class at KU law in the 90s and, though she believes Branson cares, she thinks the county needs a change. In an interview with The Star, Valdez said she hopes to address “systemic and cultural” issues in the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office, placing a focus on uniform policy and victim needs.
She told The Star last year that law enforcement in Lawrence failed to protect women.
Valdez, who specializes in prosecutorial ethics, is the second person to enter the Democratic primary to be the top prosecutor in Lawrence. Cooper Overstreet, a defense attorney at The Swain Law Office, announced his candidacy last week.
Branson has not yet filed to run for reelection. In an email Thursday, Branson said he is not ready to announce his future plans.
“I will say the people of Douglas County have been well served by the attorneys and staff of this office,” Branson said. “I believe the criticism aimed at this office and those that work with me is misdirected, shortsighted and uninformed.”
The district attorney’s office faced criticism last year after prosecutors filed, then dropped, false report cases against three women who had reported sexual assault and domestic violence. One of those women was Valdez’s student.
Branson has since announced changes in policy and training on sexually violent crime in his office. He hired a consultant in February to work with prosecutors and law enforcement. A training session initially scheduled for April was postponed because of COVID-19, Branson told The Star in an email in March.
He was first elected in 2004, according to the Douglas County website.
Treatment of victims
In an interview with The Star, Valdez described how the district attorney’s office would run differently if she is elected.
She said she started hearing concerns about Branson’s office in the last two years. The issues, she said, included Branson’s handling of a murder case that was delayed for five years and the debate over a proposed jail expansion in Douglas County.
The “trigger” however, that left her angry and pushed her toward running was the decision in 2019 to charge her student with making a false report of rape.
“My beef, my argument, my anger was that there was no sensitivity at all to that case and the others that I’ve seen, instead he’s treated the survivors as liars,” she said. “It’s a very, very serious thing to do what he did.”
Though she acknowledged that sexual assault cases can be difficult to investigate and prosecute, she said she struggles to see a scenario in which filing charges for false report would be appropriate.
She said Branson’s efforts to revamp policy and training on the topic in his office following criticism are “a little too late.”
She said sexual assault cases need to be handled with sensitivity and it will be important to work with with the police department, which has been accused of retraumatizing survivors, on how to handle such cases. Like the district attorney’s office, the police department announced changes in the wake of criticism.
“If we all care about our community and we care about the way these cases are handled and the sensitivity of them then we all need to be on the same page,” she said.
“Is it going to be a challenge for me? It might be because I think I’ve been fairly vocal about my disappointment in how these cases are handled but maybe it’s a learning moment.”
The district attorneys office, she said, needs to place a larger focus on ensuring the victim of any crime has a say in the process.
Changes in policy
In addition to adjusting the way the office interacts with victims, Valdez said, she plans to redesign the county’s diversion program to make it more realistic for defendants to complete.
And she would create a clear policy for prioritizing the prosecution of violent crimes over non-violent crimes while finding ways to send people back into the community when possible.
“If you’re putting people in jail for crimes where it may be feasible to allow this individual to pay a fine, to undergo therapy, to use other resources what ever it is that we can get that person back into the community without putting them in jail, that’s where the focus should be,” she said.
Additionally, Valdez said she sees a need for policies that ensure criminal cases are cleared quickly. As the county’s debate over jail expansion moves to the federal courts, Valdez said it is important to look at data and understand the role prosecutors played in overcrowding.
Part of that, she said, will come through careful consideration of the prosecutors in the office. Valdez criticized Branson’s choice to keep prosecutor Amy McGowan on staff despite allegations of misconduct in Kansas and Missouri. McGowan retired last year.
“You can’t have prosecutors in your office with that type of reputation,” Valdez said.
More transparency is needed for these conversations Valdez said
“We need to acknowledge that we’ve got a criminal justice system that is racist, is biased,” she said. “We have a horrible problem nationwide with incarceration. We’ve got these big issues that we need to acknowledge these are problems and we need to fix them. And what we need to do is we need to fix them as a community.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 1:53 PM.
