Readers know that I am opposed to confidentiality agreements in municipal litigation: lawsuits against public entities, about public matters, involving public figures should be publicly known.
Recently, Wisconsin’s Crime Victims Rights Board reprimanded Columbia County District Attorney Jane Kohlwey for something worse: a secret deal with a defendant’s attorney.
The AP Wire relates that
The Baraboo News-Republic newspaper reports Kohlwey signed a secret deal with Riedel’s [the defendant’s] attorney in February, saying the case would be dismissed if Riedel satisfied certain conditions. The agreement also called for Kohlwey to destroy all copies of the agreement.
The defendant, a former sheriff’s deputy, was accused of “backing over his then-girlfriend.”
Under Wisconsin law, a victim is entitled to information on a case’s disposition. The secret deal between the prosecutor and defense counsel kept that information from the victim as the law requires.
Secret deals are wrong because they distort justice by allowing prosecutors to extend opportunities to select parties without accountability to the public that elects prosecutors, and often in contradiction to the prosecutors’ own grandstanding public statements.
D.A. Kohlwey contends that she never destroyed the records of the deal.
I am unsympathetic; she should never have made the secret deal, and deserves no credit for failure to execute all parts of it before discovery.
This secret pact happened in Columbia County, but we should and must expect that there will not be similar deals in nearby Rock, Jefferson, or Walworth Counties.
Here’s a link to the AP story —
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/
W/WI_HIDDEN_RECORDS_CORRECTION_WIOL-
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