DENVER—District Attorney Carol Chambers can’t prosecute an upcoming death penalty trial of an inmate accused of killing another prisoner because her office has conflicts in the case, a judge ruled Monday.
Chambers will appeal the ruling, district attorney’s office spokeswoman Kathleen Walsh said.
Chambers’ office was removed from the case after a judge ruled that 30-year-old Alejandro Perez’s right to a fair trial was in jeopardy because of conflicts of interest from two prosecutors, including one who once represented Perez as a defendant.
Lincoln County District Judge Stanley A. Brinkley said a special prosecutor must now be appointed in Perez’s case.
Perez is a co-defendant of David Bueno, whose death-penalty case is already being deliberated by jurors. Both are charged in the 2004 stabbing death of 40-year-old Jeffrey Heird at the Limon Correctional Facility.
In his order, Brinkley focused on the role of two former defense attorneys who worked on the Heird case, and whether the prosecution properly funded its costs through the Department of Corrections.
One of the attorneys, Dan Edwards, a prosecutor with the state Attorney General’s capital crimes unit working for Chambers’ office, once represented Perez in the second-degree murder case that got him sent to prison.
“To allow an attorney to engage in the calculated killing of a former client shocks the conscience of a civilized society,” Perez’s attorneys wrote in the court motion asking for the removal of Chambers’ office in the case.
The other attorney, Bob Watson, was a deputy prosecutor in Chambers’ district when the Heird homicide happened and one of the first investigators on the scene. Though Watson is no longer involved in the case, he once represented an inmate whom defense attorneys say should have been a suspect in the Heird slaying but was never investigated under Watson’s direction.
Brinkley said those two conflicts were enough to remove Chambers’ office from the Perez case, without adding “to the mix the mechanism used by the district attorney’s office in funding this particular prosecution.”
Although state law allows the Department of Corrections to reimburse district attorneys to prosecute prison crimes, Brinkley ruled the law does not include attorney’s fees. However, part of the DOC funding has gone to cover the entire salary for Dan May, the chief deputy district attorney prosecuting Bueno, according to the court order.
Brinkley also said Chambers’ office “circumvented” the law by billing the DOC directly, instead of having the costs first certified by the county. Brinkley said that because the four counties in Chambers’ district were providing funding for her office at the same time the DOC was billed, “the question then arises as to whether or not this was doubling up on the part of the district attorney’s office which would provide governmental profit for that department.”
Legal expert Scott Robinson said the funding issue is not as problematic as the conflicts posed by the former defense attorneys.
“Either of those could’ve served as an appropriate basis for disqualification,” Robinson said.
Robinson said it’s possible the judge in the Bueno case could stop jury deliberations because of Brinkley’s ruling, but added that that would be “extraordinary” and “a long shot.”
