State Attorney Fernandez Rundle faces mounting criticism over prosecutor conduct

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle is facing calls by a statewide organization of criminal defense attorneys for an independent ethics review of her office amid new claims of misconduct by her prosecutors.

Just weeks ago, Rundle rebuffed a call from a Miami group of criminal defense attorneys for an outside look at prosecutors’ handling of cases, after two prosecutors were thrown off a high-profile murder case by the judge.

In a three-page statement sent Friday morning to its 1,400 members, the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers alleged Rundle allows unethical behavior to go unchecked. The office has a “win at all costs” mentality, abuses its authority, and “has fostered conditions permissive to a toxic culture,” reads the statement, signed by association President Luke Newman, a criminal appeals attorney based in Tallahassee.

The Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers “is appalled by recent and ongoing unethical conduct by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, along with retaliatory targeting of criminal defense lawyers,“ the statement says.

The organization is alleging misconduct in the high-profile murder case of OnlyFans model and accused killer Courtney Clenney. The lawyers’ group called for the removal of prosecutor Khalil Quinan from the case, an apology to defense lawyers, “and a full, independent ethics review within the Miami Dade State Attorney’s Office.”

READ THE STATEMENT

The case is the second in two months in which Rundle’s prosecutors are accused of misconduct. In the murder resentencing case of gangster Corey Smith, Judge Andrea Ricker Wolfson was so incensed by the tactics of prosecutors Michael Von Zamft and Stephen Mitchell that she took the rare — and, for Rundle, embarrassing — step in early March of removing them from the case.

Wolfson’s order cast a shadow on Rundle’s office just as she approaches another election to continue running the largest state attorney’s office in Florida. Qualifying for candidates begins Monday and concludes Friday. Rundle, a 74-year-old Democrat, paid her candidate qualifying fee Wednesday to run for another four-year term. A Cuban-American, she was first appointed to the job in 1993, then won elections for three decades. The job pays $212,562.

An arrest and a search warrant

Jude Faccidomo, a past president of the statewide lawyers’ organization and an attorney representing Clenney’s parents, Kim and Deborah Clenney, seized on the Wolfson order earlier this month, using it as a foundation for making larger accusations that Rundle’s office has a permissive culture. In a motion filed April 8 to Judge Laura Cruz, he alleged vindictive prosecution of the parents and asked that charges against them be dismissed.

Rundle’s office didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment late Thursday, but pointed to a court document in the Clenney case in which the allegations of bias and misconduct are vigorously disputed.

Much of what the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said this week echoes what Faccidomo filed in his motion.

Clenney, a social media phenom, is charged with second-degree murder in the 2022 stabbing death of her boyfriend Christian Obumseli at their Miami apartment. She is arguing self-defense.

Her parents are charged in a separate but related case, accused of unauthorized access to a computer from the Miami crime scene.

Though the case is unrelated to the Smith case and involves different prosecutors, Faccidomo ties them together in his motion.

“The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has recently come under scrutiny for its toxic culture and the ethically questionable actions of certain senior prosecutors in discharging their duty to the citizens of Miami-Dade County,” the motion reads. “ … The above-listed Defendants are similarly subject to the State’s ‘win at all costs’ the ‘rules do not apply to us’ mentality resulting in a vindictive prosecution in violation of their due process rights.”

Friction between defense attorneys and prosecutors first ignited, Faccidomo said, when text messages emerged showing prosecutor Quinan communicating about the case with then-Miami Herald reporter David Ovalle. In the exchange, Quinan disparaged the defense team and revealed how much they were paid for taking the case, Faccidomo complained in his motion.

Defense attorneys on that case notified Quinan’s supervisor, Kathleen Hoague, in April of 2023, but Faccidomo’s motion says that ultimately, nothing was done.

In a reply to the motion, Hoague said the text message conversation with the reporter broke no rules, but she spoke with Quinan “regarding his private communications and [told him] to refrain from discussing an open case with a personal friend.”

Faccidomo says in his motion that Quinan retaliated afterwards in his handling of the Clenney case.

He charged Clenney and her parents with the little-used statute regarding accessing a computer. The computer had been shared by Clenney and Obumseli and was left at the scene by crime scene processors.

Faccidomo said Kim Clenney, the defendant’s father, took it when he was tasked with clearing out the entire apartment. It was then accessed using one of Obumseli’s passwords. Nothing of value to the case was found, Faccidomo said, or it would have been turned over.

Particularly offensive to the attorney group was the fact that two of Clenney’s defense attorneys were listed as principals in the alleged laptop crime. Hoague said in her court filing that they were included as witnesses, not uncharged parties to a crime.

Quinan also had the parents — both of whom are witnesses for the defense — arrested at their Texas home because of the laptop, and had a search warrant executed at the home of the defense’s laptop expert. Faccidomo cited the search warrant in his motion as another example of retaliation by Quinan, because the expert’s wife was the incoming president of the defense attorneys’ Miami chapter and had overseen a query to all the chapter’s members asking if lawyers had experienced unethical conduct by Quinan.

“To be clear,” Faccidomo wrote, “Quinan sought a search warrant at the home of the defense attorney that he believed to be responsible for the investigation into his unethical behavior.”

Hoague said Quinan didn’t make decisions alone; the prosecutors made decisions as a team. They didn’t know the expert’s wife was incoming chapter president, her motion says.

Quinan also read communications between the defense attorneys and their clients when he accessed their iCloud accounts — a violation of attorney-client privilege, Faccidomo and the statewide lawyers’ group alleged.

Hoague’s motion says the prosecutors didn’t know they were reading communications with her attorneys.

The statewide lawyers’ organization said in its statement that Quinan’s actions in the Clenney case “are so far outside the norms of the criminal legal system that it is apparent he is using his State Attorney badge as a sword and not a shield. Worse yet, this conduct has been brought to the attention of his supervisors, and no discipline of any kind has been enforced. The Miami Dade State Attorney’s Office has surpassed mere acquiescence of unethical behavior and is now encouraging it.”

In the 118-page response to the motion, Rundle’s office said Faccidomo is trying to capitalize on what happened in the unrelated Smith case.

“The motion takes great pains to weave a web of entirely unrelated incidents and cases to cast aspersions onto a legal prosecution, the State Attorney’s Office, and to otherwise defame an individual prosecutor.”

Make the witness ‘unavailable’

The defense attorneys said Rundle tacitly endorses misbehavior by offering no consequences for it.

The group said it had learned that after being removed from the Smith case by Judge Wolfson, prosecutor Von Zamft was “allowed to resign with no further consequences,” and co-prosecutor Mitchell, also implicated by Wolfson’s order, “faced no discipline whatsoever.”

Rundle’s office didn’t immediately respond to questions about whether either faced consequences.

In the Smith case, Von Zamft was accused of coordinating witness testimony and talking to a convicted killer about making a witness “unavailable.”

Judge Wolfson also called out co-prosecutor Mitchell for following “Von Zamft’s lead without concern for the consequences.”

Though the revelations could have implications for other cases prosecuted by Von Zamft, Rundle has resisted the notion of conducting a proactive review of past cases.

In March, the Miami chapter of the criminal defense lawyers’ association called for exactly that. Rundle said her own office will conduct a review, and only of that one case.

In an email to the Miami Herald two weeks ago, spokesman Ed Griffith said “it always goes without say[ing], whether a case was handled by Mr. Von Zamft or anyone else in my office, if there was any allegation of impropriety in any case, or any allegation of actual innocence, we would of course entertain it on a case specific basis.”

Faccidomo told the Herald that “Judge Wolfson’s order … shined a light on what’s really been a poorly kept secret, that there are some prosecutors who are not being held accountable when these issues arise and are not being addressed by the state attorney.”

He said most of the prosecutors in the office fulfill their duties properly.

“Not to be cliche but it’s one of those ‘a few bad apples’ situations,” Faccidomo told the Herald. “When you’re dealing with something as important and significant as a person’s liberty, you can’t have a few bad apples.”

Miami Herald staff writer Charles Rabin contributed to this report.