CT’s chief public defender won’t call defense witnesses; hearing on her future moves forward

Nearly four hours into her termination hearing earlier this week, the oversight commission considering the removal of Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis asked her lawyer whether he wanted to continue until late at night or recess and reconvene another time.

“You want to stay here until 10?” attorney Thomas Bucci whispered to Bowden-Lewis, though not softly enough to avoid being caught by a microphone. “We’ll have to keep you on the payroll as long as possible.”

Bowden-Lewis, who has been suspended with pay , laughed and replied,  “Yes, I know, I know.”

By Thursday, she had decided to cut the process short, informing the Public Defender Services Commission, with which she has been at odds for the entirety of her time in office, that she has decided against calling witnesses in her defense.

“Attorney Bucci has confirmed that he will be proceeding directly to an oral summation without additional witness testimony,” commission Chairman Richard N. Palmer said Thursday. “The Commission will schedule a special public hearing for the purpose of hearing Attorney Bucci’s summation and commencing deliberations in the near future. The date of the special public hearing will be announced on the Division of Public Defender Services’ website as soon as it is scheduled.”

Bowden-Lewis’s decision not to call witnesses to rebut the commission’s list of charges against her moves the state’s public defender service closer to some sort of resolution of her tumultuous, two year battle with successive oversight commissions.

Four of the five members of the commission that appointed her the state’s first Black female public defender resigned as a group early last year after she accused them of discrimination and threatened to sue after they rejected her candidate for division human resources director. The commission said her candidate was unqualified. She claimed she was being denied the decision making authority given to her white predecessors.

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A new commission, which by law has the last word on hiring, spending and policy, was hastily empanelled and just as quickly became embroiled in a series of confrontations with Bowden-Lewis. She claimed the commission’s role was essentially to rubber stamp her decisions and, when it didn’t, she continued to assert that it was guilty of racial or sexual bias.

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Earlier this year, the commission drew up a detailed list of charges against Bowden-Lewis that includes retaliation against employees who disagree with her, making unfounded allegations of racism and lying to and impeding the work of the commission. The commission put her on paid administrative leave in February when an investigation revealed she had arranged to surreptitiously access and print out Palmer’s email correspondence with two senior division lawyers.

Morale has sunk in the division over the last year. The Connecticut Public Defender Attorneys Union, voted 121-9 in February that it lacked confidence in Bowden-Lewis’s leadership. Staff attorney’s said the division has been split along racial lines. At the hearing earlier this week, when Bowden-Lewis responded to the 16 charges against her, Black and white spectators sat separately.

After Bucci’s closing argument, the commission will decide whether to fire Bowden-Lewis or impose some lesser form of discipline. That decision will likely take the form of a legal opinion in anticipation of a possible legal challenge by Bucci of a possible expected termination.

Bucci did not respond to an inquiry about his plans, but he argued at length during the termination hearing that it amounted to an unconstitutional violation of Bowden-Lewis’s due process rights.

He argued that by compiling a list of charges against Bowden-Lewis, the commission has demonstrated bias against her. He said a decision on discipline must be made by a neutral panel. But he did not say whether such a panel exists in state government or under what authority one would be appointed.

The commission has been preceding with a disciplinary process adopted by the state Supreme Court in a similar employment law case.

Whatever the commission decides in Bowden-Lewis’s case, it will have to resolve other unfinished personnel matters that developed during Bowden-Lewis’s time in office.

The division’s director of diversity equity and inclusion has been suspended with pay since November for what female colleagues said they consider a misogynistic social media post. Daryl McGraw also is the subject of a complaint for accusing a Puerto Rican colleague of trying to act white.

Kate Kowalyshyn, a junior information technology staffer, was suspended in February for secretly hacking potentially privileged email accounts on Bowden-Lewis’s instructions and, when asked about it days later during a subsequent investigation, saying she couldn’t remember the details of what happened.

The commission also is expected to revisit the position of human resources director. An investigation by an outside law firm reported that Bowden-Lewis made working conditions so intolerable for the director appointed against her wishes that she resigned. Bowden-Lewis’s candidate has been working in an acting capacity since.