A former assistant prosecutor in St. Louis says that top staff working for St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner regularly make court filings on behalf of lower-level attorneys who have no idea what's being filed under their name and bar number.
Natalia Ogurkiewicz, who resigned from the Circuit Attorney’s Office on Friday, says that among the filings made by executive staff are nolle prosequi filings dismissing cases without the knowledge of the staff attorney handling the case — even though the staff attorney's signature is on the paperwork being filed.
"One of the craziest things was always that the executive staff would decide that things needed to be filed, and they would be filing it under our name without us ever knowing or allowing them to do it," Ogurkiewicz says.
Ogurkiewicz’s allegations — shared with the RFT in an interview yesterday — could become a complication for Gardner as she seeks to head off a removal petition from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. Gardner has argued that, under the law governing quo warranto actions like the one brought by Bailey, she can’t be held responsible for actions of underlings.
But Ogurkiewicz says top staffers regularly make court filings using the signatures of the other attorneys.
Ogurkiewicz cites as an example the relatively high-profile, but short-lived, case against Bianca Robinson, who in December was charged with robbery and armed criminal action for allegedly trying to carjack then-Alderman Brandon Bosley a few days before Christmas. Bosley's Facebook livestream of the immediate aftermath of the supposed crime became a story in itself.
The Circuit Attorney’s Office filed charges against Robinson on December 23, only to drop them on January 3. The memo to dismiss the charges appeared to have been filed by Ogurkiewicz, but Ogurkiewicz says she'd been off work for the holiday week and was only vaguely aware of the case from the media.
"Somebody else issued the charges. And it was nolle’ed before I ever knew it was going to be assigned to me. So the executive staff filed the nolle under my name without me even knowing the case existed," she says. "People started asking me questions about why I nolle’ed it. And I'm like, I don't know anything about this case."
She says that the office's case management software makes it relatively easy for a member of the leadership team to draft court filings on staff attorneys’ behalf. "If I'm assigned to a case in our system, you can generate a certain kind of memo, and my e-signature will just pop up," she says. "So they would just file those all the time without us ever actually physically being there and signing off."
Ogurkiewicz says it is common for motions to have certain judges disqualified from cases filed in this manner, too.
“Those were being filed under the attorneys’ names who were to be assigned those cases without them ever even knowing why,” she says.
When asked why Circuit Attorney Gardner or a member of her executive team would file motions with other attorneys' names on them, Ogurkiewicz says, "Kim can never be responsible for anything. Because in case it were to blow up…Kim's name is on not one filing."
Gardner maintaining a separation between herself and the attorneys on her staff has been a consistent motif in the embattled elected official's filings in response to Bailey's attempts to remove her through a quo warranto process.
Bailey has alleged many failings on the part of the CAO, including the office not prosecuting cases and attorneys not showing up to hearings.
Gardner has insisted in her own filings that if any mistakes were made by her office — and Gardner doesn't concede there were any — those mistakes are the fault of staff attorneys and not her.
“If the Attorney General believes an assistant circuit attorney has … forfeited his or her office, the remedy is not to seek Ms. Gardner’s ouster, but to seek that person’s ouster,” a motion filed by Gardner last week said.
When Ogurkiewicz left the office Friday, she penned a blistering letter on the way out, calling the office’s work environment "toxic."
She says there were many mornings when she was supposed to be in five different courtrooms, all at 9 a.m.
In theory, she says, every prosecutor's caseload was supposed to fit within judge groups that coordinated schedules. But in practice, the scheduling system broke down as more and more attorneys left the office.
“As people left, everyone had to take on the cases of the people who were leaving," Ogurkiewicz says. "So it ended up being a situation where all of us are assigned to every division."
At times, she says, it was impossible to prepare for trial while at the same time "work the pager," which means being on call to write warrant applications for violent crimes and other cases that need immediate action. She recalls that once, a week before she was supposed to start trial on a murder, new witnesses in that case came to light.
"They're totally different from all the [previous] interviews. They're different than the police report. Nobody had ever heard any of these names before," Ogurkiewicz says. "During those depositions, I get a text saying, 'You have the pager now; if you can't do it, find coverage. Good luck.'"
Ogurkiewicz says that Gardner, for her part, was "completely inaccessible."
"We could email her and it was a 30 percent chance you'd get a response."
"None of these things alone make a difference," Ogurkiewicz says. "But the totality of it was crazy."
Editor's note: This story was amended shortly after publication to use more precise language regarding the alleged filings made by senior staffers.
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