Former Kenosha County DA cleared in ethics case
Supreme Court rejects reserve judge’s decision
The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a reserve judge’s conclusions that former Kenosha County District Attorney Robert Zapf violated ethical rules and should be suspended.
In a 49-page opinion — unusually long for a lawyer discipline case — the court concluded “the Office of Lawyer Regulation failed to demonstrate by clear, satisfactory, and convincing evidence” that Zapf violated the rules alleged in a complaint. “I’m very pleased with the decision of the Supreme Court,” Zapf said. “They seem very detailed in their analysis and didn’t just rubber-stamp the referee’s finding.”
“The criminal justice system is not an exact science,” he said. “Legal minds may disagree.”
In December 2016, the OLR accused Zapf of three counts of professional misconduct related to the 2015 prosecution of two men involved in a 2014 shooting death. It came months after a Kenosha activist and two lawyers filed their own complaints with OLR over the case.
The OLR charges focus on Zapf ’s claimed failure to fully and timely disclose information to the defense that a Kenosha police officer, Kyle Baars, had planted evidence and then resigned and was facing a possible criminal investigation.
The high court found that it wasn’t clear until much later that the officer had indeed planted the evidence with the intent to implicate a specific suspect.
“Although we know now, with the benefit of hindsight, that those items were, in fact, ‘planted’ by Officer Baars, we must be careful not to conflate that later acquired knowledge with the knowledge of the participants at the time (or in the subsequent months).”
The OLR sought a 90-day suspension, but referee Dennis Flynn, a former Racine County circuit judge, who the high court said “clearly viewed this matter as a massive conspiracy by the KPD as well as an egregious exercise in hiding police criminal conduct by Attorney Zapf,” recommended at least a year’s suspension.
Zapf has been an Office of Lawyer Regulation target as DA before. In 1985, he was sanctioned by the state Supreme Court for failing to disclose pretrial material and contacting a defendant without going through the defendant’s attorney.
That was during Zapf ’s first stint as DA, from 1980 to 1988. After several years out of office, he returned in 2005 when he was appointed by then-Gov. Jim Doyle.
He announced in March 2016 that he would retire at the end of that year.