05182016 - News Article - Prosecutor calls for investigation of former court clerk

Prosecutor calls for investigation of former court clerk
Post-Tribune
May 18, 2016
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The stepdaughter of former Lake Station Mayor Keith Soderquist is facing a new criminal investigation connected to whether she failed to perform her duties as a court clerk for the city.

Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter Jr. said Wednesday that he asked the Indiana State Police to investigate whether Miranda Brakley violated state law by failing to notify the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles of people convicted of operating while under the influence.

Brakley pleaded guilty earlier this year to stealing bond money from the city court and is waiting to be sentenced in federal court. Soderquist pleaded guilty to helping her hide the crime.

Miranda Brakley's attorney, Thomas Vanes, strongly denied any allegations against his client, however, saying Carter is trying to hide his own office's mistakes.

"The only thing this is going to do is distract from Bernie's office's screw-up," Vanes said.

The issue arose after it came out that Randy Palmateer, a local union official who sits on several public boards including the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority, was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of reckless driving after an operating while intoxicated arrest earlier this year.

Carter's office had already given Palmateer a plea deal in a similar situation in 2011 and said that normally for a second case a defendant would not be able to plead down. However, Carter said a week ago that Palmateer's prior record didn't show up in a BMV database, and the deputy prosecutor handling the case thought Palmateer was a first-time offender.

Carter's office started an investigation with the Lake Station Court, where Palmateer's first conviction took place, and sampled 12 random OWI files. Carter said none of them had been reported to the BMV.

"We found that the charges with Randy Palmateer and his lack of BMV record reporting was not isolated," Carter said.

Carter said his office has pinpointed Brakley as the likely culprit, saying that interviews with other people showed she was the one primarily responsible for reporting OWIs to the BMV.

"This is not an incompetence issue," he said. "It's willful, intentional."

Carter said the matter could become a official misconduct issue because anyone who works for a public office and whose duties include filing records with the state has a legal obligation to do so.

Along with asking the state police to investigate, Carter has asked Lake Station officials to go through all OWI records from about 2008 to 2012, when Brakley worked there, to determine the extent of the issue, he said.

Lake Station Mayor Christopher Anderson, who served as city judge during that time, said the city has already started an investigation and that it could take several weeks to go through all the applicable files, which he estimated at around 500.

Vanes defended his client, saying that she was not the only one responsible for submitting records to the BMV and that for at least some time, court clerks thought that a Lake County court program did it automatically. Brakley also previously brought the 2011 Palmateer conviction to Carter's attention, Vanes said, so he questioned why she would then purposely not report it to the BMV.

Vanes argued that Carter's office erred in failing to find Palmateer's prior conviction, noting they would have seen the prior conviction if they had looked at local court records.

"They just didn't check or didn't want to check," Vanes said.

Vanes also pointed the finger at Anderson, saying that as he served as judge at the time, he is ultimately responsible for any error.

Anderson said that it's possible he bears some responsibility for what happened but noted that the city judge is a part-time position whose primary duties are to oversee the court calls. Once the judge accepts a plea deal, the court clerks handle the case from there, he said.

Anderson said the city would likely look to whether changes need to be made to create more checks and balances but noted that it would be impossible to have every OWI record double-checked.

"We'll try to use this best we can as a learning experience and make sure it doesn't happen again," he said.

Brakley's plea deal with federal attorneys require her to not commit any other criminal acts, and Soderquist's plea deal relies on Brakley following her plea deal. Vanes said he was not worried about Carter's allegations affecting the federal case.

"No one's going to buy Bernie's nonsense here," Vanes said.

Scott King, who is representing Soderquist, could not be reached for comment. Ryan Holmes, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in Hammond, declined to comment on the case.

Carter said he did not know how long a police investigation into the issue would take but said that he would accept whatever their recommendations were.