3 jailhouse phone calls in a shooting case end in ethics violations for a Keys prosecutor
A prosecutor in the Florida Keys has admitted to Florida Bar ethics violations related to an attempted murder case that sent a retired Miami Beach police captain to prison for shooting his estranged wife’s boyfriend.
Colleen Dunne, an assistant state attorney in Monroe County, faces a year suspension of her law license. And her boss said this week that he likely will fire her.
“She’s made an admission,” Monroe State Attorney Dennis Ward said. “She’ll be given the option to resign at the end of the month.”
Dunne has worked for the State Attorney’s Office for 13 years. The prosecutor, who makes $96,000 a year, declined to comment.
She is accused of improperly withholding from defense attorneys information about three jailhouse telephone conversations that the former police captain, William Thomas Skinner, had with his son on the day of the shooting, June 1, 2009.
That day, Skinner, now 64, fired six shots during an argument he had with his wife and her boyfriend at their Plantation Key Colony home. The boyfriend was shot and wounded in the shoulder as he tried shutting the front door to get away from Skinner.
Skinner attempted to strangle his wife before firing the handgun. The estranged couple’s son, 4 at the time, was home during the chaos. Monroe sheriff’s deputies used a stun gun to subdue Skinner when they say he reached for another gun inside his car.
In 2011, a Florida Keys jury convicted Skinner on two counts of attempted second-degree murder and one count of armed burglary. Monroe Circuit Judge Luis Garcia sentenced him to life in prison on one of the attempted murder charges, another life term on the armed burglary charge, and an additional 15 years for the second attempted murder charge.
The attempted murder charges were overturned in 2014 based on improper jury instructions. Skinner’s attorney has asked for a new trial on the remaining count.
Back when the case was heading to trial, defense attorneys in January 2010 told prosecutors they intended to rely on insanity as a defense for their client.
Dunne, the prosecutor, had initially planned to use the telephone calls between Skinner and his son as evidence that Skinner was sane when he fired his weapon. The calls “demonstrated the defendant was lucid, organized in his thoughts, able to plan, that he remembered the events in question and that he had not suffered any blackouts,” the November 2018 Florida Bar complaint to the Florida Supreme Court states.
However, Dunne did not tell defense attorneys about the calls, according to the complaint.
According to the Florida Bar’s probable cause report, Dunne also denied having access to those conversations when she deposed a mental health expert working on behalf of Skinner’s attorneys on July 27, 2010. During that deposition — which was prior to the trial — Dunne “asked pointed questions which insinuated she had knowledge of statements made by the defendant to his son,” the Bar complaint states.
The line of questioning prompted Skinner’s attorney at the time, Cara Higgins, to ask Dunne if she was in possession of “some statements allegedly made by the defendant that day that [Dunne] is referring to?”
According to the transcripts in the Bar complaint, Dunne responded: “I am not in possession of any statements Mr. Skinner gave to law enforcement or that I’m referring to. I’m not. I am not in any possession. I have turned over any and all statements that he has made that day.”
Higgins responded that the “entire line of questioning” suggested she had not disclosed all the evidence she had at the time.
Dunne, according to the transcript, responded that she “will provide any and all statements that Mr. Skinner made that would be required under discovery rules.” Higgins replied that she had already asked for that information.
After the deposition, Dunne emailed Higgins the audio copies of the three phone calls.
Higgins filed a motion to exclude the phone calls as evidence. A hearing was held May 10, 2011, days before Skinner’s trial, in which Dunne testified that at the time of the deposition, she was not in possession of the phone calls, according to the Bar complaint.
“At the time I was deposing these witnesses, I was familiar that Mr. Skinner had been making these phone calls, but I didn’t have them literally downloaded on disk,” the transcript reads.
But, according to the Bar complaint, Dunne’s statement is refuted by a July 6, 2010, email from her intern stating she was almost done downloading the phone calls to DVD, and another email on July 16, 2010, to the prosecution’s expert witness that contained the phone calls.
Dunne told Garcia, the judge, that she did not intend to use the calls as evidence until after she deposed the defense’s mental health expert, according to the complaint.
Garcia concluded that Dunne should have turned over the phone calls, but he denied Higgins’ motion to keep the calls out of the evidence for the trial, stating that there was enough time in between when the phone calls were turned over to Higgins and the trial to “cure the prejudice resulting from the violation,” according to the Bar complaint.
The Florida Bar probable cause report stated that it wasn’t until several years after the trial — when more emails were turned over to Skinner’s new attorney, Seth LaVey, in 2013 and after a 2015 hearing to disqualify the Monroe County State Attorney’s Office in the case — that “it was determined with certainty that Ms. Dunne was in possession of the jail calls during the defense expert depositions,” Bar investigator Brittany Miller wrote in her report.
Nevertheless, Garcia denied the motion to remove the State Attorney’s Office from the case, although he concluded that Dunne “clearly violated her ethical obligation to the court when she denied having possession of the three recorded phone calls prior to the depositions of the defense experts,” Miller stated in her report.
LaVey wants a new trial, and a different venue.
“One way or the other, they have to reverse the conviction,” he said.
Dunne was scheduled to argue against the Bar complaint this week in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, but the hearing was canceled after she agreed to a plea. The details of the agreement were not disclosed, but Ward confirmed Dunne “admitted to not being candid with court.”
LaVey said under the plea agreement, Dunne will lose her law license for a year.
Ultimately, it is up to the Florida Supreme Court to approve the agreement, said Francine Walker, public information officer with the Florida Bar.
LaVey said he is not entirely satisfied with the outcome because Ward continued to assign Dunne major cases after the Bar found probable cause against her in February 2018.
“He should have at least benched her,” LaVey said. “Instead, he let her run roughshod.”
LaVey is co-counsel in another one of Dunne’s cases, the so-called “tree house murder.” Police say his client, John Johnson, drove the getaway car in that crime. Franklin Tyrone Tucker and another man, Rory Hank Wilson, are accused of stabbing another man to death inside a tree house on Stock Island in a botched crack cocaine robbery. Higgins is the other attorney representing Tucker, and she filed a motion to disqualify Dunne from the case in October.
Higgins said the state’s case relies solely on a jailhouse informant who told police Tucker confessed to him his involvement in the killing. Other than that, there is no physical evidence placing Tucker at the scene, Higgins said.
“The state’s case is horrible,” Higgins said.
Among other accusations, Higgins said the videotapes of the original police interrogations have disappeared, and she said she has reason to believe Dunne and some cops may have “planted” the jailhouse informant.
LaVey said Dunne should have been pulled from the case a long time ago.
“There’s nothing more dangerous than a prosecutor who lies to the court and hides evidence from her opposition,” he said.
Ward said he pulled Dunne from all her cases after Higgins filed her motion. He said she had been assisting other prosecutors taking her place with those cases, and has most recently been taking vacation time.
“She hasn’t been part of any cases” since then, Ward said.
As far as his involvement as Dunne’s boss back in 2010 in the Skinner case, Ward said her immediate supervisor was the one who told her to use jailhouse phone conversations as evidence, not him.
“I’m not a part of this,” Ward said. “It’s the Florida Bar versus Colleen Dunne.”
This story was originally published December 4, 2019 at 11:53 AM.
