2009 attempted murder case dogs Keys prosecutor; she’s forced to quit over ethics violations
A Monroe County prosecutor will step down under pressure from her boss at the end of December after admitting to Florida Bar ethics violations earlier this month in connection with a 2009 attempted murder case she tried involving a retired Miami Beach police captain.
Assistant State Attorney Colleen Dunne, 48, pleaded guilty Dec. 2 to several ethics violations and will lose her license to practice law for one year if the Florida Supreme Court accepts the recommendations made by Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Maria Verde, according to documents released Thursday by the Bar.
Verde, who was appointed “referee” by the Bar in the case, also recommended fining Dunne $1,250.
Dunne, who has been a member of the Bar since 2000 with no prior disciplinary actions against her, said Thursday that while she can’t comment on the specifics of her case, there is more to the story than has been reported so far. She did not elaborate.
“Until the Florida Supreme Court makes a ruling and issues their order, this is still a pending matter and I am not permitted to discuss it. I fully intend on speaking about the matter and giving the full story about what happened 10 years ago that led to this recent action,” she said. “That has not yet been told, and the information that has been reported has been very one-sided.”
Dunne has been working at the State Attorney’s Office for 13 years and is one of the agency’s top prosecutors. Her salary is $96,000 a year. Her boss, Monroe State Attorney Dennis Ward, said her last day will be Dec. 31, and she is spending her time “bringing other prosecutors up to speed on her cases.”
He said after the Miami Herald broke the story on her impending guilty plea earlier this month that he would give her the option of resigning.
The veteran attorney is accused of improperly withholding from defense attorneys information about three jailhouse phone calls former South Beach cop William Skinner, now 64, had with his adult son on June 1, 2009, the day he shot and wounded his then-estranged wife’s boyfriend.
That day, he fired a total of six shots during an argument with the woman at their Plantation Key Colony home. The boyfriend was shot while trying to close the front door of the house to get away from Skinner. Monroe County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrived and shot Skinner with a stun gun after they say he reached into his car for another gun.
The couple’s 4-year-old son was inside the house when he fired the weapon.
Skinner’s attorneys — in January 2010, before the case went to trial — informed Dunne that they intended to rely on an insanity defense for their client. Skinner’s demeanor and comments he made in the jailhouse phone calls, according to the November 2018 Florida Bar complaint, showed he was sane when shot the gun.
However, Skinner’s attorney, Cara Higgins, did not know the state was in possession of the phone calls until after Dunne deposed a defense mental health witness on July 27, 2010. Dunne’s line of questioning during the deposition prompted Higgins to ask her if she was in possession of “some statements allegedly made” by Skinner the day of the shooting.
According to transcripts of the deposition that were included in the Bar complaint, Dunne denied having any statements Skinner made that day.
“I have turned over any and all statements that he has made that day,” Dunne said.
Dunne emailed Higgins audio files of the jailhouse calls the next day. Higgins filed a motion to have them excluded as evidence in the trial. During the May 10, 2011, hearing on the motion, which was days before the trial, Dunne said she was familiar with the conversations the day she deposed the defense expert, but had not yet downloaded them.
But, that statement was shown to be not true by two emails sent in July 2010 from Dunne’s intern. One, sent July 6, stated the intern was almost done downloading the conversations to DVD. And, a July 16 email was sent to the state’s mental health expert witness that contained copies of the calls, according to the complaint.
Monroe Circuit Judge Luis Garcia concluded that Dunne should have turned over the phone calls to Higgins prior to the July 27, 2010, deposition. But, he also denied Higgins’ motion, stating enough time existed between when Dunne turned over the calls and the trial “to cure the prejudice resulting from the violation,” the complaint said.
A jury convicted Skinner of two counts of attempted second-degree murder and one count of armed burglary. Garcia sentenced him to life in prison on the armed burglary count and one of the attempted murder counts. For the other attempted murder count, Garcia sentenced Skinner to an additional 15 years.
The attempted murder counts were overturned in 2014 after the Florida Third District Court of Appeal ruled the state erred during jury instructions. Prosecutors should have allowed jurors to decide on a lesser charge of attempted manslaughter, according to the appellate panel.
But, the life sentence on the armed burglary charge stood, so then-Monroe County State Attorney Catherine Vogel decided against retrying Skinner.
A Florida Bar probable cause investigator 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 2015, that “it was determined with certainty that Ms. Dunne was in possession of the jail calls during the defense expert depositions.”
LaVey is seeking a new trial for Skinner on the armed burglary count, and he wants the Monroe County State Attorney’s Office off the case. Garcia has so far denied that request.
“One way or the other, they have to reverse the conviction,” LaVey said earlier this month.
Skinner said in a Dec. 4 email sent from prison to the Herald that he showed up at the house that day because his now ex-wife Indira “parentally kidnapped our son four days before the incident — when she abandoned our marital home, without any discussion or warning to me.”
He said he did not know until that day that she had left him for another man.
“Indira had secretly moved in with her boyfriend, who we had later found out she had been seeing for two years. I did not know she took our son for two days. I did not know she had a boyfriend until after the incident,” Skinner said.
Higgins is a defense attorney in another high-profile case assigned to Dunne that has made recent headlines — the so-called “tree house murder” in Key West. She filed a motion in October to disqualify Dunne from that case, in large part because Higgins was a witness in the Bar complaint.
Ward, the state attorney took Dunne off the tree house case — a 2017 stabbing murder that police say resulted from a botched crack cocaine robbery — in October, after Higgins filed the motion. But Higgins said he should have benched Dunne after the Bar found probable cause to investigate her in 2018.
“I find it reprehensible for a prosecutor to lie to the court and hide evidence,” Higgins said Friday. “It is equally reprehensible for the state attorney to condone and ignore such behavior by his assistants.”
As far as pulling Dunne from all her cases sooner, Ward said she was entitled to due process before action was taken against her by his office.
“I’m not condoning what Colleen did. She admitted to doing it. She received due process. And, that’s why she won’t be employed by the state attorney’s office after Dec. 31,” he said. “I find it reprehensible that someone in the legal profession would come in and make a reckless statement like that on someone’s due process rights.”
The tree house case has become a headache for another Keys law enforcement agency as well — the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Rick Ramsay revoked the command of his major crimes unit leader this month after a tape surfaced of her instructing one of her men in either November or December 2017 to pressure one of the two murder suspects, a black man, by acting like a “white supremacist cop.”
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 2:53 PM.
