Attorney Haase
in The News

March 10, 2023

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In July 2021 Winnebago County Circuit Judge Scott Woldt was disciplined by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for violating multiple provisions of the Code of Judicial Conduct, including a rule that requires impartiality.  

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But just months after serving a one-week suspension imposed as punishment, Woldt made statements from the bench about a criminal case that called his impartiality into question again. His comments were memorialized by one of the lawyers who heard them and prompted the defense attorney to file a formal request for the judge to step aside. The trial involved a case of extremely violent domestic abuse in Menasha. Woldt agreed to disqualify himself from the matter. But some local lawyers see his courtroom comments as evidence that the Supreme Court was mistaken when it decided to temper its punishment of the judge based on his “assertion that he has attempted to modify his conduct.” 

 

In its 2021 ruling the Supreme Court said Woldt used “undignified, discourteous and disrespectful language,” “essentially threatened” one defendant and tried “to intimidate” another. “These are all serious violations of a judge’s ethical duties and show an open and callous disregard of Judge Woldt’s obligation to serve the public in a fair, reasoned, impartial and courteous way,” the court said.

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Acrimonious campaign

 

Questions about Woldt’s fitness for office are front and center in an acrimonious campaign between him and former Judge LaKeisha Haase. Their race for a six-year term in Branch II has split the local legal community, with each candidate claiming the public support of one of the county’s six circuit court judges. Branch IV Judge Michael Gibbs, who unseated Haase a year ago, is backing Woldt while Branch I Judge Teresa Basiliere, who was elected to an open seat in 2018, is backing Haase.

 

Both candidates have freely criticized the other, but the accusations can be hard to pin down. Haase said on social media that the most recent impartiality incident led to a complaint with the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, which was confirmed this week to the Examiner by the lawyer who filed it, Ben Szilagyi. But Woldt said he has been assured there are no complaints currently pending against him.

 

With 19 years on the bench and a reputation for thoroughly researching his cases, Woldt is campaigning on a record of running a tight ship in court while also developing alternative sentencing programs intended to rehabilitate offenders and improve public safety. His long tenure and community involvement may explain the extensive degree of support he enjoys despite the Supreme Court’s strong public rebuke of his behavior.

 

It was less than two years ago that the Wisconsin high court issued its 30-page report on Woldt’s conduct as judge. The court found that Woldt had mocked a domestic abuse victim from the bench, displayed a handgun on multiple occasions in his courtroom and, at least by implication, called a lawyer arguing before him a “dick.” But Woldt says that these descriptions, while true, do not provide a complete picture. “I’m not this raving maniac,” Woldt said in an interview. He argued that his behavior looks worse on paper than it was in real life and that greater context would help explain why he acted the way he did in certain circumstances. 

 

District attorney backs Woldt

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That view seems to be widely shared in the Winnebago County Courthouse. His election committee includes the county’s top prosecutor, District Attorney Eric Sparr, as well as defense attorney Edmund Jelinski, who is probably best known to local residents as a whistleblower who helped send former D.A. Joe Paulus to prison. The chairman of Woldt’s campaign committee is state Rep. Michael Schraa (R-53rd). Other prominent supporters, according to Woldt’s website, include County Executive Jon Doemel, Oshkosh City Council member Bill Miller, UW Oshkosh criminal justice professor David Jones and a raft of local lawyers, both prosecutors and defense attorneys.

 

Haase also lists a large number of high-profile endorsers, including former judges, Oshkosh Mayor and Assembly Rep. Lori Palmeri (D-54th) as well as school board President Barb Herzog and board members Stephanie Carlin and Angie Lee. But Haase positions herself as an outsider, someone who is willing to criticize what she sees as failings in the administration of criminal justice. She believes the way that support for Woldt has coalesced is a sign that entrenched interests have circled the wagons to maintain the status quo and to divert attention from Winnebago County’s struggles to respond to the drug epidemic.

 

Haase has made Woldt’s behavior in court the central argument in her campaign. In her announcement last fall, she cited a lack of integrity on Woldt’s part as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s highly unusual punishment of a sitting judge. The Supreme Court has sent a “blaring message” about judicial conduct, Haase said at the candidates forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters. “They were calling for us to vote for someone who maintains the integrity that can meet the expectations that we all have.”

 

The Supreme Court was not the first body to find fault with Woldt. In 2006, according to an article in the Appleton Post-Crescent, the state’s Crime Victims Rights Board “privately reprimanded” Woldt for violating a Neenah man’s right to speak at a sentencing hearing. The newspaper reported that Woldt did not comment at the time because of a potential appeal. Nathan Olson, Woldt’s campaign treasurer, said that Woldt did not receive “a public or private reprimand” in this matter.

 

Woldt overturned on appeal

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The Post-Crescent also reported, in 2015, that appellate courts had overturned Woldt’s decisions at an unusually high rate, roughly 30%. Despite this negative publicity, Woldt ran unopposed in 2017. Woldt prides himself on courtroom efficiency. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” he said at the League forum. “In my courtroom, I have zero for a backlog–state of Wisconsin: 35,000 cases.” One of the reasons he has no backlog is that he is a stickler for moving trials along. Woldt explains that this tendency is what got him in trouble in the case where he warned an attorney in graphic terms about an argument that was about to be raised.

 

In that 2009 case, Woldt told a lawyer that a line of questioning he was starting was inappropriate. But instead of using that language, Woldt said, “Counsel, there’s a thin line between being an advocate and being a ‘dick’–thin line–and you’re blurring it.” The case was a child custody dispute, and “I knew this attorney very well,” Woldt told the Examiner. “My concern was that he was doing something … that if he kept on going down that lane, it was going to rip this family apart.” Woldt said he acted “in the best interest of this child” and that his comment, while unconventional, is an example of his willingness to “try different things” to make a point and hasten settlements. “In that case, it worked,” Woldt said. “The family resolved all their issues.” The judge added that he apologized at the end of the hearing. The lawyer he criticized got the result he wanted for his client and was not the person who filed the complaint against Woldt, the judge said.

 

Woldt is running as a champion of innovative approaches to deep-seated social issues. He was a leader in creating the Safe Streets Treatment Option Program and the Winnebago County Drug Court, which are rehabilitation programs that offer an alternative to incarceration and the high costs associated with prisons and jails. “These programs reduce crime, while saving taxpayers their hard earned income,” Woldt said. “Experience has taught me that the major issue facing our criminal justice system centers around drugs, alcohol and mental health,” Woldt said. “The revolving door of relapse and re-incarceration is the mantra of the past. Today we need to treat the root cause of crime, which is addiction and the lack of treatment.”

 

Do diversion programs work?

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Winnebago County has gained a national reputation for its efforts to reduce incarceration, especially for drug offenders who can be diverted into treatment programs. A plan to expand the county jail was put on the shelf because of a decline in the number of inmates.  Haase argues that the statistics used to justify the county’s approach are misleading. It’s true that the county’s jail population has declined in recent years, but figures from the U.S. Department of Justice show a similar trend across the country.

 

She also questioned whether local prosecutors are diverting cases or bringing lesser charges in a way that reduces incarceration rates at the expense of public safety. Local enforcement officials have raised such concerns quietly for several years, pointing to instances where defendants who handled significant amounts of harmful drugs were allowed to avoid trial. While she believes that diversion programs can work in some cases, Haase said they don’t work all the time. She also warned that drug dealers are learning that they face less risk of severe punishment if they operate in Winnebago County compared to, for example, Outagamie County.

 

Woldt is equally critical of his opponent, who he believes is out for revenge for his part in supporting Gibbs in his successful race last year. Woldt said Haase lacks the temperament and qualifications for the job. During the League forum, he commented: “The voters of this county, when she was a judge, have spoken. They voted her off.” He went on to say that Haase, after losing her judgeship, had applied to be a court commissioner, an appointed post that involves handling some preliminary work on behalf of judges. “She didn’t get the job. Notice she’s not a court commissioner. She didn’t get the job,” Woldt said. “The judges decide who’s the court commissioner. She didn’t get the job.” Woldt had to be cautioned by the forum moderator that he was getting off track. To that he responded by saying that Haase doesn’t know what a court commissioner does. “That was just a way for him to try to get in a dig,” Haase said. Given her experience as a judicial assistant, attorney and judge, “his statement that I don’t know what a court commissioner does is just foolish,” Haase said. 

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She describes Woldt as an intimidating, divisive figure in the courthouse and says that she was encouraged to run for Branch II by three other Winnebago judges. She also says that the commissioner selection process was irregular, with newly elected judges allowed to take part before they had been seated.

 

A case from early in Haase’s tenure in Branch IV illustrates her strong advocacy for victims and her willingness to criticize prosecutors for not being tough enough on crime. But some of her comments, in retrospect, were not borne out and suggest what courthouse critics say is a directness that rubs some people the wrong way. The case involved a man who was accused of domestic abuse against his wife and who was seeking a deferred adjudication agreement that could lead to having the charges dismissed. At the end of the hearing, the defense lawyer tried to interject that her client would be taking an option that Haase had offered, which prompted the judge to deliver a lecture on courtroom behavior that ended with the seeming threat of a contempt citation. “You do not interrupt me. I don’t care if you’re by video or not,” Haase said. “I don’t care if you’re upset by what you heard.” Haase continued: “Decorum is demanded even by you. It is absolutely inappropriate for you to interrupt me. Inappropriate. Show advocacy for your client every single day, but you will not disrespect this court process. Ever. Because if you do it again, it’s contemptuous.”

 

It was not so much the interruption that led to her forceful response, Haase said in an interview. Throughout the video hearing, the defense attorney, who was not the  attorney of record, was behaving inappropriately, with laughter and eye-rolling, Haase said. “Her decorum was awful,” she said.  

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Victim advocate

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Earlier in the hearing, the man’s wife made a statement to the court describing the extent of the domestic abuse and complained that prosecutors had not brought a charge of strangulation, which would have carried a stiffer punishment. Haase was relatively new on the bench at the time, but she said she had already heard from from police officers with complaints about the DA’s office. The police said they were handling calls from victims, especially of domestic abuse, who thought their attackers were getting off easy.

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“I am appalled,” Haase said after the wife spoke under the victims rights provisions known as Marsy’s Law. “I’m appalled. And I stand behind what I say on this bench because I didn’t accept this position to mince words or, really, to care who gets upset about this.”

 

The woman appeared before Haase trembling and in tears. She recounted how a nurse who had examined her told her that the fact that she had urinated on herself after the attack by her husband suggested that she had lost consciousness, possibly as the result of strangulation. “The information I just heard compared to the charges that were filed, compared to the information that’s contained in the criminal complaint, I 100% question the district attorney’s advocacy as it relates to Marsy’s Law,” Haase said. “A verge on deceit for a criminal complaint to be filed the way that it was and for me to hear the multitude of felonies that possibly could have been charged, deceit to not only this community or this court,” Haase said, according to a transcript of the hearing that is in the court file.

 

As it turned out, and as later documented in a memo from prosecutors, the wife’s statements at the time of the incident and later contained “uncertainties and inconsistencies” that would have made it hard to press a strangulation case. In the end, Haase agreed to approve the deferred adjudication agreement that she initially put on hold. As judge she has no control over the DA’s charging decisions, but she continues to be concerned. “We had a case where a child sex assault [was] charged out as contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and I said, ‘Wow!'”

 

Ties to the Oshkosh community

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Both Woldt and Haase earned bachelor’s degrees from UW Oshkosh, but that may be the extent of what they have in common. Haase is an African-American woman who was born in Chicago to a teenage mother and a father with a drug problem. Woldt, a white male, grew up in Oshkosh, with a mother who worked for the school district and a father who served as a sheriff’s deputy.

 

Woldt has emphasized his long ties to the community. But Haase thinks that he is not telling the whole story. Woldt’s father was fired from the Sheriff’s Office for misconduct, although he later won an arbitration ruling that forced the county to pay him unemployment compensation because of a lack of evidence, according to newspaper accounts from 1984. In his campaign materials Woldt also describes a motorcycle accident that cost him a leg. That incident propelled him to community service as he later helped another amputee, who lost both legs in a train accident, come to grips with his situation and move on to a successful career in business. On his campaign website, Woldt describes how the motorcycle accident left him “mentally devastated” because he would no longer be able to compete in sports. He does not include the fact that a female passenger on his motorcycle, who was about to graduate from Oshkosh West High School with highest honors, suffered irreversible brain damage and died from the accident. Revisiting these events “is beneath someone seeking election– especially to the Circuit Court,” said, Olson, Woldt’s campaign treasurer. “This is simply an attempt to smear Judge Woldt and revictimize all those involved.” But Haase believes these are legitimate issues since Woldt has used the motorcycle story to burnish his image.

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Impact of Supreme Court race

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In the end the winner on April 4 may be carried to victory by whoever comes out to vote in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a race that has been called the most important contest in the country (subscription). Both the local and statewide court races are nominally nonpartisan, but the Democratic and Republican parties have each picked their favorites and are working to drive turnout.

 

Last year Haase won handily in Oshkosh, which is the Blue-leaning county seat, capturing 56% of the vote. But factoring in the rest of Winnebago County, where Republican and libertarian views are dominant, she came up short by 1,705 votes out of the 25,901 cast, a gap of 6.6%.

 

She is planning to campaign more actively in municipalities away from Oshkosh, and she may get a boost because of the Supreme Court ballot. In last month’s primary election, the two liberal candidates got 488 more votes countywide than the two conservative candidates. But there are a couple of factors that confound any simple conclusion about how the race will end up. An overriding issue in the Supreme Court race is abortion, which could drive turnout among women, many of whom are outraged about the potential for their reproductive rights to be limited by a pre-Civil War law. 

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Which voters will turn out?

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If they extend their support to Haase, she could have a good night. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that conservative women voters will support the liberal alternative in the Supreme Court election but follow the local GOP’s endorsement of Woldt. Woldt thinks there is a good chance that attacks on his integrity will backfire. One facet of the Supreme Court’s disciplinary action against him concerned his carrying of a gun into court. But two of the justices defended his right to display a firearm from the bench, and the many county voters who are Second Amendment advocates may rally to Woldt’s side in April. “Over the years, I’ve had many death threats,” Woldt said. He began carrying a gun under his robes at a time when the county courthouse was known for its weak security, which has since been significantly upgraded. He now keeps his sidearm in a safe in his chambers while he presides over cases.

 

As always, the big question will be turnout, which typically runs lower during the spring election cycle. Woldt put it this way, “The hard thing [is] it’s a nonpartisan election, and many people don’t bother to vote.”