The state Public Defender Service is close to replacing former chief TaShun Bowden-Lewis, whose tempestuous term as the first Black woman to hold the position of Chief Public Defender ended with her dismissal a year and one-half ago.
The Public Defender Services Commission, which oversees the more than 400-employee agency that provides legal services to the indigent, is scheduled to begin interviewing candidates for division chief in January, but will not reveal the candidates who have applied.
“I’m not in a position at the moment to comment about the interviews other than they (the candidates) are scheduled for interviews on January 20,” said commission chairman and retired Supreme Court Justice Richard N. Palmer.
Over the intervening 18 months, the division has been run by former deputy and now acting chief public defender John Day. The candidates to be interviewed for the position are three lawyers from within the division and one from outside, according to a variety of officials.
Even as it prepares to interview Bowden-Lewis replacements, the commission is still responding to her claims of unjust dismissal as well as her personnel decisions. Both are for the most part bound up in her claims of racial discrimination.
At one point after her firing in June 2024, Bowden-Lewis had pending legal challenges against the Public Defender Services Commission in four forums: U.S. District Court, Superior Court, the state Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities and the state Freedom of Information Commission.
Former Connecticut Chief Public Defender TaShun Bowden-Lewis
Only the claim before the Freedom of Information Commission has been resolved. Bowden-Lewis argued that the Public Defender Services Commission violated open meeting laws by firing her without a public hearing. The Freedom of Information Commission said she was not entitled to a public hearing because she had not asked for one.
The other claims — two moving through the courts in public proceedings in court and a third before the human rights commission, which operates in secret — are similar, according to people familiar with all three.
In them Bowden-Lewis argues she was not fired for misconduct and poor judgment, as the commission claimed in a public memorandum. Rather, she claims the allegations against her were contrived or “concocted” and she was in effect removed for conduct that had been considered acceptable by her “Caucasian” predecessors.
In the lawsuits, Bowden-Lewis is suing members of the commission who voted to fire her in their personal capacities rather than as indemnified representatives of the state.
Her tenure as chief was characterized by dissension almost from the start of her appointment by the Public Defender Services Commission that hired her — a commission that was replaced not long after by the one that later dismissed her.
She accused the first commission, which had hired her as the first Black female public defender, of racial discrimination for failing to appoint a Black candidate she recommended as the division’s human resources director. The commission appointed a white woman instead after concluding that the Bowden-Lewis candidate did not have the experience to meet state personnel requirements.
According to an outside investigation by a Hartford law firm, Bowden-Lewis then made working conditions for the new Human Resources director so inhospitable that she resigned within months. Bowden-Lewis then appointed her preferred candidate to fill the vacancy in an acting capacity.
Members of the former commission resigned as a group after the racism accusation.
The human resources director appointed in an acting capacity by Bowden-Lewis remains on the division payroll, but in recent months has appeared at work only sporadically if at all, according to a review of division attendance records.
The current commission, which ultimately fired Bowden-Lewis, was hastily appointed in March 2023 with instructions from Gov. Ned Lamont to restore balance to a Constitutionally indispensable agency.
Senior members of the division’s legal staff immediately took the unusual step of appearing at commission meetings to complain in public about Bowden-Lewis’s management, with more than one speaker complaining that those who disagreed with her at business meetings were accused of racism.
Connecticut Chief Public Defender Tashun Bowden-Lewis chats with supporters before a hearing at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford, Conn. on April 16, 2024. (Associated Press/Susan Haigh, File)
Bowden-Lewis, at the same time, was complaining in correspondence to commissioners that as Chief Public Defender, she controlled the agency and the commission’s role was, in effect, to approve her decisions. She hired an employment lawyer and wrote repeated letters implying the new commission was guilty of racism for second guessing her.
In the months leading to her dismissal, Bowden-Lewis lost support of unionized public defenders, who voted 121 – 9 that they had no confidence in her leadership.
Not long after, her dispute with the commission escalated when it was discovered that she instructed a junior member of the division’s Information Technology team to search the computer system for Palmer’s email conversations — at a time when the commission was considering disciplining or dismissing her.
The forensic investigation revealed that the junior staffer used a software program to locate and download about a dozen exchanges, some legally privileged, between Palmer and two senior division lawyers.
In her lawsuits, Bowden-Lewis argues that most of the criticism directed at her was for behavior in which her predecessors had engaged without reproach.
Regarding criticism of her appointment of an interim human resources director, Bowden-Lewis responded in her lawsuits that she “resisted the appointment of a less qualified Caucasian candidate as Human Resources Director for the Division of Public Defender Services, in place of a more qualified African American candidate.“
She said the commission had “concocted a sham allegation” about violating Palmer’s expectation of privacy in his email correspondence because he didn’t have such a right. She acknowledged intruding on Palmer’s email, but argued he was mistaken in the belief that he could “reasonably expect that his emails would not be searched surreptitiously unless there was a valid reason for doing so.”
“The resort by the defendant to disgraceful sophistry renders its decision to remove the plaintiff from the position of Chief Public Defender fatally flawed in logic and law,” her Superior Court lawsuit claims.
