Albany County, Prosecuting Attorney Peggy Trent to resign
Trent leaves behind a legacy of championing criminal and juvenile justice reform, but her resignation comes amid a civil suit regarding one of her most controversial moments in the public limelight.
Albany County and Prosecuting Attorney Peggy Trent is resigning this week, foregoing what would have been another year-and-half of her term in office. Trent said she has accepted a new position in Johnson County, Kansas.
“When I initially decided to run for county attorney, I had indicated at the outset that I would run only for two terms,” she said. “My second term is coming to a conclusion, and an opportunity presented itself, out of state, and it came sooner than expected. The final year is usually running for reelection, and it’s very difficult to get things accomplished in your final year because you’re moving forward, the next person is coming in. And I’m a very goal-oriented individual who wants to accomplish a lot of items, and it’s hard to accomplish when they know you’re not running for reelection.”
Trent’s resignation will trigger an appointment process similar to the one used by the county Democratic Party and the Albany County Commission to replace former Sheriff Dave O’Malley less than six months ago.
Trent is stepping down just over halfway through her second term as Albany County and Prosecuting Attorney — having first been elected to the role in 2014, and re-elected in 2018.
Trent oversaw the reform of the county’s juvenile justice system, as well as the formation of a special victims unit aimed at prosecuting domestic violence, stalking and sexual assault. She was, however, criticized by police accountability advocates for actions following the 2018 police shooting of Robbie Ramirez — and her resignation comes less than three months after the filing of a civil suit seeking to unseal grand jury proceedings related to the 2018 shooting.
But Trent stands by the way she handled that, and stands by her accomplishments as county and prosecuting attorney.
“I have no regrets,” she said. “I have accomplished what I set out to do when I ran for office. I was very detailed in all of the initiatives I wanted to implement, and I did implement all of those initiatives. It’s a good feeling to know that I was able to gain the support and develop those partnerships to implement what I had set out to do.”
In Albany County, Trent’s office has two roles: acting as prosecutor on behalf of the state in criminal, misdemeanor and juvenile cases, and advising and representing the county and its officials in legal matters.
In her new role halfway across the country, Trent will serve first as a county adviser — and once licensed to practice in Kansas — Chief Legal Counsel for Johnson County. The new role is not an elected one, and it will no longer include the prosecutorial role of her current position. Trent said the new position will allow her to focus on advising the county commission and the county manager, without bringing cases for the state.
“I do find it very challenging how the elected official (in Wyoming) does two roles: the DA and the county attorney,” she said. “It’s just very difficult, as an elected official giving legal advice, when it shouldn’t be from an elected official. And I really enjoy that portion of my job.”
Trent’s replacement will be selected via an appointment process initiated by Trent’s party, the Albany County Democrats. The county party will consider and select applicants for the remainder of the term, passing a final list of candidates on to the county commission, which will then select Trent’s replacement from among those candidates.
Ramirez, Colling, and the Grand Jury
In November of 2018, Deputy Derek Colling of the Albany County Sheriff’s Office killed Robbie Ramirez, a man with mental illness, following a traffic stop. In the aftermath of the shooting, relatives of Ramirez said he was fleeing for the safety of his nearby home.
Colling has a history of violence, having previously shot a mentally ill child holding his own mother hostage with a knife, and having been ousted from the Las Vegas Police Department after beating a videographer who was legally filming him.
The local police shooting echoed other incidents across the country that have given rise to calls and movements for police accountability, disarmament or defunding. In Albany County, Ramirez’s death gave rise to the group Albany County for Proper Policing, which has pushed unsuccessfully for Colling to face criminal charges or termination. (Colling currently serves as a detective for the sheriff’s office.)
About three months after the shooting, Trent convened a grand jury to consider bringing an involuntary manslaughter charge against Colling. That grand jury concluded after three days that the evidence did not rise to the level of probable cause, meaning that no charges would be brought against Colling.
“There was a thorough investigation,” Trent said during a press conference. “And no offense to defense attorneys, it was more raw, more direct toward those witnesses than you would ever have in a courtroom with a jury present, with a judge.”
Trent said neither Colling’s past violent incidents, nor Ramirez’s past encounters with law enforcement, were relevant to this case. Although members of the grand jury asked about these details, Trent said they were answered with an explanation of their irrelevancy.
“One of the key elements: was it justified?” Trent said at the press conference. “Now, it may not be the result that some people wanted, but I will submit to you that the system did not fail. The jury system is there for a reason and this system was done fairly. And the evidence was presented.”
The grand jury’s failure to find probable cause did not quell the movement that had started to form. As marches for police accountability, transparency or defunding took place across the country and around the world, Ramirez’s name was among those chanted by demonstrators on the streets of Laramie.
Meanwhile, Ramirez’s mother, Debbie Hinkel, has filed a wrongful death claim against the county, suing for as much as $20 million in damages. Hinkel and her lawyers, the Spence Law Firm, argue that county officials protected Colling to shield themselves from accountability.
In a new motion filed Feb. 19, Hinkel is seeking to make the grand jury proceedings public, arguing that Trent’s experts were biased — one of the two having been fired from investigating the death of Elijah McClain in Colorado for a perceived bias in favor of law enforcement.
At this point, Trent’s press conference is the source of almost all publicly available information about the grand jury’s closed-door proceedings.
Trent stands by her decision to convene a grand jury, adding that after its conclusion, she contacted state legislators, advocating for a more standardized, more transparent system for dealing with officer-involved shootings and use-of-force incidents.
“I have no regrets in the way I handled it, but feel we need to do better,” Trent said. “We need to have mechanisms in place so that when we have the unfortunate situation, there is a more transparent process. But the process I utilized, I felt, was an attempt to try something different than what was done in other communities where the county and prosecuting attorney simply provides their sole opinion. I felt it was important to convene a grand jury, to present that evidence to them, and let them decide as a grand jury.”
Bogard, Stone, and the Special Victims Unit
During her tenure, Trent sought to make convictions in special victims cases more frequent through the formation of a special victims unit.
Crimes such as strangulation, domestic abuse, stalking and sexual assault are notoriously diifcult to prosecute. For many of these crimes, the case can come down to choosing between conflicting personal accounts of an incident, and often occur in the absence of much other concrete evidence. Unprocessed rape kits and other factors also contribute to the difficulty of prosecuting these cases.
The low prosecution rate leaves victims and survivors with less incentive to report the crimes committed against them, and researchers and advocates in this area say these types of crimes are dramatically underreported as a result.
So Trent’s special victims unit started getting involved earlier in the investigation process, communicating with law enforcement about what evidence would be required to make a conviction.
“We’ve had cases where law enforcement declined prosecution, and we’ve reviewed it and filed charges after additional investigation or determining that we could be successful with prosecution,” Trent told the Laramie Boomerang last year. “We’re always looking at the strengths and weaknesses of how we prosecute our case. Sometimes we look at whether the person has been accused of sexually assaulting someone in the past, and then we might reach out to that prior victim. We talk to everyone and see if they would be interested in coming forward and helping with our case.”
Trent added in the same interview that she personally meets with victims whenever she determines that charges cannot be brought.
“We explain the strengths and weaknesses, and it’s also an opportunity for them to tell me what they don’t like about the system, and then I take that back to our team so we can improve,” Trent said. “When we first started in 2015 and 2016, those conversations were hard. It’s hard when someone tells us that someone didn’t believe them.”
The SVU appeared to score its first major conviction in October 2017, when the Albany County District Court found Travis Bogard guilty of sexual assault. Bogard was later sentenced to 5-10 years in prison, but the Wyoming Supreme Court overturned his verdict, citing “prosecutorial misconduct” on the part of Trent’s office.
The Bogard case captured the public’s attention as it played out in 2017 and into 2018. The victim in the case testified against Bogard at his trial and during his sentencing, and testified to the lasting trauma that had derailed her life.
“Sometimes, I wish I would have died that night,” she said in the courtroom.
As Bogard was being sentenced, Trent said she believed that the conviction was the first time in about 30 years that a case of this particular nature resulted in a guilty verdict, and touted the conviction as a crowning achievement for the new special victims unit.
But Bogard’s criminal trial wasn’t the only high-profile sexual assault case of the last six years. Trent also brought charges against Martin Ridinger in 2018 when a determined detective — William Meier of the Albany County Sheriff’s Office — reopened a rape case from 2010.
Again, the survivor of the assault testified against the perpetrator and a jury found Ridinger guilty. Albany County District Court Judge Tori Kricken, who had also sentenced Bogard, sentenced Ridinger to 30-50 years.
For Savannah Stone, the survivor, the verdict was long overdue, but it was justice.
“I’m going to be mad that it took ten years,” she said in an interview with the Laramie Boomerang. “It shouldn’t have been 10 years.”
Youth, Students, and Nonviolent Offenders
Soon after taking office in 2015, Trent started to reform juvenile justice in Albany County. That was the year the county formed a Community Juvenile Service Board and launched a diversion program aimed at keeping kids out of the criminal justice system.
That diversion program entails both community service requirements and enriching activities like outdoor recreation. Trent’s reforms have also included implementing a single point of entry for juvenile criminal matters and standards to avoid the removal of juveniles from their homes, as well as the creation of a juvenile drug court program, which connects young offenders with treatment for substance abuse problems
Trent has kept many of these programs alive by continually seeking out and securing funding.
Trent has, in general, advocated for criminal justice reform and reduced reliance on jail time, especially for non-violent offenders.
In addition to diverting minors away from the criminal justice system, she has also established a diversion program for young adults, aged 18-25.
“For UW students arrested for drinking offenses, we need to explore other avenues other than our jail. … Our criminal system should not be revenue-making,” she said during a 2019 county commission meeting. “Our jails should be filled with violent offenders, and I have concerns that we’re releasing those that are unsafe to our community because we’re making way for offenses that are non-violent and substance abuse … we have our jail consumed by non-violent people.”
Trent also played a role in establishing the Albany County Mental Health Board, which was modeled on the Juvenile Service Board. The board exists to review current mental health services and to develop and promote new programs, with the aim of enhancing mental healthcare in Albany County. The board also seeks to keep mentally ill individuals out of the Albany County Detention Center.
“When I decided to run for office, I had indicated at that time we needed to treat our youth and families, our vulnerable populations, differently,” Trent said. “So everything I have done in attempting to improve the system relates around to those vulnerable adults in our population — including the mentally ill, and families and children — and the way we approach individual sexual assault victims and victims of domestic violence.”
What’s Next for the Albany County Democrats?
The Albany County Democrats will find themselves in an all-too-familiar situation come Trent’s resignation Tuesday.
Less than six months ago, former Albany County Sheriff Dave O’Malley resigned from his post, ending a long and controversial career in local law enforcement.
As an elected official, O’Malley’s resignation triggered a county and party process to fill the vacancy. O’Malley’s replacement, Sheriff Aaron Appelhans, will now serve out the rest of O’Malley’s term.
Once Trent resigns, the Albany County Commission must notify the Albany County Democrats’ central committee — the party’s governing body — of the vacancy. Once the central committee receives that notification, they must meet in the next 15 days. The central committee then identifies three people “qualified to fill the vacancy” and sends their names to the county commission. The county commission will then select Trent’s replacement, appointing one of the party’s three submitted candidates.
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