Fact checking – North Dakota style

It appears I’ve upset at least one of the good folk of North Dakota.
In an article published yesterday in WorkCompCentral about the prosecution of former North Dakota state workers compensation boss Sandy Blunt (subscription required), Bill Kidd quoted prosecutor Cynthia Feland:
“In an e-mail reply [presumably to Kidd’s query], Feland said that “I find it unfortunate that the authors [yours truly and Peter Rousmaniere of Risk and Insurance] have chosen to print information without checking their facts.”
“A transcript of the trial is available and if they would have reviewed it, it would have been obvious that the information they received and used to write their stories and base their opinions was inaccurate,” Feland wrote.”
I’m assuming Feland was referring to this comment in a post from last year; “Blunt was charged with authorizing sick leave for and failing to collect moving expenses from a Fund exec who was terminated within two years. In theory, if he left within the two years, the moving expenses paid by the Fund should have been reimbursed.
Turns out that the prosecutor who brought the charges, Cynthia Feland, knew that failing to collect the moving expenses was not a crime – yet she brought charges anyway.
She had in writing that the ND Attorney General advised state auditors in October of 2006 that the exec did not voluntarily leave and thus there was no legal authority to collect. This fact was then put in writing to Feland a year before the trial and she
– added it as a crime just weeks before the trial and
– withheld the memo proving it was all legally done, thereby not giving the defense exculpatory evidence she was legally required to provide.”
That’s a big assumption, as her comments could have referred to any of the other posts I’ve written about the Blunt case, but as the possible withholding of exculpatory evidence is the most egregious of the prosecutor’s actions, I’ll focus on it.
Ms Feland made an assumption of her own in her note to Kidd; in fact I have read the relevant parts of the transcript, and searched the entire transcript for any mention of the memo in question. Couldn’t find any reference to it anywhere. Now, I’m certainly no attorney, so it’s possible I didn’t look for the right words. So I’ve asked Ms Feland to tell me exactly where the memo is mentioned in the transcript, when it was placed into evidence, and/or any other official documentation that it was shared with Blunt before or during the trial.
I’ll keep you posted.