March 7, 2022 at 2:12 p.m.
Where is justice? Where is the justice system?
Where is justice? Where is the justice system?
Yes, all eyes are on the system, and, as our stories show, they should be. Not only that, but citizens should be angry about the details that have emerged, angry with police conduct, angry with prosecutorial judgement, and angry with Minocqua town officials and police department management, who failed to hold the officer accountable or to perform any proper investigation - at least until last week, after The Lakeland Times ran a story about the incident.
We start with officer Kaleb Punzel, who was suspended with pay pending an investigation last week after the story appeared. His failure to heed the urgency of pleas to help a woman who could be in immediate danger is appalling. His reasons for not responding are even more appalling. It wasn't even his calculated indifference to a human life - that was part of it and is bad enough - it was the fact that he knew the alleged assailant in the case and chose to preserve that personal relationship over properly responding to a 911 call for help.
The details can be found in our stories, but throughout the night in question, Punzel kept changing his story about why he could not respond to the scene of a potential crime. He couldn't go without backup, that was one line; he couldn't leave the woman's acquaintance, whom he had detained for drunken driving, or take him with him to the property; most of all, because he knew the alleged assailant, he had a conflict of interest and could not investigate - Punzel said he might be biased toward the man he knew - though after receiving a call from the man, Punzel did in fact notify dispatch that he was headed to the area to investigate.
All of these excuses collapse like a house of cards when the facts are reviewed. If Punzel felt he couldn't go to the scene because of a conflict of interest, he could have diverted police who were headed to his OWI location to that property instead, and informed those police and dispatch of the urgency.
But Punzel never did. He did not relay the threat he was being told about, only that he had a drunk driver. He said he needed assistance, not that a woman in danger needed assistance. His nonchalance undoubtedly influenced dispatch, too, because dispatch never relayed any urgency, either, even after talking with the man calling for help for his friend.
Punzel said he did not investigate because he did not want to be biased toward the alleged assailant, whom was a contractor doing work on a home bathroom, but it is clear that he took what the man told him on the phone as the truth, betraying that his bias was already formed.
We have one more story next week in this trilogy, but here's one spoiler: At the OWI trial of the man who had called 911, Punzel explained how he viewed the conflict of interest with the alleged assailant:
"I guess my bias ... would be that if I had to take enforcement action and it would be on [the alleged assailant], he could come back and raise the price of what this bathroom costs in turn bringing into another court proceeding. ... It's directly affecting [the alleged assailant], if I arrest [the alleged assailant]. So if [the alleged assailant] gets bailed out, he comes back to work on my house the very next day and says, oh, it was $2,000, now it's $6,000 because you arrested me last night, I believe that's a direct reflection of what occurred, a direct indication of what occurred."
That's shocking, but Punzel put it even more shockingly at the scene talking with other officers, when he said of the situation: "Hey, as long as my bathroom gets done in my basement, I really don't care."
So it was all about his bathroom, it was all about his personal interest, it was all about the money - all that explains why Punzel did not investigate, but it does not explain why he did not urge others to respond immediately, unless, of course, it was for the same reason.
Meanwhile, it turns out there was actually a serious situation going on at the property - enough that, after investigation, Minocqua officer Jazmin Solberg referred sexual assault charges against the alleged assailant to the district attorney.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, how did police brass handle the situation? Well, despite Punzel's egregious behavior, despite the seriousness of the situation that police did not respond to, the officer was given a verbal warning and nothing more.
In other words, he went unpunished. He was not held accountable for his actions. That is, until last week when the newspaper's publication of what occurred forced the town's hand. Now he's suspended with pay and under investigation, but it should not take a newspaper's investigation to get the town to act.
We should point out to those who have moved to the area in the past decade, this is not the first time Minocqua police have been involved in outrageous and perhaps illegal conduct. We refer to an infamous drug-planting case that led to wholesale housecleaning at the department.
Then, like now, it took this newspaper's investigations to expose wrong-doing. When that happens, as it is now, it means a cover up has been perpetrated, and that's what this situation has been for nearly two years - a cover-up from top to bottom.
Even more disturbing is that the Minocqua town board apparently tolerated such behavior as well. Indeed, the woman who says she was sexually assaulted has filed a notice of claim against not just Punzel but the police department and the town, not to mention the alleged assailant.
So the town board has been well aware of this incident for a while now, and yet it has conducted no investigation into the matter. They have stuck their proverbial heads into the sand. That's inexplicable and inexcusable. The town board acts as the de facto police commission, and it is well within its statutory powers to have investigated and rendered justice in the matter, but yet it has remained silent.
Indeed, we would argue that it is the town board's responsibility to investigate such serious matters. Not doing so is an abdication of its duty to oversee the police department, and, more than that, in this specific case, because the town board has explicit knowledge of the charges filed against the town, and because public safety is at stake, the board's lack of action could well constitute misconduct in public office.
We observe that some town supervisors - Brian Fricke and John Thompson - love giving our reporters who cover their meetings a hard time. Our reporters are professionals, but we believe supervisors' time would be better spent overseeing the behavior of town employees: They should worry about what town workers do on the job, not about what our reporters do on their jobs.
We observe, too, that this town board loves to tell people what they can and cannot do, using ordinances and moratoria and zoning permit conditions. They are johnny on the spot when citizens engage in some perceived violation, and threaten them with court actions and other sanctions. But when it comes to public employee misconduct right under their noses, they look the other way.
The town board should have long ago launched an investigation into the matter, and it should not have taken a newspaper article for an investigation to happen.
Finally, we disagree with the district attorney's decision not to prosecute this sexual assault case. Such cases are hard to prosecute, to be sure, and the decision to do so or not is a tough one.
Yet this is far more than a he-said, she-said case, and the facts as we have reported them do not align with what the district attorney stated in a memo to sheriff Grady Hartman justifying his decision not to file charges.
For one thing, the district attorney, in the memo, makes several blatantly false statements. For instance, he writes that "[by] all accounts, this was consensual."
It most certainly was not by all accounts consensual. Certainly not by officer Solberg's account after her investigation. She concluded that the woman was too drunk to give consent, which led to her recommendation that Schiek charge the man with sexual assault of an intoxicated person.
Schiek ignored that and honed in on the victim's statements made in a squad car as she was taken from the house - still drunk, mind you - where she said such things as she was not raped, or to "just call it consensual or whatever," when asked if she had consensual intercourse.
But given the context of those statements, no serious prosecutor can take such remarks as a valid confession of consensual sex. The statements were made in a police car, by a woman who was still drunk, not two hours after the assault allegedly took place. The deputy she was talking to repeatedly called her "very confused," "disoriented," "dazed," and "incoherent," and said the woman also said that "she did not know what happened."
Add to that Solberg's correct observation that the first 24 or 48 hours after an assault is a traumatic experience that can leave victims confused and in a state of shock that requires time to sort out what did or did not happen.
Those statements simply can't justify a conclusion that "by all accounts, it was consensual." Of three accounts, one was made by a woman who was drunk, dazed, confused, and incoherent; one was made by a police officer saying the woman could not have given consent, given the evidence; and one was by the alleged assailant, who actually said it was consensual but who had changed his story with police, not only about which bedroom he put the unconscious woman in (a spare bedroom at first, he said, before admitting it was his bedroom), whether he was clothed or not (first he said he was, then he admitted he climbed into bed with the woman with no pants on), and whether anything happened (no, nothing at all, at first, then an admission of kissing).
By all accounts? Really?
Schiek also ignores the woman's acquaintance's eyewitness account that the alleged assailant carried the woman unconscious upstairs and kicked him out of the house. And he dismisses the alleged assailant's probable DNA on the waistband and front panel of her underwear as "no evidence," even though, as Solberg wrote in her charging referral, the alleged assailant's "DNA is the only male DNA to have moderate support for being" on the underwear.
To be clear, we seek not to act as judge and jury. We make no claim that the person accused of sexual assault is guilty. What we believe is that an actual jury, impaneled as part of the judicial process, make that judgment.
The evidence that a person is guilty might or might not be compelling, but the evidence that this should go to a jury is all-compelling. That's because it is not true that everyone said it was consensual, and one police officer believes consent could not be given. And it's not true that there is no evidence, given the DNA findings.
A jury should decide whether that evidence, along with eyewitness accounts and subject statements, is enough.
So far, justice has not been served. It has been obstructed from top to bottom. The officer did not serve justice. The police department did not serve justice. The town board has not served justice. The district attorney has not served justice.
This is in fact, so far, a malignant miscarriage of justice, for, without justice, a justice system is just a system.
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