Five-year suspension recommended for prosecutor who sought clemency from Matt Bevin in brutal sodomy case

Scandal-plagued prosecutor Rick Boling should be suspended from practicing law for five years, a trial commissioner has found.

The Courier Journal disclosed in 2020 that Bowling, the Christian County commonwealth’s attorney, cited false information when he sought a pardon from Gov. Matt Bevin in a life-threatening sodomy case.

In a letter to Bevin written on his office stationery, Boling claimed without proof that convicted sex offender Dayton Jones was targeted by Democratic prosecutors because of a political vendetta against his grandparents, who donated to Republicans.

Boling later apologized to voters and the victim, who was 15 years old and unconscious when he was sodomized with a sex toy and almost died of his injuries.

More:'I made a monumental mistake': Prosecutor sorry for asking Bevin for pardon in sodomy case

The trial commissioner, Roderick Messer, said in a report Wednesday that Boling should be found guilty of misconduct for making false statements and wrongly impugning a judge.

Messer also found that Boling misled a jury in an arson and manslaughter trial when he said he was unaware of any evidence the defendant was intoxicated. In fact, a detective had told him Karen Brafman was “out of her frickin’ mind” at the time of the crime.

Boling opposed giving the jury an instruction that she was voluntarily intoxicated, for which the Kentucky Supreme Court reversed her conviction, finding Boling had engaged in prosecutorial misconduct.

If neither side objects to the findings, they go to the Kentucky Supreme Court for a decision. Boling's attorney, Peter Ostermiller, said the recommended sentence is excessive and not supported by the law and he will file an appeal to the bar's board of governors.

More:Matt Bevin said only co-defendants implicated Dayton Jones in brutal sodomy. He was wrong

The Kentucky Association of Commonwealth’s Attorneys in August expelled Boling from the organization, and two circuit judges banned him from the courthouse.

The five-year suspension is the harshest penalty that can be imposed on an attorney in Kentucky short of disbarment.

Boling will have to reapply for admission to the bar association after he serves the suspension.

Justifying his commutation of Jones' sentence for the brutal sodomy, Bevin said the only evidence implicating him came from co-defendants trying to get leniency for the assault. But a Courier Journal review of the case shows that Bevin was wrong — that other witnesses besides Jones' co-defendants implicated him and Jones implicated himself.

Following his guilty plea in state court, Jones was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but after three years, Bevin commuted his sentence to time served. It was one of more than 650 pardons and commutations by the outgoing governor in 2019, some of which were as controversial as the Jones commutation, some even more so.

More:Dayton Jones gets 8 years in federal prison for case in which Gov. Matt Bevin freed him

Outraged by the commutation, federal prosecutors won an indictment against Jones on a federal pornography charge for making a video of the assault and he was sentenced in May to eight years on that charge.

The trial commissioner said in his finding on Boling that he had engaged in misconduct involving “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation” and that he had hurt the profession and the community in both cases.

He claimed he did not act intentionally.

The findings will now go to the bar association’s board of governors, which could reduce or increase the proposed penalty.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Rick Boling faces suspension in clemency request of Matt Bevin