A prosecutor in the Denver District Attorney’s Office, who was fired two years ago, has been ordered disbarred after framing a male colleague for sexual harassment, a Colorado judicial office ruled.
The former prosecutor, Yujin Choi, faked receiving text messages, altered her cellphone records and, during the investigation, destroyed her laptop and phone, according to a 26-page ruling by Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge released on Dec. 31.
The office’s ruling said that Ms. Choi’s “fabrication of false messages reflects adversely on her fitness to practice because it undermines the pursuit of truth — the very foundation on which our system of justice rests.”
It added that “deception within the ranks of prosecutors in whatever form poses an even greater danger of eroding public confidence in the legal system and its practitioners.”
The disbarment takes effect next month though Ms. Choi can appeal the decision.
Ms. Choi’s casework was later found to be in “excellent order,” with no evidence of fabrications, the district attorney’s office said.
Ms. Choi was a relatively new attorney who was rapidly rising in the prosecutor’s office. While attending the University of Denver’s law school, she was an intern at the district attorney’s office and the State Attorney General’s Office. She joined the district attorney’s office in May 2019, after graduating from law school in December 2018.
She was hired as a county court prosecutor and was promoted in March 2020 to the behavioral health unit, which prosecutes felony drug possession, alcohol- and drug-related traffic offenses, and screens eligibility for treatment courts and programs.
By the end of the year, she was assigned to work felony cases in district courts.
Ms. Choi became a deputy district attorney with the family violence unit in March 2022, where she handled felony domestic violence and child abuse cases.
“Family was the reason why I worked so hard,” she said, according to the ruling.
Ms. Choi emigrated with her parents and brother from South Korea when she was 10 years old. She was one of the only female Asian American prosecutors in the state, which she found “isolating and wearing,” according to the ruling.
In 2021, Ms. Choi made her first allegation against Dan Hines, a criminal investigator in the district attorney’s office. She told supervisors that he had made an inappropriate comment to her.
Mr. Hines, who joined the office in 2019 after spending 10 years in the military and 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police, retiring as a troop commander, denied the allegation.
“The investigation was closed as unsubstantiated,” according to the ruling, but Mr. Hines was transferred within the office and was ordered not to contact Ms. Choi.
“I remember the ‘walk of shame’ as I wheeled my office equipment and personal belongings to my reassigned location,” Mr. Hines, 53, said in a phone interview. “How people interacted with me changed overnight. I felt like I was a leper in the office.”
In October 2022, Ms. Choi said that Mr. Hines sent her four inappropriate text messages. While she provided screenshots of the messages, questions about their authenticity quickly surfaced.
The first text had a time stamp that was about 40 minutes after Ms. Choi had already reported it to her superiors, according to the ruling.
She said that she did not want a formal investigation and did not cooperate with it, the ruling said, but the prosecutor’s office felt obligated to move forward with an inquiry.
When confronted with the new allegations, Mr. Hines immediately demanded a polygraph test and offered his phone for inspection. A forensic search of his phone did not show any communication between his number and Ms. Choi’s, according to the ruling.
The investigation further revealed that Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself. In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.
The investigation found that Ms. Choi downloaded and altered a spreadsheet containing her Verizon message logs before she provided those records to investigators.
The weekend before her phone and laptop were to be examined for evidence of the alleged misconduct by Mr. Hines, Ms. Choi told investigators that her phone had fallen into her bathtub after she had drawn herself a bath and put her phone on a tray.
She said that she dried it right away but found that it was not working. She then went to her desk to make a video call to a colleague, according to the ruling. After the call, still in a panic over her phone, she knocked over a bottle, spilling water on her laptop, and leaving that disabled as well.
“I’m devastated that I may have tanked the investigation on my own, but that I also lost all of my personal data that were very important to me,” she wrote in an email to investigators, after returning from an Apple Store, where she said she had tried to recover the data on both devices and had bought a new phone.
“In our view, this narrative is not plausible,” the court office said, finding that Ms. Choi had destroyed both electronic devices.
“Unremitting honesty must at all times be the backbone of the legal profession,” the ruling said. “When a lawyer repeatedly employs deceit and dishonesty to harm another person, that lawyer corrodes the integrity of the profession and threatens to compromise public confidence in the legal system.”
Phone calls to Ms. Choi and her family were not immediately returned on Saturday. Her lawyers could not be reached.
Ms. Choi told the disciplinary office that she did not intentionally harm Mr. Hines because she did not make any formal statement against him until the office forced her to participate in its investigation.
In asking for leniency, she said that she was under financial stress and that she had been a lawyer only for a short time. The court office noted in its ruling that Ms. Choi’s repeated deception and lack of remorse persuaded it to go beyond suspending her law license and to seek disbarment.
Mr. Hines said he was livid about the way the internal investigations were handled, and the damage done to his reputation and mental and physical health. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, Beth McCann, the city and county of Denver, and the prosecutor’s office.
“We believe the investigation was handled appropriately,” Matt Jablow, a spokesman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office said on Saturday.
Jack Begg contributed research.
