Former City Attorney Pleads Not Guilty, Case Bound Over For Trial

Tearman Spencer (bottom left) appears before Court Commission J.C. Moore. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Former City Attorney Tearman Spencer‘s felony misconduct in office case is advancing to trial after a second attempt to dismiss it failed.

Spencer appeared in court Wednesday for a preliminary hearing. His attorney, William F. Sulton, again tried to have the case dismissed. However, after 40 minutes of examination of two case investigators and plenty of objections from both sides, Court Commissioner J.C. Moore determined there was probable cause that Spencer may have committed a felony and advanced the case to a full trial.

The then city-attorney, as an October complaint filed by assistant district attorney Nicolas J. Heitman alleges, used his power to avoid permitting fees from the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS) for a property he rented at 3030 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. to store his collection of vehicles. When he instructed a deputy in 2023 to prepare a memo that he didn’t need an occupancy permit, he is alleged to have withheld that such a determination was for his personal benefit and would save thousands of dollars in permitting costs. He is then alleged to have provided the memo not to DNS, his client, but to his landlord to use in meeting with DNS.

“He provided work product from the office to a citizen that would benefit him personally,” said Heitman. The assistant district attorney also alleged that Spencer misled his deputy, Odalo J. Ohiku, in requesting the information. “He only provided information that would benefit him personally.”

But Spencer’s attorney, as he has in multiple hearings, moved to have the case tossed.

“This is just insufficient. We would ask that you dismiss it,” said Sulton.

“Essentially there are four elements to this,” said Moore in making his ruling. “The first two don’t sound like they are at issue,” said the commissioner of the fact that Spencer was a public official and used discretionary power. “They’re not in dispute.”

“I think what’s really at dispute here is… whether he exercised that power in a manner inconsistent with the duties of his office and whether he did so with an intent to gain a dishonest advantage,” said Moore. “The state has indicated that he had members of his office fashion the memo so that they could be used by the owner of the property to dissuade DNS and then inure to his benefit. The defense says no, it was just a perfectly innocent thing, and it was completely ordinary for the city attorney’s office to generate essentially a memorandum opining on a legal issue for a member of the public.”

Moore said it wasn’t his role to decide who was right.

“Those are two competing inferences, and when it comes down to competing inferences, I don’t really have to make a determination as to whether one or the other is correct. All that I need to find is that there is an inference consistent with the evidence and also consistent with the defendant’s commission of a felony in this case, and I think clearly we have that,” said the commissioner. “Whether or not there’s anything more is something for trial, but we’re not at trial here today.”

Moore ordered Spencer bound over for trial, a ruling that advances the state’s case to a circuit court trial with Judge Jorge Fragoso. Spencer remains free on a $2,000 bond. Sulton entered not guilty pleas on his account.

After leaving the courtroom, Sulton said he expects to file more motions for dismissal. “We’ll ask Judge Fragoso to review it,” the attorney said. Fragoso, in January, denied Sulton’s de novo petition to dismiss the case.

“I do think they made some factual representations that they’re not going to be able to back up,” said Sulton of the alleged comments of Spencer’s subordinates Ohiku and assistant city attorney Theresa Montag, who authored the memo. “We’ve interviewed these folks. They don’t say that.”

Sulton, who had many objections overruled by Moore during the hearing, said the commissioner was applying the law as written, but had the wrong analysis in his final decision. “It’s hard to get a fair shake before the actual jury trial.”

The maximum penalty for the Class I felony charge is a $10,000 fine and imprisonment of not more than three and a half years. Spencer also faces a misdemeanor charge for obstructing an officer stemming from a July 2024 voluntary interview. The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and nine months imprisonment.

Spencer, as district attorney’s office investigator Michael Lopez testified Wednesday, said he did not provide a copy of the memo to his landlord, Mohammad Arif Ghaffar, nor anyone else. But Lopez, citing a search warrant that provided access to Spencer’s private Yahoo email account, said Spencer forwarded the memo from his city email account to his private email account and then again to Ghaffar. Later in the interview, said Lopez, Spencer said he may have provided the email. DNS, according to the investigators, did not learn of the memo until it was presented to them by Ghaffar.

After a single term as city attorney, Spencer, 68, was defeated in April 2024. He spent much of his tenure embattled in controversies, including allegations of harassment of female subordinates and publicly sparring with the Common Council, his client. One of the harassment allegations resulted in a settlement. Other conduct issues resulted in the council rewriting an anti-harassment policy to apply to elected officials.

The city attorney serves as chief legal counsel for the city and oversees a team of roughly three dozen attorneys.

A scheduling hearing is set for April 11.