The Lawyers Who Kept Screwing Up

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By February 2023, U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Numbers II was at his wits’ end with the North Carolina Department of Justice’s Public Safety Section. 

Numbers wasn’t alone in his frustration with the section, which defends the N.C. Department of Adult Correction, N.C. Department of Public Safety, State Bureau of Investigation, and State Highway Patrol against lawsuits. For years, federal judges across the state had criticized its attorneys for missing filing deadlines and failing to follow orders. 

On their own, these might seem like minor issues, Numbers said during a hearing in Raleigh. “It’s the repeated nature of those violations that make small violations appear more like major ones or appear to have systemic problems,” he said. 

Weeks earlier, Numbers had instructed Justice Department lawyers not to publicly file discovery materials in a lawsuit brought by Sean Mayo, who had accused Nash County probation officers of false arrest and conducting an illegal search. The next day, however, department attorney Sonya Calloway-Durham had done just that. 

Numbers wanted to know what happened—and why it seemed to keep happening. Calloway-Durham explained that she’d been sick and didn’t have paralegal help, and she hadn’t read his order all the way through.  

Numbers had also summoned Leslie Cooley Dismukes—then head of the department’s criminal bureau, which oversaw the Public Safety Section—to the hearing, citing “the ongoing nature of these issues.” Dismukes told Numbers that since the General Assembly cut the department’s budget in 2017, the section “has notoriously been overworked and underfunded.”

Dismukes added that because of “protections for state employees,” it takes the department “a longer period of time” to “impose corrections” on “individuals who have repeated issues.” 

Numbers said that federal judges had mostly declined to punish the department’s lawyers, but “that grace has not been met with improved compliance.” Still, he said he’d let it slide once more. 

Two years later, what was left of that grace had evaporated. 

“Few groups have so persistently tested the patience of this state’s federal judiciary as the North Carolina Department of Justice’s Public Safety Section,” Numbers wrote at the outset of a scathing 43-page order he issued on October 17. (Carolina Journal and Law360 first reported on the order.)

“From Manteo to Murphy, North Carolina’s federal judges have chided, criticized, and chastised its attorneys for disregarding court orders and the federal rules,” Numbers continued. “Yet the Public Safety Section’s problems persist. Its persistent disregard for the authority of the federal courts and the rule of law is deeply troubling.”

After determining that Calloway-Durham had violated federal rules by filing a “frivolous” motion that delayed Mayo’s trial, Numbers sanctioned Calloway-Durham and the state Justice Department for failing to supervise her. 

This “failure” was “not an isolated event,” Numbers wrote. “Instead, the Public Safety Section’s attorneys have often failed to meet their professional obligations in litigation across the state.” 

The problem has gone on “for over half a decade,” he added.

“Few groups have so persistently tested the patience of this state’s federal judiciary as the North Carolina Department of Justice’s Public Safety Section.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Numbers II

For most of that time, Josh Stein headed the N.C. Justice Department as the state’s attorney general. Stein, a Democrat, was elected governor in 2024. In a statement, a Stein spokesperson blamed funding cuts for the section’s “severe understaffing.” 

Numbers’ order directed Jeff Jackson, a Democrat who became state attorney general in January, to “prepare a report outlining the steps he will take to address the Public Safety Section’s deficiencies.” 

The report was due Monday, and Jackson’s office filed it just before 5 p.m. Like Stein, Jackson said a lack of resources was at the root of the section’s troubles. The report also argued that reforms already underway had placed the section “on a path toward greater accountability and professionalism.”

Several attorneys who have litigated against the Public Safety Section said their experiences aligned with what Numbers described. 

“No deadline will be respected,” said Elizabeth Simpson, an attorney at the civil rights organization Emancipate NC and an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. “[Filings are] going to be incomplete. You’re going to have to follow up and follow up and follow up again to try to get what you’re trying to get. And the things that are filed are going to be sloppy.”

But most plaintiffs the section faces are like Mayo: They’re pro se, meaning they don’t have attorneys representing them. Many are prison inmates with a limited grasp of byzantine legal processes and little chance of winning.  

Without legal opponents effectively pushing back and judges often too busy to notice, the section’s attorneys grew accustomed to cutting corners, said Cate Edwards, a Raleigh attorney who has litigated against the department.

“It is really up to us as attorneys to be honest with the court,” Edwards said. “It’s incredible that these judges have caught some of this conduct. I’m certain that they haven’t caught all of it.” 

‘Not the Highest Priority’ 

Court documents, interviews, hearing transcripts, Jackson’s report, and personnel records indicate that the Public Safety Section has long struggled with low morale, high turnover, and recruiting and retention.     

“It always felt like a section that litigates primarily against pro se people who are in prison is certainly not going to be the highest priority,” Simpson said. 

These issues aren’t unique to North Carolina, said Brian Kane, executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General. Public safety sections across the country lack the resources to handle prisoner lawsuits. 

“There’s always this tension of are there enough resources to do the job we need to do and ensure that justice is done,” Kane said. 

After Stein was elected attorney general in 2016, the Republican-led General Assembly cut the N.C. Justice Department’s funding by $10 million. According to Jackson’s report, that equaled 40% of the department’s general fund budget. 

The cut made it difficult for the Public Safety Section to keep up with the rising number of prisoner lawsuits, Jackson’s report said. The section’s more experienced attorneys couldn’t advance, so they left. The attorneys who stayed were overwhelmed.  

“As a result, the section experienced a high turnover rate, sometimes with numerous vacancies occurring at the same time,” the report said. In March 2024, only 45% of its positions were filled. 

The staffing problems also led to poor management, according to Jackson’s report. “From approximately 2019 until 2022, there was little managerial oversight into attorneys’ caseloads,” because the section’s leader had to “‘put out fires’ instead of concentrating on management tasks,” the report said. 

As attorney general, Stein “did everything he could to secure additional attorneys to ease that burden and address issues in the section, including repeatedly calling on the General Assembly to fund additional positions,” Stein’s spokesperson said in a statement. The legislature “routinely rebuffed those requests.”

“As a result, the section experienced a high turnover rate, sometimes with numerous vacancies occurring at the same time.”

report from state Attorney General Jeff Jackson

“Frankly, these complaints sound more like excuses from the current attorney general and his predecessor,” a spokesperson for House Speaker Destin Hall told The Assembly. The spokesperson pointed out that Stein’s budget proposal this year didn’t seek funding for additional Public Safety Section attorneys. 

The Justice Department’s annual budget request to lawmakers sought those funds, however. The General Assembly has likely adjourned for the year without passing a budget.  

Jackson’s report said that, alongside budget and staffing issues, the section also had a couple of attorneys who were not “a good fit for this high-volume, fast-paced litigation work.” 

Without explicitly saying so, the report indicated that one of them was Calloway-Durham. 

‘Second-Guessed and Micro-Managed’

The N.C. Justice Department fired Calloway-Durham on October 29, according to personnel records. 

Thirteen months earlier, it paid her tens of thousands of dollars to settle a discrimination lawsuit. Calloway-Durham, who is Black and will soon turn 57, had accused department managers of rejecting her application to lead the Public Safety Section because of “her race, dark skin, sex, and age.”  

In the September 2024 settlement, which The Assembly obtained through a public records request, the department denied wrongdoing but paid Calloway-Durham just over $25,000 in what the settlement characterized as a retroactive raise. (She was making about $128,000 a year when she was dismissed.) The department also paid Calloway-Durham’s attorneys $50,000. 

Calloway-Durham did not respond to interview requests.

A former public defender, Calloway-Durham joined the Justice Department in 2002 and spent the next decade working on labor cases. She then transferred into the criminal division, assisting with and arguing federal and state appeals. 

In 2018, Dismukes, the criminal bureau chief, asked Calloway-Durham to handle litigation involving the electronic monitoring of sex offenders, which meant transferring to the Public Safety Section. Calloway-Durham agreed. 

But the section’s leader soon told her that there weren’t enough electronic monitoring cases to justify her position, so she’d have to take on inmate lawsuits, too, according to her complaint. 

Calloway-Durham viewed that as a demotion. She had a higher rank than the attorneys who typically handled prisoner lawsuits. And not long before, she’d been handling high-stakes appeals, including death penalty litigation. 

In May 2020, the section’s leader left, and Calloway-Durham applied for that job. A month later, the department selected James Trachtman, a white man, for the position. Trachtman had joined the department only a year earlier and had less relevant experience, Calloway-Durham’s lawsuit alleged. (Trachtman, who left the department last year, declined to comment.)  

In court documents, the department pointed out that Trachtman replaced a Black woman, and the managers who selected him were women. The department argued that he was chosen because he was a better candidate. 

Calloway-Durham protested. According to her discrimination complaint, at Calloway-Durham’s October 2020 grievance hearing, Dismukes—who’d been part of the hiring committee—said that Calloway-Durham was incapable of handling complex work. Another manager said he considered Calloway-Durham a poor writer. Another called her a “prime example of lazy career employees” who did not “come across as a person of very high intelligence,” the complaint alleged. 

In her complaint, Calloway-Durham said these comments were false and maligned her. Following that hearing, Calloway-Durham said she faced a hostile work environment in which she was “scrutinized, second-guessed, and micro-managed.”

She filed suit against the Justice Department in September 2021. At that point, she wasn’t yet on the radar of the state’s federal judges. The same couldn’t be said for other attorneys in the Public Safety Section.

‘Eminently Frustrating’

In 2019, a Justice Department attorney told Numbers that he had failed to comply with an order to attend legal training because “I receive a copious number of email messages. It is possible that I simply overlooked this email.” The legal training requirement came after the department violated discovery rules. 

In December 2020, U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger criticized Public Safety Section attorney Bryan Nichols for failing to respond to discovery requests filed by pro se inmate Matthew Griffin, who had accused correctional officers of attacking him. 

These failures are “not only eminently frustrating and unprofessional, but cost the court considerable unnecessary loss of its very limited time and resources,” Reidinger wrote. 

Nichols, who is now deputy general counsel at the State Bureau of Investigation, blamed “the stress and difficulty of working from home during the COVID-19 crisis.” (He did not respond to requests for comment.)

Less than a year later, Reidinger again berated Nichols for missing deadlines and failing to follow orders. He advised Nichols to “seek the assistance of other attorneys” in the department, because he had made “no consistent effort to manage this case properly and professionally himself.”

(In June 2025, the Justice Department settled Griffin’s lawsuit for $10,000.)  

In another case in December 2021, Reidinger once again called out Nichols’ “history with this court in failing to abide the deadlines of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the court and to generally manage his cases.”

Other federal judges began to take issue with the section’s attorneys. 

In 2022, a judge faulted an attorney’s filings for typos and formatting errors “from what appears to be cutting and pasting.” In 2023, U.S. District Judge James Dever said the section’s lawyers had a history of nonresponsiveness. That same year, U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder wrote in an order that throughout a four-year-long case, section attorneys “exhibited repeated failures to file timely responses to motions and discovery.” 

Nichols “explained during one hearing that his office was grossly understaffed,” Schroeder continued. “The court is aware that other cases pending in this district have suffered from similar neglect by the state. The Attorney General’s Office should hold itself to a higher standard of professional competence.”

Some judges resorted to financial penalties. In September 2022, U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle ordered the Justice Department to pay $15,000 to attorneys for the late Charles Ray Finch, an exonerated former death row inmate who died in January 2022, after determining that the department had abused its subpoenas.

“The Attorney General’s Office should hold itself to a higher standard of professional competence.”

U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder

(The SBI also paid $7.5 million in July 2022 to settle Finch’s claims that agents concealed evidence from the state’s Innocence Inquiry Commission. Wilson County had previously paid Finch $2 million to settle his lawsuit over its sheriff’s department’s role in his wrongful conviction.) 

In May 2023, Reidinger ordered the Justice Department to pay a prisoner plaintiff $1,000 on account of Nichols’ “carelessness in responding to the discovery requests.” In November 2023, Numbers ordered the department to pay a nonprofit plaintiff’s attorneys more than $45,000 after it failed to prepare a witness for a deposition. A month later, U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Jones Jr. awarded the plaintiffs in another case more than $40,000 after the department failed to produce required documents.  

‘Genuinely Incredible’ 

During the February 2023 hearing, Numbers didn’t think Calloway-Durham was the Public Safety Section’s biggest offender. 

“Ms. Calloway-Durham, to her credit, does not have a great deal of issues to date,” Numbers said. 

He didn’t comment on her explanation for disobeying his order in the Mayo case—that after being sick and short on paralegal assistance, she’d failed to read it to the end. Instead, he appeared more interested in getting Dismukes to tell him how she planned to fix it. 

Numbers had previously asked Trachtman, then the Public Safety Section’s leader, how he planned to make things better. “His answers were disturbing in that he said he could not promise me that attorneys wouldn’t violate court orders,” the judge said, “and there just were simply not enough people or hours in the day to comply with the court’s orders.”

The Justice Department couldn’t control how much money the General Assembly gave it, Numbers admitted. “But the bottom line is this court’s orders need to be followed.” 

“I do think that we try very hard to do things the right way,” Dismukes said. She told Numbers that the Public Safety Section had instituted weekly meetings to discuss upcoming deadlines, and the section’s leader was copied on notices its attorneys received. 

Most importantly, Dismukes said, the section had just received funding from the N.C. Department of Adult Correction for five additional attorneys. That brought the number of budgeted attorney positions for the section from eight to 13. (A Justice Department spokesperson told The Assembly that the section had 11 attorneys as of late November, with two vacancies.) 

That “will take the caseloads from the attorneys who are currently working in this section down and will allow them each to spend more time with each individual case,” Dismukes said. “And our hope in doing that is it will allow them to be more precise and pay closer attention to each court’s order.”  

That didn’t happen—at least not to Numbers’ satisfaction. The judge summoned Calloway-Durham and her supervisors back into his courtroom in April 2025. 

Calloway-Durham had angered him by filing a motion just before Mayo’s trial was scheduled to begin in October 2024 that argued that federal courts lacked jurisdiction to hear his lawsuit. The court delayed Mayo’s trial to evaluate her claims. (The trial is now scheduled for February 2026.)

“[O]ur hope in doing that is it will allow them to be more precise and pay closer attention to each court’s order.”  

Leslie Cooley Dismukes, then head of the N.C. Department of Justice’s criminal bureau

But Numbers ruled her claim “frivolous.” More than that, she’d made essentially the same argument two years earlier, and it had already been rejected. To Numbers, that was inexcusable.  

“The apparent lack of a legal basis for these arguments suggests that they were presented to the court to harass Mayo and to unnecessarily delay the trial of this matter,” Numbers wrote. 

At the hearing, Calloway-Durham said that in recent years, she’d twice gone on medical leave to address issues that “affect my cognitive processing.” She said those issues made recall difficult when she was stressed, but insisted they did not affect her ability to practice law. 

Her explanation didn’t go over well. 

“I am so frustrated and aghast at the fact that you’re claiming you don’t recall the key portion of an earlier order dealing with largely the same issue,” Numbers told Calloway-Durham. “It’s incredible. I mean, it’s genuinely incredible. It is impossible to believe.”

In his October order, Numbers required Calloway-Durham to have another attorney with equal or greater experience co-sign any document she files in federal court for the next year. He then told the state bar to investigate Calloway-Durham for “a potential disability” and determine her competency to practice law. 

Numbers also chided Dismukes for not acting earlier. Dismukes, as head of the criminal bureau, stood next to Calloway-Durham during the 2023 hearing, when Calloway-Durham said that “she violated a court order because she had not read to the end of that document,” Numbers wrote. “Every practitioner knows that is the most likely place to find the court’s commands to the litigants or counsel.” 

“Why did an attorney’s admission that they had not completely read a court order not result in closer scrutiny of that attorney’s performance going forward?” he asked. 

By then, however, Dismukes had left the Justice Department. After Stein was elected governor, he appointed her secretary of the Department of Adult Correction. 

Dismukes told The Assembly in November that the Justice Department “has worked for years to address the persistent challenges faced by its Public Safety Section, including high caseloads, limited staff, and scarce resources.”  

Swain Wood, a former first assistant attorney general and general counsel to Stein, pointed out that the section’s attorneys deal with more cases than other Justice Department lawyers. The section handles about 200 cases per year on average, according to a department spokesperson.    

“I do think that the issues that the court focused on are the exception rather than the rule,” Wood said. “Judges appropriately regard a lot of the work as something that should be a no-fail kind of environment. But when you have all these challenges and this huge number of cases and massive resource constraints, there are going to be occasional problems.” 

‘Not What It Used to Be’

At the April 2025 hearing, the department’s new leaders promised change. 

A year earlier, the department moved the Public Safety Section from the criminal to the civil bureau, housing it alongside other high-volume civil litigation sections and providing it with better oversight, they told Numbers. They said the new administration had staffed the section with more experienced attorneys who received more training in civil procedure. The section’s new leader, Alex Williams, said he double-checked his attorneys’ arguments before they were filed and was more deliberate in assigning cases. 

Williams told Numbers that the new administration had “tried to change the culture of the section” to reduce turnover. “I could tell you that, having been there for the last five and a half years, there has been quite the evolution of this section,” he said. “And it is not what it used to be.” 

Numbers didn’t buy it. 

“The court’s recent experience with the Public Safety Section has not instilled confidence that the issues have been addressed,” he wrote in his October order, ticking off three cases from this year in which the section’s attorneys messed up. 

But Numbers confessed that he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He could fine the Justice Department, but that would “simply shuffle taxpayer dollars from one governmental entity to another.” And because most of the plaintiffs in these cases don’t have lawyers, he couldn’t make the department cover their legal fees. 

Numbers wrote that he considered appointing a third party to recommend reforms. But Jackson is new, so Numbers decided to give him a chance to right the ship first. 

In his report, Jackson promised to bring in outside experts to help guide the section. Former N.C. Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jackson will “provide advisory and mentoring services” to its attorneys, while the National Association of Attorneys General will consult on ways to improve the section’s performance. 

Jackson also said he’d overhauled the section’s leadership and implemented stricter accountability and quality control measures. He’d prohibited attorneys from seeking repeated delays in cases without their supervisors’ permission, and he’d taken steps to get caseloads under control. 

The report said the department would continue lobbying for more funding, though it noted that Numbers’ order “may inadvertently result in additional obstacles to recruitment and retention within the section.” 

It also pointed out that the section’s most problematic lawyers were no longer the department’s problem.   

“A small number of former [Justice Department] attorneys were responsible for the vast majority of the issues” that Numbers cited, the report said. “Those individuals are no longer with the department.”

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Swain Wood’s name.