Lawyer refunds part of fees amid allegations against judge
A Roanoke attorney who received a big payment from the state for court-appointed work on a murder sentencing returned more than half of the money this month after The Roanoke Times questioned him about discrepancies in his billing.
Patrick Kenney is a former prosecutor and now one of the region’s more well-known criminal defense lawyers.
The sentencing in question was for Timothy Mwandi Church, who had been convicted in 2019 of killing a Roanoke motel owner and attacking his wife and daughter in what a judge called one of the most horrific killings in city history. He is now serving a 40-year sentence.
Timothy Mwandi Church, center, receives a 40-year prison sentence in 2020 in Roanoke Circuit Court with defense attorney Patrick Kenney beside him. Kenny has returned thousands from his work on the case.
The Roanoke Times reported last month about developments in the case.
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In an Aug. 30 court filing, Timothy Church alleged that his mother had sex with a Roanoke judge while Church was awaiting trial. Another judge convicted him on six charges. His court filing included a statement from his mother in which she said Judge Onzlee Ware promised to help her with her son’s case in exchange for sex.
She began having sex with him, according to court records, and Ware told her he knew the judge who would sentence her son, said he could ensure a light sentence and helped her write a statement she read at the sentencing.
Timothy Church’s mother, Grace Church, testifies on his behalf in Roanoke Circuit Court in July 2020 and says he had struggled with depression and had been hospitalized twice before the Starlite attack, to no avail: “He was suffering silently and never knew how to articulate his pain.”
Grace Church said in the August court filing by her son that Ware also told her to switch out her son’s lawyer for Kenney.
Grace Church has said she couldn’t afford a new attorney. So she told her son’s lawyer, who handled his bench trial, that she wanted to replace him with Kenney. The lawyer conveyed that to Circuit Judge Christopher Clemens, who was overseeing the case, and Clemens appointed Kenney.
A few days after the allegations against Ware were reported in a Roanoke Times story last month, Ware stopped hearing cases and has not been seen in the city courthouse since. His status remains unclear.
Roanoke judge absent from courthouse weeks after sexual allegations surfaced
In reviewing case documents, The Roanoke Times found that Kenney had received $11,475 from the state for his work on Church’s case.
The newspaper asked for his billing records from the state judiciary’s administrative office, the Office of the Executive Secretary.
Defense attorney Patrick Kenney, appointed to Timothy Church’s case after it was tried but prior to the sentencing, said in 2020 his client “is not broken without redemption” and that Church “was struggling for years before this happened.”
Those records are public because Kenney was appointed by a court to handle Timothy Church’s sentencing, and he submitted paperwork to local judges and ultimately the state government so that he could be paid for the work.
Two judges — Clemens and David Carson of Roanoke Circuit Court — signed off on Kenney’s paperwork and an $11,475 payment. Records show it was among his biggest payloads for court-appointed work between 2019 and 2021.
But the numbers in Kenney’s billing records didn’t add up.
The records showed Kenney reported spending 130.5 hours working on Church’s sentencing. But an addendum in his records on how he spent his time accounted for only 53.5 hours of work.
In this document, Roanoke defense attorney Patrick Kenney requests from Roanoke Circuit Court judges additional compensation for his work on Timothy Church’s 2020 sentencing hearing.
The Roanoke Times emailed, called and delivered a letter to Kenney requesting to talk about the billing discrepancy. He emailed back Oct. 6 to say he’d made an inadvertent error in part of his form and had written a check that day to the state to reimburse $3,510 of the $11,475 he had been paid.
“Thank you for bringing the matter of my billing to my attention,” he wrote to the newspaper.
To the Supreme Court of Virginia, he wrote, “I wanted to immediately correct this inadvertent oversight.”
Along with this letter, dated Oct. 6, from attorney Patrick Kenney to the Supreme Court of Virginia, Kenney delivered a $3,150 check payable to the state treasurer, explaining that he was overpaid as court-appointed counsel.
He had written on his July 2020 form that he worked 92.5 hours on the murder charge, one of six his client had been convicted of. But he told the Supreme Court this month the number should have been 53.5 hours.
He declined to answer further questions from the newspaper about it.
Some numbers still didn’t make sense.
In his addendum where he detailed the time he spent on the case, the hours totaled 53.5. But Kenney also reported that he worked an additional 29 hours on the five other charges — two counts of aggravated malicious wounding and three counts of attempted robbery. And he billed for nine hours of “in court” time — 90 minutes on each of the six charges — even though he reported he was only in court for 90 minutes total.
Timothy Mwandi Church placed his hands on a copy of The Good News Bible at his July 2020 sentencing in Roanoke Circuit Court with his then-lawyer, Patrick Kenney, standing beside him.
The newspaper reached out to Kenney again Thursday.
He responded by email to say that he had just sent a second reimbursement, in the amount of $3,015, to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
“There appears to be confusion in the legal community regarding payments and billings across multiple charges,” Kenney wrote to the newspaper Thursday. He would not comment further.
He attached a letter he sent to the Supreme Court on Thursday, telling the court he was enclosing a check for $3,015 “as repayment for an overage amount that I was paid as court-appointed counsel.”
Along with this letter from attorney Patrick Kenney the Supreme Court of Virginia, dated Oct. 19, Kenney said he enclosed a second reimbursement check to the state, this one for $3,015 “as repayment for an overage amount that I was paid as court-appointed counsel.”
“It has come to my attention that time was billed across multiple charges on the same voucher,” his letter to the Supreme Court said.
Was Kenney allowed to bill for 90 minutes of “in court” time on each of the six charges when he only spent 90 minutes in court?
A spokeswoman for the state judiciary’s administrative office said the issue of whether an attorney can multiply “in court” time by the number of charges “is not clearly addressed in our resources or materials.”
One Virginia attorney familiar with the process said billing time in court for each charge isn’t the norm.
“The usual practice that I am familiar with is that you would divide the time by the number of charges or assess the time on one charge only,” said Eugene Oliver, a Harrisonburg attorney who is past president of the Virginia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It would be unusual to multiply the time spent by the number of charges.”
Of his original 2020 payment of $11,475, Kenny has refunded $6,525 — nearly 57% of his original payment.
Of the 53.5 hours Kenney broke down in his paperwork, he reported spending 12 hours on “discovery,” four hours to read the trial transcripts because he had not handled the trial, nine hours to read through the files of two previous attorneys, 10 hours of meeting with Timothy Church, four hours of meetings with the commonwealth’s attorney’s office, 90 minutes of “legal writing,” 4.5 hours of conferences with Timothy Church’s family, an hour to review a court report prior to sentencing, and six hours to prepare for the sentencing hearing.
When The Roanoke Times posed questions to Kenney about some of that work, he declined to answer them, citing attorney-client privilege.
Timothy Church’s July 2020 sentencing hearing lasted just under an hour, according to court records. A transcript shows that during the hearing, Kenney called Church’s mother as his only witness.
The transcript, a public document available through Roanoke Circuit Court records, details Timothy Church’s sentencing hearing on July 6, 2020.
Kenney then presented about seven minutes of argument, according to court records. He included in his argument that Church had been hospitalized and medicated for mental health challenges. He asked Clemens to sentence Church within state sentencing guidelines, but “to show some grace, to allow some redemption.”
Carson, the chief judge in 2020 who approved Kenney’s billing after approval by Clemens, declined to comment on the attorney’s paperwork.
Because he hasn’t commented on the case, it’s unclear if Kenney had any knowledge during the 2020 sentencing that Ware, according to the new allegations, was engaged in a relationship with Grace Church and assisting her with her son’s defense.
But Timothy Church wants to find out.
He has a pending legal case, updated by the Aug. 30 filing that first publicly revealed his mother’s allegations against Ware, in which he’s asking for his freedom. Church is asking a court for release of any communications between Ware, Clemens or Kenney.
Patrick Wilson is a reporter for the Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team.
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