Attorney Paul Wommer has been a contract defender for 12 years. Many of his clients last year complained that he mistreated them. Photo by Gary Thompson.

"People say I'm grouchy all the time, too, Jerry ... Mr. Wommer, he's been an attorney for like 25 years, wins a lot of cases for the defense. He specializes in criminal defense."

Justice of the Peace Nancy Oesterle at an Aug. 29, 2005, court hearing

Time and again in a recent one-year period, defendants complained that contract defender Paul Wommer showed little interest in their cases.

Many of the accusations against Wommer were made in writing, but Justice of the Peace Nancy Oesterle, Wommer's supervisor since 1994, took no action.

If Oesterle had checked, she would have found that Wommer by his own admission rarely visited clients in jail or took phone calls from them.

"I don't go over to see everyone at the jail. I can't," Wommer said. "You have to make arrangements to see them when they're brought over for hearings."

For Wommer, the attorney-client relationship in contract cases often consisted of brief and sometimes nasty exchanges before court hearings.

Jerry Saulter, who was accused of stabbing a man in the bicep with a kitchen knife, told Oesterle that he did not meet Wommer until his preliminary hearing and that his attorney called him "stupid" and "ignorant."

Oesterle brushed off the complaint and denied Saulter's request for a new attorney. Saulter eventually pleaded guilty and is serving five years in prison, according to court records.

An examination of cases from late 2005 and early 2006 reveals a pattern in which defendants alleged that Wommer pressured them to plead guilty, and if they chose not to, largely cut off contact.

In addition to his contract cases, Wommer was juggling about 125 privately retained cases and at least 20 civil cases, he said in an interview.

Wommer, who was physically assaulted by an unhappy client in the Clark County Detention Center in 2005, defended his conduct in the contract cases.

"Every attorney will tell you they threaten and chastise clients," Wommer said. "If I wasn't competent, they would have gotten rid of me a long time ago."

Oesterle, who worked with Wommer at the district attorney's office in the 1980s, has kept him on despite consistent and specific complaints.

Wommer has contributed $1,500 to Oesterle's election campaigns since 1998, county records show. She was re-elected twice in that time.

Peter Deshotel, who was accused of taking part in a robbery and carjacking at a local Wal-Mart in 2005, claimed Wommer was more interested in convicting him than defending him.

"He said he didn't believe me about me being innocent, so save my breath, told me I was stupid if I didn't take the deal of 4 to 30 years," Deshotel wrote in a motion to the court requesting a new attorney.

A co-defendant in the case later said Deshotel had no involvement in the crime.

Jail records show Wommer did not visit Deshotel in the two months before he was convicted at trial. Deshotel was later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

After the conviction, Wommer refused to discuss plans for appealing the case, said Deshotel's mother, Mary.

"He wouldn't return our phone calls and wouldn't tell us anything about what was happening," Mary Deshotel said.

Darryl Cone, who was accused of stealing a truck from his workplace, alleged in three separate court filings that Wommer threatened to work with prosecutors to get him a long prison sentence if he did not plead guilty.

"His attorney never went down to the jail and talked to him," said Lotee Cone, Cone's grandmother. "I don't know much about these things, but that doesn't seem right to me."

Wommer's performance on another case earlier this decade nearly had fatal consequences.

In 2002, Oesterle appointed Wommer to defend Steven Kaczmarek on charges he robbed and murdered a man at a Fremont Street motel, even though another attorney had defended Kaczmarek in a related sexual assault case.

It was her courtroom and her choice of who to appoint.

Oesterle chose Greg Denue, another of her contract defenders, to serve as Wommer's co-counsel in the capital murder case.

After Kaczmarek was convicted and sentenced to death, court filings showed Wommer had visited him only once before trial. A block on Wommer's phone prevented Kaczmarek from calling his attorney collect.

Before the trial, Kaczmarek's attorneys made little effort to bring his mother, Charlene Holman, from Ohio to Las Vegas to testify at a hearing that would determine if her son would live or die.

In an interview, Holman said she wanted to testify at the penalty hearing.

"They told me two or three days before it was time to come," Holman said. "I didn't have time to make plans to get out there. If I wanted to get off work, I needed more time. I couldn't just get on a plane and come."

Holman could have told about the extreme physical abuse and psychotherapy her son had received as a child. Instead she sent a one-page letter briefly explaining that her son had a rough upbringing.

Wommer and Denue's performance at and before trial prompted the district attorney's office last February to offer Kaczmarek a plea deal that took him off death row. He is now serving life without the possibility of parole.

When asked about the deal, District Attorney David Roger said, "Did we feel that errors by his trial lawyers might have resulted in a new trial? There's always that possibility."

Wommer said he thought he and his co-counsel did an adequate job in the Kaczmarek case.

"Taking a case to a jury is not an exact science," Wommer said. "I thought my relationship with Kaczmarek was good and that we did a good job at trial."