Check us out on Facebook for up to date information. www.facebook.com/Albany.County.Prosecuting.Attorney
I’m Richard Bohling and I am honored to served as the Albany County and Prosecuting Attorney. I have twenty-five years experience as an attorney, including fourteen as a prosecutor. I was first elected as Albany County and Prosecuting Attorney in 2002. As the Albany County and Prosecuting Attorney, I served for eight years as a member of the Wyoming County and Prosecuting Attorney’s Association (WC&PAA) executive board, first holding the office of Secretary, then Vice-President, and from 2008 to 2010 I served as President of the association. I currently have over 400 hours of specialized continuing legal education regarding prosecution, governmental law, and administration of a prosecutor’s office. I have successfully prosecuted numerous homicide, sexual assault, and aggravated assault cases, in addition to many other serious financial and violent crimes through jury trial to guilty verdicts. Although Albany County has struggled with chronic high turnover in the ranks of local law enforcement in the past few years, my office has consistently worked with local law enforcement agencies, providing training, improving standards, and helping law enforcement adapt to changing technology and communications styles. I developed a system of email communications to the point that there is now a message that originates from the detention center early every morning that informs all local courts, the office of the county attorney, probation and parole, various other local criminal justice agencies, and the public defender’s office, as to who has been arrested, what they were arrested for, and what court they will appear in. This fundamental step of keeping the criminal justice community informed as to who is entering the system, and for what, is a basic tenet of community based prosecution.
One of the most important roles I play in representing the legal interests of Albany County is as a county representative to the Wyoming State Legislature and as such I have assisted for several sessions in crafting legislation and reforming state law. I have made numerous appearances in front of the Joint Judiciary Committee, both in my capacity as President of the WC&PAA and on behalf of Albany County to advance the cause of juvenile justice reforms. Our local initiatives that have been implemented since I became County and Prosecuting Attorney, such as the juvenile diversion program, detention alternatives, local and home based treatment, and less emphasis on out of the community treatment programs have resulted in consistent praise from the Director of DFS and many other leaders in the field of juvenile justice as a model approach for Wyoming. Because of the success of our juvenile diversion program my office has been able to significantly reduce the number of delinquency petitions filed in the Juvenile Court. The difference in cost between what is spent on children in the diversion program and what is spent on children in the juvenile court is tremendous and our reductions in the juvenile court caseload have resulted in savings of tens of thousands of dollars to the taxpayers. I helped to draft the language of the single point of entry statute to ensure that all minors who commit crimes in the State of Wyoming come directly to the attention of the local County Attorney. Prior to enactment of this important revision to the juvenile statutes, many minors had made multiple trips to local municipal courts before ever coming to the attention of the county attorneys that could intervene and address their conduct in a more meaningful and comprehensive manner. I participated in a multi year legislative re-write of the state statutes that provided more state funding for the operations of county attorney’s offices statewide in the Wyoming legislature. As a result of the efforts of Wyoming County and Prosecuting Attorneys association membership and with the cooperation of several local legislators, the State of Wyoming now annually reimburses Albany County in excess of $150,000.00 for the salaries of the attorneys in my office.
When I took office in 2003, efforts to create a drug court in the community had ground to a halt. I put the process back into high gear and by the end of the year, Albany County Drug Court was up and running. After learning of a need for a vehicle to be used by the program, I approached the director of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, and a forfeited car, seized by DCI in a prior drug case, was provided the program. The Albany County Drug Court is now in the eighth year of operations. I served on the Wyoming Legislature’s Drug Court Steering Committee at the request of the Legislative Service Office (LSO) and assisted in the formalizing of Wyoming’s Drug Court statutes in that capacity.
I am proud of the legal team I have built to provide consistent, competent and reliable legal advice to the only “client” I am allowed to have by law, Albany County government. During my tenure the Board of Commissioners and the other elected officials and department heads, as well as the many boards and agencies that rely on our office for legal advice have come to trust our abilities and learned to expect us to be there to provide a helping hand. Serving in my current capacity as the County Attorney actually means I run a small law office, with one client that has many faces and a myriad of needs in almost every area of the law imaginable. In one day we go from questions about HIPPA, to taxation, to construction, to search and seizure. It never gets boring or mundane.