CLINTON – The DeWitt County state's attorney Tuesday dismissed criminal charges filed more than a year ago against a former employee in the DeWitt County circuit clerk's office.

State's Attorney Dick Koritz said he received new information recently in the case of Susan Stevens, 54, of Clinton that "created strategic problems" in proceeding with prosecuting her for felony theft and official misconduct.

Stevens was charged in May 2009 on what Koritz conceded was circumstantial evidence, but he said he filed the charges anyway because the three-year statute of limitations on theft and the one-year statute on official misconduct was looming.

Stevens had served as the deputy clerk in charge of bookkeeping for the clerk's office and was in charge of making deposits of money received by that office. She had been in the clerk's office a little more than 20 years, Koritz said.

Allegations of theft, dating to January 2004, first came to light in March 2007 during the administration of former State's Attorney Jerry Johnson. A Shelbyville certified public accounting firm was retained to review the files. Stevens left her post when the accusations came to light, Koritz said.

"The accounting review was essentially a review of deposit tickets and bond receipts. The evidence against Ms. Stevens was circumstantial in nature and without direct evidence against Ms. Stevens," Koritz wrote in a news release.

No formal forensic audit, the purpose of which is to look for illegal transactions, was ever done, Koritz said.

"The lack of a forensic audit became problematic when the CPAs that have conducted the annual audits for DeWitt County for the past several years voiced their concerns to my office that the amounts alleged to have been stolen were in excess of anything their audits would support. The auditing CPAs also voiced concern with the record keeping of the circuit clerk's office and difficulty in getting the financial records to balance," he wrote.

Stevens had been charged with theft over $100,000 for a series of transactions that occurred between Jan. 1, 2004, and March 23, 2007.

Additionally, Koritz said, he received information during the past several weeks "that bears on credibility." The information was not generated by either the Illinois State Police or any of the accountants who investigated and was shared by Koritz with the attorney for Stevens.

"Based on the new information that was presented to my office and the lack of a forensic audit in a case where credibility would be a major issue, it would simply be unethical, under the rules that govern prosecutors, to proceed to trial," he wrote.