The Kansas City Star, Oct. 20
Why did Wyandotte County DA secretly seal records for man charged with killing deputies?
Ask yourself why this happened. Then ask the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office why it did this.
The man accused of gunning down two Wyandotte County deputieslast year had two previous cases against him involving violent crimes dismissed by the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s office - which then appeared to want those cases erased from memory.
The Star discovered that dozens of documents in two previous cases against accused murderer Antoine Fielderhad been inexplicably sealed from public view. Worse yet, when initially asked, the Wyandotte County Clerk of District Court office could not explain how the files were sealed - or on whose request and approval.
The answer, as we learned days later, is that the files had been sealed unilaterally at the request of District Attorney Mark Dupree’s office- without a required order by a judge.
To his credit, Wyandotte County Chief Judge Robert Burns investigated the matter after we brought it to his attention. The judge later ordered the documents unsealed.
It’s impossible for the public to know which documents had been sealed in the two cases, but Burns said the roughly 50 documents sealed in just one of the two cases concerned normally routine matters such as subpoenas, motions by lawyers and rulings by judges.
Making the curious episode more curious is the fact that the two cases had long ago been closed, so there was no legitimate reason for the district attorney’s secrecy.
Even more curious, the documents had been sealed, surreptitiously, about the same time in June 2018 that the district attorney’s office filed capital murder charges against Fielder in connection with the case of the murdered deputies.
Why would the district attorney suddenly seal documents in two closed cases? Why was it done without following the proper legal procedures? What was someone in the district attorney’s office trying to hide - the fact that the office had previously dismissed two serious cases against a man now charged with the slaying of two deputies?
Moreover, what would lead a prosecutor of any level of experience to ask a district court clerk directly - and not a judge, which is the proper route - to seal a file?
These are not inconsequential questions, and they are among a litany of queries we posed to the district attorney’s office, which has yet to respond.
“Judges’ orders are the only thing that seals a case,” Clerk of District Court Kristi Hill told The Star, adding that her clerks have been reminded of that this week.
While Judge Burns considers the court clerk’s actions to be an honest mistake, the sealing of documents was certainly no accident on the part of the district attorney’s office.
It also appears to be quite meticulous: The 50-plus documents in one case were sealed while others were not, meaning there was some extensive picking and choosing of which documents to hide from the public.
The sealing of these public documents was a deliberate act on the part of the district attorney’s office - by all appearances to hide embarrassing information from the public in the case of a man suspected of gunning down two sheriff’s deputies.
One of the cases in which documents were sealed involved the murder of 22-year-old Kelsey Ewonusof Overland Park, who was found shot to death in a car in 2015. Two juries were hung in 2017before Dupree dismissed the case in September of that year, choosing via “prosecutorial discretion,” according to court records, not to try Fielder a third time.
The second Fielder case in which documents were mysteriously sealed by the district attorney’s office until this week involved a Dec. 29, 2017, sexual assault and battery that was ultimately dismissed by Dupree’s office.
In a case that’s still pending, Fielder was also charged with the carjacking of a woman earlier that same month, on Dec. 18, 2017. And Fielder is charged in Jackson County with the Dec. 26, 2017, murder of Rosemarie Harmon.
Notably, all of those December 2017 crimes occurred after Fielder’s release following the failed prosecutions of him in the Kelsey Ewonus murder.
Three area prosecutors and close observers of Dupree’s office who requested anonymity said the Ewonus case was difficult yet doable, but that Dupree left himself with far-less-experienced attorneys after a purge of the staff when he took office in 2017 - and that the Ewonus case hinged in large part on circumstantial evidence best communicated to jurors by seasoned prosecutors.
Then, as one said, he just quit on the case.
Are these the jigsaw pieces the district attorney’s office didn’t want us to put together? Are there other pieces we haven’t seen yet?
At the very least, ask yourself: Do you really want a district attorney, perhaps the most powerful presence in any community, playing hide-and-seek with public documents and past actions?
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The Topeka Capital-Journal, Oct. 20
Tax council faces daunting challenge
The Governor’s Council on Tax Reform met for the second time last week, with special attention paid to tax bills passed last session but ultimately vetoed by Gov. Laura Kelly.
While it’s likely not worth litigating again - the legislation passed would have benefited some individual taxpayers along with multinational corporations - the meeting highlighted just how complex taxation really is. Making a small change in one area can result in large repercussions in another. The council has its work cut out for it, and we wish them well.
The traditional way of looking at state taxes is through the analogy of the three-legged stool. That is, Kansas government depends on income, sales and property taxes to balance the books. If revenue from any one of those three sources craters, the burden is passed on to the other two.
The whole Brownback tax “experiment” then, can be easily understood as an attempt to lop off one of the stool’s legs. The legislation dramatically reduced income tax rates in an attempt to stimulate the state’s economy. The move didn’t work, and the other two legs of the stool - sales and property taxes - had to make up some of the difference.
That’s why we end up with a situation in which Kansas sales taxes are some of the highest in the country. They’re set at 6.5 percent, with many cities and towns adding to that for their local needs. Likewise, property taxes in many communities went up to offset reductions in support from state income taxes.
Yes, legislators undid much of the “experiment” in the 2017 legislative session. But state income tax rates still aren’t back to where they were before the tinkering began. And while the state has enjoyed new revenue, budget projections make it clear that we’re heading for a deficit within a few short years.
That’s why Kelly and a vocal minority balked at the tax legislation debated recently. No doubt worthwhile changes can be made, but we’ve only just recovered some stability. The real questions for the council going ahead is how to limit or reduce sales and property taxes while ensuring that income taxes are fairly levied. Spending, too, should be examined, which seems a bitter pill to swallow after the pervasive disinvestment of the Brownback years.
As we said at the beginning, the council has its work cut out for it. The outcomes can be easy to pull for - no one wants to pay high sales taxes. But how the council recommends achieving them will be a complicated, ideologically fraught task.
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Lawrence Journal-World, Oct. 20
A cocaine party and loose discipline should create worry at KU
This little detail will wake you up if you are the parent of a fraternity member at the University of Kansas. The Delta Upsilon fraternity in 2017 had enough cocaine at its spring break house that it was drawing the Greek letters of the fraternity in the illegal drug.
The next part probably won’t help those parents get back to sleep: The fraternity simply was given probation by KU, even though a year earlier the university already had cited Delta Upsilon for hazing and harming new members.
Those details were revealed in a highly redacted university disciplinary document that the Journal-World received through the Kansas Open Records Act and reported on last week. All the details of the cocaine incident aren’t publicly known, so perhaps some judgment should be withheld.
However, it is probably safe to judge KU a bit, given what comes next. In March 2018 - just 10 months after the fraternity was placed on probation - Delta Upsilon was found to have violated university rules by tying a “highly intoxicated member to the neighboring Delta Gamma sorority house’s decorative anchor.”
That too did not cause the university to suspend the fraternity from operating at KU. Instead, it just had a year added on to its probation. Such a suspension wouldn’t come until a few months later when the parent of a pledge complained about the fraternity. In finally handing down a suspension for five years, the university noted several acts of violence, forced alcohol consumption and members of the fraternity urinating on new members.
Upon questioning by the Journal-World, a university spokeswoman acknowledged that KU doesn’t use a formal system of “strikes” or “chances” when deciding whether to discipline campus organizations. Rather “there is an ongoing conversation with Student Affairs leadership and with an organization’s national headquarters” about patterns of misconduct.
Evidently, monogrammed cocaine isn’t as much of a conversation starter as it used to be.
The spokeswoman went on to say that disciplinary matters become a “case-by-case evaluation of the severity of the current incident and the severity of an ongoing pattern of behavior.” It sure seems like this incident would cause KU to rethink its policy. Was it ever a good idea to have such a loosely defined system regarding a matter that involves student safety? KU sure seems like it is playing with fire.
The university should rethink how it deals with such issues in the future, but it is unclear that it will. Much is unclear about KU and how it deals with fraternities. The disciplinary documents released by KU through the open records act included several entire pages cloaked by black and gray boxes. KU officials redacted descriptions of abusive behavior for specious privacy reasons. Rather than simply redacting basic identifying information such as names and addresses, KU produced paragraph after paragraph of blank, black space.
There’s probably an analogy in there somewhere. KU’s stance on fraternity problems creates a pretty big void itself. In March 2018 - near the time the drunk student ended up tied to the anchor - KU sent out a press release announcing a broad fraternity “freeze” on social activities that included alcohol. In the release, KU Chancellor Douglas Girod said the freeze was required because of “systemic problems” in KU’s fraternity system that “we must address.”
Then, just a few days later the student-run University of Kansas Interfraternity Council decided the freeze wasn’t approved in a proper manner. It was nullified, to never return again, while Girod and his underlings largely avoided questions.
In an interview on April 5, 2018, Girod did tell the Journal-World that he was “encouraged” by the progress being made on fraternity matters. Coincidentally - presumably - April 5, 2018, is the same day the provost’s office received the complaint from a parent that started a new round of investigations at Delta Upsilon.
Maybe things weren’t as encouraging as Girod thought. Maybe they still aren’t.
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