Last week’s censure of Sedgwick County District Judge Rebecca Pilshaw by the Kansas Supreme Court caught the attention of legal observers around the country. Pilshaw was sanctioned for yelling at potential jurors in a 2004 murder trial.
The American Bar Association Journal reported the action along with a post in the Legal Profession Blog by Mike Frisch, ethics counsel at Georgetown Law Center, and one on Anne Reed’s Delberations blog about juries and jury selection.
Reed called out the Kansas Supreme Court for how it handled both Pilshaw’s case and the appeal on the trial of Dewey Gaither in 2004.
“The Kansas story sounded so bad you had to wonder whether sanctioning the judge was enough,” Reed wrote.
“…Every trial judge needs to let jurors know that defendants are presumed innocent, and that attitudes manufactured to get out of jury duty aren’t okay. But surely Gaither and his lawyers didn’t get the voir dire they should have, much less the deeply committed jury described in that other juror’s letter to the judge. An apology is a good thing, but more than a year after the Gaither opinion, a taint remains.”
Pilshaw, the only woman on the Sedgwick County district bench, is
up for re-election this year.
A 69-year-old Wellington woman faces sentencing this morning for bilking funds meant to compensate coal miners for black lung disease.
Although Iris Shanks received more than $92,000 over nearly two decades, her
lawyer said in legal pleadings that she lived for most of those years in a house without electricity or running water.
Shanks pleaded guilty this spring to making a false claim to the federal government. Shanks said she continued to collect funds from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Coal Miners Compensation fund meant for her mother, who died in 1989. Shanks’ father was a coal miner who died of black lung disease in 1977. But Shanks said she kept collecting the money for 16 years after her mother’s death. Authorities learned of the scam after she opened a bank account in her mother’s name in 2005, using a U.S. Treasury check.
Federal sentencing guidelines suggest Shanks receive up to five years in prison. But federal public defender David Freund is asking U.S. Senior Judge Wesley Brown to give Shanks probation. Freund said in a court brief that Shanks recently moved into an assisted living residence. She uses a walker to get around and has multiple medical problems. She does not own a car and can’t leave the assisted living community without special permission.
“Probation in the present case would arguably be as restrictive as any Bureau of Prisons facility,” Freund wrote.
Update: Judge Brown gave Shanks one year of probation.
