Category Archives: Capital murder

Carr brothers’ death appeal coming in June

April 14, 20095:56 p.m.

It’s been nearly six years since a jury said Reginald and Jonathan Carr should die for the torturing and killing of four people in Wichita during a weeklong crime spree in December of 2000.

The Supreme Court should begin receiving the Carrs’ appeals by June. That’s when Jonathan Carr’s lawyer said she plans to file his appeal. His brother, Reginald Carr, has an even earlier deadline.

“This is very comparable to what we’ve had in other cases,” said Rebecca Woodman, who will represent Jonathan Carr’s appeal, on the length of time taken to file the legal papers.

The Kansas Supreme Court has extended the filing deadline for Reginald Carr 23 times, 19 for Jonathan.

“Yes, this last extension in Carr is the last,” Woodman said.

The time includes two years — from 2004 to 2006 — when all death penalty cases were put on hold, after the state’s highest court struck down the death penalty and the 1997 capital murder convictions of Michael Marsh. Marsh’s case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually restored the Kansas death penalty law.

Further court battles on the capital appeal of Gavin Scott put Kansas death penalty cases on hold again from January 2007 to May of 2008.

Marsh’s case was resolved this month — 13 years after the killings — only after the prosecutors decided not to continue pursuing the death penalty. He’s serving life in prison.

But cases where the death penalty is at stake require a higher standard of legal scrutiny. As the U.S. Supreme Court has said: “death is different.”

“Non-capital murder cases … do not generally involve the type or number of constitutional issues that are present in death penalty cases,” Woodman said.

The length of time and expense is why 10 states, including Kansas, have sought to vanquish the death penalty. New Hampshire lawmakers are the latest to abolish capital punishment.

Death penalty cases not only have to pass the state’s Supreme Court but then must pass scrutiny in federal courts.

After the Carrs’ first round of arguments are filed this spring, the appeals process could last years.

No one has been executed in Kansas for 44 years.

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25 random things about covering a capital murder trial

Feb. 18, 20096:04 p.m.

A lot of the people using this meme have blogged about trivial stuff. My time has been absorbed by the grim reality of the justice system, so that’s what I’ve chosen to write about. Here are thoughts, observations and personal notes that are helping me process the trial I’ve covered the past three weeks — a day after seeing Justin Thurber sentenced to death for killing Jodi Sanderholm:

  • The details I don’t, and won’t, report about the brutality of the crime are the ones that keep me awake at night.
  • There is no way to try to make sense of a senseless crime.
  • Here’s something else that doesn’t make sense. Even after being convicted, under overwhelming evidence , Thurber told a psychologist a version of how he claimed to kill Sanderholm — by stabbing her — that could not be supported by any other physical evidence.
  • Defense attorney Ron Evans gave one of the most stirring closing arguments I’ve ever heard. But even that didn’t convince a jury to spare Thurber’s life.
  • In a country where everyone is guaranteed the right to a legal defense, I have to respect lawyers such as Ron Evans and Tim Frieden, who choose to represent defendants charged with the worst crimes.
  • Cowley County Attorney Chris Smith asked that people remember the Thurber family’s suffering, even after he’d spent two years working to prosecute Thurber. I’ve known Smith for years, and that tells you how compassionate he is.
  • For some, the stress doesn’t stop — assistant Kansas Attorney General Vic Braden will go from prosecuting this case to being deployed to Afghanistan for the Kansas National Guard in April.
  • Cindy Sanderholm, Jodi’s mother, told me she realized that large groups of people had offered support to their family throughout the past two years, but Thurber’s family had little community support.
  • Brian Sanderholm, whose family had been in the news spotlight for two years, thanked reporters after the trial for their sensitivity. It’s something you don’t hear often in my job.
  • Burying myself in my stories is a way to deal with the pain I see in the courtroom.
  • “It’s given me insight into our court system that I hadn’t had before.” Comments like that, from Skyler Lovelace, and others who follow my coverage on Twitter, remind me why my job is important.
  • I woke up with chest pains Tuesday morning, before the verdict, caused by the anxiety of the trial.
  • I was in tears on the drive back to Wichita from Winfield Tuesday, trying to absorb all the emotions I’d experienced.
  • I celebrated my birthday and my wedding anniversary during the trial.
  • I just have to sit in the courtroom and hear words and see pictures. The police are the ones who actually see the crime up close and live with it.
  • I especially have to admire the police who sifted through the waste tank at the lakeside latrine where they retrieved Jodi Sanderholm’s shoes, jacket and belongings. Anyone who’s held their nose while using such a restroom can only imagine the dedication that must take.
  • I wonder how Dave Falletti of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the lead investigator of the case, digests all the brutality he’s seen.
  • The police in Arkansas City, a town of 12,000, showed the same high level of investigative skills as what I’ve seen from Wichita police in similar cases. That speaks well of law enforcement training, no matter what the department’s size.
  • After seeing the pictures of the crime scene and the state of Jodi Sanderholm’s body, I keep asking myself, “What would enrage someone to the point they’d be capable of this?”
  • They were some of the most disturbing crime-scene photos I’d ever seen.
  • I have no doubt Jodi Sanderholm was tortured.
  • After I go through weeks like this, I make sure I have someone to talk to about the worst of it.
  • I hope more testing is done on Thurber’s IQ and mental state before his death sentence is carried out.
  • After a decade of covering capital murder trials, and seeing the violence people are capable of inflicting on each other, I’m still not sure how I feel about the death penalty.
  • There is nothing more sobering than watching 12 people condemn another human being to die.

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Anti-death advocates speak out about Thurber’s sentence

Feb. 17, 20095:27 p.m.

Sue Norton sat with the family of Justin Thurber as a jury said he should receive a death sentence for killing Jodi Sanderholm two years ago.

Norton now lives in Arkansas City but she’s from Oklahoma, where her father and stepmother were killed in January 1990. The man convicted of killing them, Robert Knighton, was executed by lethal injection on May 27, 2003.

“It was 13 years of wondering what would happen next,” Norton said. Then she watched Knighton’s execution.

“I can tell you, the death penalty is not absolution,” she said. “It didn’t bring them back.”

Norton may have gotten a little too involved in the Sanderholm case, Cowley County prosecutor Chris Smith said. Two weeks before the trial, when Thurber offered to plead guilty to killing Sanderholm, her family learned about it from Norton.

“We would have liked to have been able to present this to them and talk to them about it,” Smith said.

Don Anderson of the Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty also sat through the trial, as he has done in every capital murder trial in the Wichita area since I began covering courts in 2000.

Anderson was adamant that the state should have accepted Thurber’s plea. Afterwards, Anderson released a written statement:

The terrible murder of Jodi Sanderholm was an unspeakable tragedy.

The coalition affirms that life without parole is a sufficiently severe punishment for Justin Thurber that also protects the public.

More of Norton’s comments following the verdict:

(Video/Travis Heying, The Wichita Eagle)

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Why do capital murder cases take so long to go to trial?

July 23, 20087:18 p.m.

Sedgwick County District Judge Ben Burgess heard 13 pretrial motions this morning in the capital murder trial of Elgin Ray Robinson Jr.

While most public attention comes during a trial, it is preceded by months of sometimes complex legal arguments. Pretrial motions are an attempt to resolve legal issues, so the trial runs more smoothly. In capital murder cases, there are dozens of such motions.

That’s part of the reason why Robinson is still awaiting trial, more than two years after being charged with arranging the murder-for-hire of his 14-year-old girlfriend, Chelsea Brooks. She was nine months pregnant by Robinson at the time of her death. Ted Burnett went to trial earlier this year for strangling Brooks. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Here’s just one of this morning’s arguments, presented in its entirety in three parts (the two Kansas Supreme Court cases cited involve defendants Gavin Scott and Gary Kleypas).

Defense lawyer Val Wachtel argues his motion to declare the death penalty cruel or unusual punishment under Kansas law: The response by prosecutor Kevin O’Connor: Burgess’ ruling

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Accused Crips member gets separate trial

June 30, 20088:13 p.m.

Jason Tisdale is charged with being a hit man for the Crips street gang, and federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Today, Tisdale, 28, received a trial separate from the 18 other defendants with whom he was originally indicted.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten signed an order setting Tisdale’s new trial date for June 9, 2009.

A grand jury charged Tisdale with killing three people, two in 1998 and another in 2004. Prosecutors say Tisdale shot Tisha Jones and Keith James in February 1998. Police have said Jones was scheduled to testify in a robbery against a Crips gang member. Authorities also say Tisdale shot and killed Umanah Smith in August 2004 over what police at the time said resulted from a nightclub dispute.

The other defendants are set for trial next February.

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Burnett trial juror: Two gave life

May 29, 20082:53 p.m.

Although jurors in the capital murder trial of Ted Burnett didn’t talk to the press publicly, one of the jurors posted on Twitter that the final count in the penalty phase was 10 in favor of the death penalty and two against. It takes a unanimous verdict to hand down a death sentence.

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Follow the Burnett capital murder trial on Twitter

May 14, 20084:56 p.m.

The capital murder trial of Ted Burnett is going on this week, and we’re covering it live from the courtroom on Twitter.

Twitter is a micro-blogging, social networking platform where millions of people answer the question “What are you doing?” with short messages.  What I’m doing is covering the Burnett trial and I’m posting updates live from the courtroom, including details you won’t necessarily read in the print edition of The Eagle.

Anne Reed, a trial lawyer and jury consultant from Milwaukee has been following my “tweets” and explained it this way in her blog, Deliberations.

You can also follow the updates here on Kansas.com.

You can interact if you sign up (it’s free) and put “@rsylvester” before your message to leave a comment or question. Be patient. Between Twittering and keeping track of the trial, it gets pretty hectic in the courtroom.

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One witness who won’t testify in Burnett murder trial

May 5, 20082:59 p.m.

Ted Burnett’s capital murder defense won a rare victory before his trial begins next week.

Judge Ben Burgess ruled that Steven White’s testimony was unreliable, or hearsay. White had claimed he had information from Burnett’s girlfriend, Trudy Guthrie, that Burnett confessed in a jailhouse telephone call to killing Chelsea Brooks.

Guthrie denied taking such a phone call from Burnett. Then under cross-examination during the preliminary hearing 18 months ago, White couldn’t remember for sure where Guthrie had heard it.

The information was not just hearsay, lawyer Gary Owens argued for Burnett, but “double hearsay.” Burgess agreed.

Prosecutors had fought to keep the testimony in, because it might have bolstered Everett Gentry’s testimony that Burnett strangled the pregnant teenager in what the state says is a murder-for-hire scheme.

Burnett, 51, goes on trial for capital murder, when jury selection starts next week.

Watch for blog updates during jury selection here and then on the Kansas.com home page for live updates from the courtroom during the trial.

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Will Thurber’s past haunt him?

Jan. 31, 20089:52 a.m.

Cowley County District Judge Jim Pringle admitted it’s won’t be easy deciding if he will admit wrenching testimony from women who say Justin Thurber followed them, harassed them and molested them for years before Jodi Sanderholm’s killing.

“This would make a law school professor lethal, licking his chops about what questions he could put on a law exam,” Pringle said of the 17 different decisions ahead of him.

Prosecutors are seeking to admit the testimony at Thurber’s capital murder trial, of what’s usually known as “prior bad acts.” Usually, that kind of testimony is inadmissible, but under Kansas law it can be permitted under certain circumstances.

Those include:

  • If evidence shows a pattern of behavior consistent with the crimes being charged
  • If it relates to an important aspect of a case.
  • It is valuable in helping to understand a case.

Thurber’s public defenders argue the testimony isn’t relevant to Sanderholm’s death.

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Prison after death?

Jan. 28, 20081:52 p.m.

Some might really wonder what the judge ate for breakfast when seeing prison sentences tacked on to death sentences, as most recently with Scott Cheever. It’s not like he’s going to serve prison time after he’s executed.

But lawyers will tell you there are good reasons for this in the legal world. First, no one really knows what’s going to happen with the death penalty in the future, especially in Kansas, where there hasn’t been an execution since 1965. The death penalty could be abolished. The legislature could change the law.

Also, on appeal, each conviction of each crime is reviewed separately, so the judge needs to sentence each count by itself. Plus, as Judge Mike Ward pointed out in Cheever’s sentence, all those attempted murder convictions he received — for firing on deputies and state troopers trying to arrest him — all had victims. And they all deserve to see justice.

Of course, if the state does carry out Cheever’s execution, the other sentences are meaningless. But down the road if the law or sentence changes, he still has to serve his 61 years for the other crimes.

Says Marc Bennett, an assistant district attorney in Sedgwick County: “We have every reason to seek the longest possible sentence to ensure that the worst offenders are kept away from society, no matter what unforeseen event takes place in the appellate process or in the legislature.”

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