Several times each day, people show up to see their probation officer only to find that they have a warrant for their arrest. The probation officers call across the street to the Judicial Division of the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department for a deputy to make the arrest. Sometimes, Deputy Dioane Gates knows the people he’s arresting.
Ron Nichols picked the wrong person’s credit card to steal: a top-ranking prosecutor for the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.
Nichols used a Visa belonging to Chief Assistant District Attorney Sally Salguero to go shopping online last March.
The 43-year-old, who lives in the 2000 block of Green Acres, ended up charged with 12 counts of identity theft and 10 counts of computer fraud.
Court records say Nichols used Salguero’s charge card for most the month of March.
After pleading guilty, Nichols faces sentencing next week before Judge Eric Comer.
Nichols was arrested on April Fool’s Day.
I stood in the clerk’s office on the seventh floor of the Sedgwick County Courthouse with Denise Hnytka, a reporter for KWCH-TV, Channel 12, in Wichita, waiting for the formal charging documents for Chris L. Newberry.
“Oh!” Denise said, looking at the criminal complaint.
“Yeah,” I said. As I read the charges, I knew exactly which part she was reacting to.
The complaint charged Newberry with dousing his 10-year-old stepdaughter, Caitlyn Johnson, with lighter fluid and setting her on fire as she slept in her bed last March.
Newberry had just made his first court appearance. There hasn’t been any evidence presented that he’s done anything, and he’s presumed not guilty by law.
But as details unfold, these are the kinds of cases that tend to linger long after you leave work.
People who follow my coverages of trials on Twitter often ask me if I have nightmares from the cases I follow.
This is the second consecutive case I’ve covered of someone accused of harming a child. As a parent, it’s one I’m expecting to lose a little sleep over.
The 89 pages of jury instructions in the RICO Crips trial had lawyers comparing it to parts of the Bible in today’s closing arguments.
“We have jury instructions longer than the Psalms, except there is no poetry in them,” defense lawyer Paul McCausland said of the jury instructions given Friday by U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten.
That was just one of several biblical references by defense lawyers trying to explain complicated charges stemming from RICO, the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act.
Lengthy legal instructions frequently lose jurors with complex vocabulary, grammar and legal rhetoric, experts say.
“Bad jury instructions aren’t just ignored, they can also actively confuse jurors,” said Anne Reed, a trial lawyer and jury consultant from Milwaukee, in a discussion on Twitter.
While she hadn’t seen the packet for this trial, I asked Reed her definition of “bad” jury instructions.
“Frankly most instructions qualify,” she answered.
Dennis C. Elias, a social psychologist who runs a Phoenix jury consulting firm and blogs about juror issues, agreed that jurors don’t always understand complicated instructions.
“Jurors don’t share vocab, context, logic path, or meaning with authors of instructions,” Elias tweeted. “Confusion reigns as result.”
A 35-year-old woman testified this morning that a man posed as a police officer as a ruse to attack her inside her Wichita home.
Sedgwick County District Judge Joseph Bribiesca ordered Michael W. Young to stand trial on two counts of aggravated kidnapping, one count of aggravated robbery and one count of attempted rape following a preliminary hearing.
Young, 51, pleaded not guilty.
The woman identified Young in court as the man who blocked her car with his vehicle in her driveway Sept. 5, as she tried to leave with her 3-year-old daughter. She is not being identified because of an Eagle policy not to name potential victims of sex crimes.
She said Young displayed a badge and a gun and told her he had a search warrant to look for a man, who he named, but whom she didn’t know. She testified Young ordered her and her daughter into the house in the 1300 block of North Pershing, and took her to the basement. There, he pulled a gun on her, took her cell phone, threatened her and tried to sexually assault her.
At one point, the woman testified, she thought she was going to die and asked to say good-bye to her daughter.
The woman then said she fought with the man in the basement and the kitchen, where they both reached for knives. She ended up grabbing a pizza cutter and he a butter knife.
The woman said she and her daughter eventually scrambled out of the house. Young, she said, jumped in his car and drove away.
Young’s trial is tentatively set for April 20.
Four men could face years in prison over an armed robbery that netted them $7 in cash.
The men, ranging in age from 18 to 20, were arrested after Wichita police said four people were held at gunpoint on Dec. 12 in the 2100 block of North Broadway.
Set for preliminary hearing next week on nine criminal charges are Rodolfo Ortiz, 20; Oscar C. Ortiz, 19; Wilson J. Agosto, 19; and Rene W. Ibarra, 18.
Prosecutors said the four men pointed guns at two men and two women and demanded money. They received $7 in cash from one of the women, according to the criminal complaint.
That alone brought one charge of aggravated robbery and three counts of attempted aggravated robbery against each of the men. The minimum prison sentence they could receive for the aggravated robbery charge is 4 1/2 years.
But there’s more.
Police reports say the group also knocked out the windows out of a sport-utility vehicle and two pick-up trucks and took $20 in speakers. Add three counts of criminal damage to property and misdemeanor theft, which could bring another 12 months in jail on each count.
Two of the men, Wilson Agosto and Oscar Ortiz, also had prior convictions as juveniles, which prevented them from carrying handguns. Now, they stand charged with criminal possession of a firearm.
If convicted of all the charges, and sentences run consecutively, the men could face between 12 and 52 years in prison.
I’m spending my days for the next couple of weeks in Winfield, covering the capital murder trial of Justin Thurber.
Thurber is accused of raping and killing 19-year-old Jodi Sanderholm on Jan. 5, 2007. He could get the death penalty if convicted.
You can keep up with live coverage of the trial by following my updates via the micro blogging site Twitter on the left side of this page, on widgets connected to stories about the trial on Kansas.com or by following me on Twitter.
Becky Vanderhoff-Huber was an office manager for Plains Petroleum when she started writing company checks to her self. For more than a year, she wrote checks in her own name, and by the time the company found out she’d stolen nearly $200,000.
This morning, Sedgwick County District Judge Mark Vining sentenced the 32-year-old mother of two to three years in prison and ordered her to repay $199,467.
Vanderhoff-Huber pleaded guilty in November to felony theft. Prosecutors say she didn’t try to hide what she was doing. She cut numerous company checks to herself, one for $9,146.08, from February 2006 to September 2007.
Investigators never learned where the money went, and prosecutors said Vanderhoff-Huber did not live an extravagant lifestyle.
At the time of her arrest, Vanderhoff-Huber said in a financial affidavit that she worked at Horizon Milling in Wichita making $2,400 a month.
Marlin Williams is off to prison for the next two decades, because he took a 15-year-old girl from Wichita to work the streets of Dallas as a prostitute.
Williams, 38, was sentenced to 246 months in prison last week, and courthouse sources say he continued to blame the teenage girl for his predicament.
Actually, it was state lawmakers, who passed a law against aggravated human trafficking, that gave prosecutors the power to charge adults who recruit or transport girls for illegal sexual activities. Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc Bennett, who directs the sex crimes trial unit, said before the law went into effect in 2007, there wasn’t a charge that would bring substantial prison time.
Williams was the first person in Sedgwick County charged under the 2007 law. A jury convicted him in September.
Judge Clark Owens based Williams’ hefty sentence last week on a criminal history that dated to the 1980s.
The girl testified that she was a runaway who ended up being taken in by a women whose name she didn’t know. There, the girl said she made $6,000 in about two weeks of performing sexual favors for customers along a stretch of Northwest Highway near I-35 in Dallas. She said she gave the money to Williams.
Williams remains in the Sedgwick County Jail, awaiting prison placement by the Kansas Department of Corrections.