Public defender Lacy Gilmour expects one of her cases to go to trial next week. Her client is accused of stealing money from an elderly woman. He said she loaned him the money for school. Gilmour explains what it takes to get ready for a criminal jury trial.
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Lacy Gilmour began working for the Sedgwick County Public Defenders’ office after she graduated from law school three years ago. But she knew that was the job she wanted before she went to middle school.
U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten today set a hearing on the defense motion for a new trial in the racketeering case for five convicted Crips gang members.
The defense has accused jurors of not being impartial in their deliberations. Last week, I talked to the presiding juror, who explained how the jury approached the case for a story published Sunday in the Eagle.
Marten has set a hearing for 9 a.m. June 29 to take up the arguments.
The men were convicted in April of conspiracy under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. A sixth defendant was acquitted of racketeering charges but convicted of an ammunitions offense.
UPDATED: With judge’s plan to appoint private attorneys and quotes from the judge.
The Sedgwick County Regional Public Defenders office has stopped taking cases for at least two weeks, its chief said this morning.
“We have an obligation to offer ethical representation, and we just can’t keep going on like we’re have been,” Steve Osburn said. “We just had to stop the bleeding.”
Update 1: Judge Eric Yost, who presides over the criminal division of Sedgwick County District Court, said he will appoint private attorneys to fill the void and expects them to be paid by the state.
“We have an obligation under the law to make sure everyone has legal representation, and we need to do everything we can to provide that,” Yost said.
Osburn’s office lost two lawyers, who went to work for the district attorney’s office at the first of the month, and he learned last week that there wasn’t enough money to replace them. Two other attorneys are on extended medical leave. That came on top of a caseload that has been increasing for three years. Public defenders in Wichita average nearly 200 cases apiece every year. There are currently 22 attorneys in the office.
“We are hoping for permission to fill the vacancies with the reduced budget,” said Pat Scalia, director of the state’s Board of Indigent Defense Services.
This is the first time the Wichita office has had to stop accepting cases, Scalia said, although she said it has happened in other offices throughout the state.
Update 2: Yost said he will assign cases to lawyers who have volunteered to take court-appointed clients.
“But their volume is about to increase,” the judge said.
Meanwhile, judges in Sedgwick County district court are struggling to find representation for people charged with crimes who can’t afford attorneys, as required by law.
“We don’t have an answer,” said Judge Eric Yost, presiding judge of the criminal division, after getting word of the shut-down late Friday afternoon. “We don’t know what we’re going to do.”
Update: The charges against the Floyds were dismissed.
Chad and Shannon Floyd have something to be thankful for next week: They won’t face murder charges.
The husband and wife are set to meet with a judge in Johnson City on Monday to sign a final order of dismissal in a murder case against them that’s dragged on for three years, through two trials that both ended without a verdict.
No one has ever found the body of Michael Golub, 27. Golub was a former boyfriend of Shannon Floyd and they were involved in a custody dispute over their son when Golub disappeared on May 20, 2005. The Floyds said he never showed up to get the boy that night. His pickup was found six days later on a county road in northwest Grant County.
Prosecutors Richard Guinn and Barry Disney for the Kansas Attorney General’s Office claimed Chad and Shannon Floyd shot Golub when he came to pick up his son. Prosecutors said the custody battle was interfering with plans for the Floyds to move to Montana. The couple purchased a gun that same day, and investigators found Golub’s blood had dripped between the planks on the Floyd’s front porch. Prosecutors said Chad Floyd had told a friend he’d pay Golub $50,000 to drop the case and said he wished Golub would disappear.
Lawyers Dan Monnat and Kurt Kerns of Wichita argued for the defense that there were people near the Floyds’ house that night who would have heard the gunshots — but didn’t — and that a different friend of theirs showed up unexpectedly when the killing was supposedly taking place.
They also suggested that Golub’s role as an informant in a local drug case led to his disappearance.
Adding to the rural courtroom drama: The Floyds are an affluent family that owns a chain of banks in the western part of Kansas and in eastern Colorado.
Under the terms of the dismissal, the state can file the charges again if prosecutors discover evidence that “materially strengthens” their case.
Many times, I’ve watched prosecutors play confessions to crimes in courts, where the suspect starts talking after police tell them, “You have the right to remain silent.”
Police have told me the act of reading people their rights is actually a way to engage them and get them talking. Officers talk about how surprised they are when people allow them to search their cars at traffic stops. “Did they think I wasn’t going to find the brick of pot underneath their seat?” one said.
Now, most officers I know don’t set out to overstep their authority. They’re trying to do their jobs and catch outlaws.
But even law abiding citizens should know their rights under the U.S. Constitution. A group called Flex Your Rights has produced this video to help people understand those rights before they encounter police (via Underdog Blog):
I asked some defense attorneys to watch the video and give it their review.
Rebecca Woodman of Topeka, who argues appeals for public defenders’ offices around the state, said that the police encounters dramatized in the video are “unfortunately all too common, even though they each far exceed a police officer’s lawful authority under the Fourth Amendment.”
“It’s important for citizens to know their constitutional rights and how to exercise them,” Woodman said, “so that the right to privacy is protected, not only for themselves but for all citizens.”
Kurt Kerns of Wichita also found the video valuable.
“The bottom line is this: our rights are just like our friends and loved ones,” Kerns said. “If we ignore them, they’ll go away.”
Three public defenders have finished their first month in the new conflicts office, and they say they’re just finishing up their cases from their old office.
Chrystal Krier, Pam McLemore and Nika Cummings each brought about 60 cases with them when they moved into their new office in the historic Occidental Building at 2nd Street and Main. Fortunately, they only picked up 13 new cases in the first month, allowing them to clear their old files.
The three expect to get as many as 30 cases per month at the new office, which handles defendants too poor to hire their own lawyers, but whom the regional public defenders office can’t represent because of legal conflicts. These may include cases such as those with multiple defendants.
The office opened after Richard Ney, Brad Sylvester and Doug Adams stopped taking assignments from state court. They now work on private retainers.
Kamaronte Jones’ public defender said today that the scene at a Wichita party last August was too chaotic to yield enough evidence to convict the 18-year-old of murder.
Sedgwick County public defender Mark Orr told jurors this morning that witnesses called into court this week will tell too many differing stories to find Jones guilty of first-degree murder.
But C.J. Rieg said that while party-goers scattered after seeing Keith Fritter Peters fatally shot just after midnight on Aug. 26, enough stuck around to give police a detailed description of the shooter. Enough details, Rieg said, to prove premeditation.
Following are excerpts from the opening statements Rieg and Orr gave to the jury this morning:
For the state:
For the defense:
A day after her daughter was sentenced to five years in federal prison, Amber Goff’s mother said she wants to set the record straight about her daughter’s participation in helping two men escape from a state penitentiary.
Goff, 24, said in her plea this spring she had bought a prepaid cell phone last summer, which was then smuggled by someone else to Steven Ford and Jesse Bell at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. Goff added minutes onto the phone, which Ford and Bell used to plan their escape.
But Goff, who still worked as a correction officer in the state pen at the time, wasn’t aware of their plans to escape, her mother Laurie Nutter told me this morning.
Nutter said Goff didn’t know of the plan to escape until 11 days before the men made their break on Oct. 28. Then Goff arranged to cut through fences inside the prison grounds and left the men wire cutters and provided guns to help them escape. They were arrested later in New Mexico.
“She wasn’t quite as involved in this incident as the officials would like the public to think,” Nutter said.
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.