He had sex with her on Mother’s Day and after her best friend’s birthday. She was 14 years old. He was her father. Did he deserve a harsher sentence because of that relationship? No judge can decide that. Only a jury can. Prosecutor Marc Bennett asked a jurors to do that because a father had betrayed his child’s trust.
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The majority of people in U.S. prisons suffer from some form of mental disorder. Lennie Coleman was one of them. The 66-year-old had just served nearly three years for threatening his neighbors when he was arrested again for drugs. Even his neighbors said he needed help. The law said Coleman should go to prison on the latest charge. Judge David Kaufman had to decide what was in the best interests of both the defendant and the community.
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Devon Thompson was on probation for drug possession, when he started using again and stopped seeing his supervising officer. When police showed up to serve him his arrest warrant, he told them he was someone else. After being sentenced to 24 months in prison on the drug charges, he went before Judge Ben Burgess for sentencing on obstruction of justice. Prosecutors asked for the judge to add nine months to Thompson’s sentence. Public defender Lacy Gilmour asked for probation. The judge had to decide if an extra nine months in prison would help a drug addict.
Misty Tague could barely choke out her apology between sobs today, as she learned she would spend life in prison for her role in killing a Wichita man nearly two years ago.
“I’m so sorry,” Tague, 30, told the family of Titus Franklin, before being sentenced for his murder. “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”
Tague said she didn’t know Franklin before he died during a robbery she participated in on Oct. 25, 2007, in the CitiHost Motel on South Broadway. Witnesses say Tague and Leslie Keith took drugs, a gun and money. Keith was convicted of shooting Franklin and sentenced to life in prison last month.
“I didn’t want Titus dead,” Tague said.
But prosecutor Aaron Breitenbach said Tague was the “driving force” behind the robbery.
“She provided the weapons and planned the robbery,” Breitenbach said, repeating what Keith told police
Judge Joe Kisner said he didn’t believe all of what Keith said.
“He kind of made up whatever he would to benefit him at the time,” Kisner said during Tague’s sentencing this afternoon.
It took about eight months to solve the killing. Tague was arrested in June 2008. Keith was apprehended in August 2008 in Texas.
Tague was convicted of felony murder and aggravated robbery during a trial in May. Felony murder is a death during the commission of a dangerous crime.
Under Kisner’s sentence, Tague will have to serve 20 years on the murder charge, then 7 years on the robbery charge, before being eligible for parole.
I went on medical leave two months ago, awaiting the verdict of a racketeering trial involving accused members of the Crips street gang. After sitting through the trial for weeks, the verdict came the morning I was having knee surgery.
The jury convicted five of the six men of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as RICO. The sixth was convicted on an ammunitions charge.
A case such as this doesn’t stop with the verdict, however. Since the trial, one man has been sentenced to 10 years. Defense lawyers began filing motions asking U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten to strike down the verdicts and questioning the deliberations by the jury.
This week, I talked to the presiding juror about those deliberations.
He said the lengthy legal instructions kept them from reaching their verdict for days, but that they carefully considered the charges. (He asked that his name not be used for his safety, because of the gang nature of the trial.)
Here’s what he said about his experience on the jury and the deliberations:
Last week, Marteaus Carter received a 10-year prison sentence. Carter didn’t go to trial. He pleaded guilty in February to one count of conspiracy to violate RICO. He also pleaded guilty to persuaded another adult person to travel in interstate commerce to engage in prostitution.
Other sentencing hearings are set in the coming months.
Meanwhile, I’m back to digging through court files and covering hearings live on Twitter.
As for the knee, I’m still limping but getting better.
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.
The man who shot Wichita private eye Emory Goad said through his lawyer that he was too old and sick to go to prison. But two years later, 79-year-old John Harper called after returning from serving his time and said he’s never felt better.
As his 2006 trial for second-degree murder ended, Harper drove the Rolls Royce at the center of the violent case to the Sedgwick County Courthouse
“I came out healthier,” Harper said.
Harper spent the first year of his sentence for attempted second-degree murder at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in 23-hour lockdown.
“There’s not much you can do there except read,” Harper said.
But after being transferred to Lansing, Harper said he started getting exercise, which improved his health.
“I started walking five miles a day around the path, and then I started running,” Harper said. “Pretty soon, I’m was so healthy they put me on work detail. I’m almost 80 years old, and I’m mowing lawns.”
The former car dealer was convicted of shooting Goad in May 2005, as the private investigator tried to repossess a 1951 Rolls Royce at Harper’s house. Goad could have died.
Harper was outspoken during his trial, claiming he shouldn’t have been charged with a crime. After the shooting he told police he hoped Goad died. And after going to prison, his family took out a series of ads in the Eagle claiming his innocence.
Now, Harper sounded more mellow on the phone. He’s on parole and said he’ll end up on house arrest, an ankle bracelet monitoring his movements, for the rest of his life.
“It really will help me,” Harper said. “I don’t ever want to see Emory Goad again.”
Harper’s family managed to maintain his house. And his grandson still has the Rolls.
Malcolm Webber will soon face sentencing as the convicted chief of a fake American Indian tribe that duped thousands of illegal immigrants out of money with the promise of U.S. citizenship.
Lawyers in the case are asking U.S. Senior District Judge Wesley Brown to consider sentences between eight months and 18 years for the 70-year-old Webber.
A jury in August convicted Webber on six counts, including immigration fraud, for selling memberships in the unrecognized Kaweah Indian Nation for hundreds of dollars. As the case unfolded in Wichita, evidence showed that Webber used Hispanic churches to recruit members, which eventually reached 10,000 to 12,000 nationwide.
Prosecutor Brent Anderson said Webber should get maximum time of more than 17 years for preying on vulnerable victims:
Here, we have thousands and thousands of persons who gave what little money they may have had to Mr. Webber in the hope he could make good on his promise of making them U.S. citizens. … (They) either did not know that or naively believed, in their desperation to stay in the United States, that he somehow could make that happen.
But Kurt Kerns argues in Webber’s defense that the people who joined were in the U.S. illegally and so were participants in the crime – not victims. Kerns also disputed the prosecution’s contention that Webber carried out an elaborate scheme over years to promote fraud:
The government contends that because tribal members received official looking membership cards and certificates, this somehow makes this a sophisticated operation. This is the equivalent of saying that because someone has nice handwriting, they must be a writer.
Anderson said no court has ever contemplated the kind of lengths Webber went to in selling his “tribe:”
Mr. Webber created an entire government … complete with a secretary of state, cabinet members, articles of incorporation, multiple offices complete with official seals … an Indian store complete with Kaweah trinkets and merchandise, actual Kaweah Indian Nation license plates, and a police department with vehicles, uniformed officers, badges and guns.
Kerns is asking the judge to compare the sentences given to those other chiefs, secretaries of state and police officers – all of whom received about a year or less following guilty pleas.
Webber faces Brown for sentencing at 10 a.m. Friday in U.S. District Court in Wichita.
Wichita Municipal Court officials tell us that the city has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice for a mental health court.
City officials say the court has been trying to get a grant for two years. Although they don’t know how much money they’ll be getting, they have received approval for federal funding.
The word on the new court follows a story I wrote for the Eagle about the growing problem of mentally ill people ending up in prison and another story about the training received by police for handling mentally ill people in crisis situations.
According to criminal justice experts, the mental health court is the next step in helping reduce the numbers in prison. Mental health courts follow the model of drug courts as a way of giving alternatives to punishment for people who may have run afoul of the law because of their illnesses or addictions.
Wichita Municipal Court has already developed drug courts for city offenders charged with misdemeanors.
Sedgwick County District Court is beginning a drug court for more serious offenders this fall. Parole officers and mental health providers have told us they hope that a mental health court for felony offenders also will follow.