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 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.”
The Crips trial going on the past couple of weeks has revealed a life within our city where violence visits regularly. Not only are details of testimony about the gang lifestyle foreign to many, so is its language. You don’t need the Urban Dictionary to keep track. I’ve compiled a list, according to witness testimony the past few weeks.
Q. You testified about “OG” meaning original gangster. There is also some other terms, right? “BG,” what does that mean?
A. Baby gangster.
Q. That’s baby gangster. “YG?”
A. Young gangster.
(transcribed by Jana Hoelscher, court reporter)
A 48-year-old Wichita woman is accused of prostituting her 5-year-old daughter, but prosecutors say it wasn’t the first time.
Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston is seeking a judge’s permission to introduce testimony from two of the woman’s grown daughters, who said she sold them for sex when they were between the ages of 8 and 14.
Judge Greg Waller will hear evidence this afternoon, under a law that allows information about prior bad acts if it serves to show a pattern of behavior relevant to the crime charged.
The woman is charged along with the man who prosecutors say paid for sex with the 5-year-old on several occasions . After the case of the girl came to light with state social services and police, the older daughters came forward and told what happened to them. According to court records, they’ve said their mother began selling them for sex “to put food on the table” while she worked as an exotic dancer in the early 1990s.
This morning, Waller denied a request by the couple’s defense to exclude news reporters from the trial, which is set for March.
A former Kansas attorney general who crusaded against abortion, his successor and the successor’s former lover are all scheduled to take the stand in a Wichita courtroom this week.
Sound like a political soap opera? No, it’s just the latest hearing in the case of Kansas v. George Tiller, the Wichita abortion doctor.
You can follow live updates from the courtroom, via Twitter, by refreshing the box to the left of this blog, or going here.
Phill Kline, who as AG began investigating Tiller in 2003, began testifying in November but had to postpone his testimony because of conflicts in travel plans. He is set to retake the stand today.
Kline’s successor as AG, Paul Morrison, is also scheduled to testify this week, as is Linda Carter, whose extramarital affair caused Morrison to resign. Carter also worked for Kline, who assumed Morrison’s old role as Johnson County district attorney.
Tiller’s lawyer, Dan Monnat, is arguing that Kline overstepped the bounds of his authority in investigating Tiller, including by enlisting Carter’s help in getting Morrison to file charges.
Tiller faces 19 misdemeanor charges alleging that he had an improper financial relationship with a doctor who provided second opinions for women seeking late-term abortions.
The case is now being pursued by current Attorney General Steve Six, through prosecutor Barry Disney.
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.
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.
UPDATED: A hearing on these motions is set for 3 p.m. Thursday before Judge Clark Owens.
The office of Kansas Attorney General Stephen Six is asking for more time to respond to charges that his predecessors acted illegally in their investigation of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller.
Tiller’s lawyers call motions filed last week by Six’s office “highly unusual.”
Judge Clark Owens originally had given Six’s office until Oct. 17 to respond to the allegations in Tiller’s motion to dismiss the 19 misdemeanor charges against him. But on Thursday, Six asked to the court to let his prosecutors hear testimony before they respond.
That “suggests that the state simply wishes to delay being forced to admit publicly the extent of the former AG’s misconduct,” said Wichita lawyer Dan Monnat in his response filed Friday. Monnat said all the evidence used in his motion came from internal memos and files Six’s office give the defense.
Six’s office also asked that a weeklong hearing set for Nov. 17 be postponed, because a new prosecutor has been assigned to the case: former Sedgwick County prosecutor Barry Disney. Disney, the motion said, has a conflict in another case that week.
Dan Monnat, who represents Tiller, objected, saying the date has been set for two months, asking why a prosecutor couldn’t have been chosen who was available for the scheduled hearing.
The 19-year-old woman cried this afternoon, as she told a judge how the father of her unborn child choked her and punched her in the stomach last month.
Jamie Stuart was seven months pregnant when she went to see her estranged husband about why their bank account was overdrawn, she testified at a preliminary hearing. She said Brian Stuart, her recently separated husband, became enraged, choked her and punched her in the stomach.
Such cases are not uncommon. Experts say women in abusive relationships may find violence escalates during their pregnancies.
Judith McFarlane, a domestic violence expert at Texas Women’s University, told the San Antonio Express-News:
“The abuser sees this as taking the focus away from him. And when the attention is taken away from him by the unborn child, that unborn child becomes the focus of his rage.”
The target of such violence is often direct their anger toward the woman’s stomach, Marc Shapiro, a professor of trauma surgery, told WebMD:
“The fetus is most at risk during the third trimester. I’ve seen fetuses that were shot or situations in which the mother was kicked in the stomach and spontaneously aborted. Pregnant women get scratched, punched, stabbed, shot, and sexually assaulted. It’s rare to have to do a Cesarean section to save a fetus, but it happens.”
Sedgwick County District Judge Clark Owens ruled the case should proceed to trial. Brian Stuart, 20, pleaded not guilty to aggravated battery. His trial is tentatively set for Dec. 1.