Category Archives: Trial coverage

Federal judge says ‘Twitter is on’

Feb. 23, 20094:33 p.m.

Live coverage of courts in Wichita expanded today, when a federal judge said he will allow me to use Twitter during the trial of six accused gang members.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten told defense counsel that he would allow me to file live posts, via Twitter, from his Wichita courtroom. Twitter is a micro-blogging social network platform that allows users to file and follow short posts of 140 characters or less.

“Twitter is on,” Marten told the lawyers in a brief hearing this afternoon. Marten said he will allow attorneys to file any objections they have for the record.

Marten is tech-savvy, and led efforts to make sure the renovation of the 1932 federal courthouse in Wichita included updates for a wired environment. The courthouse has wireless Internet connections that allow attorneys to access files back at their offices from the courtroom, for example.

I’ve covered several trials, hearings and other proceedings in state court during the past year. But this will be the first time I’ve been allowed to do it in federal court.

Federal court traditionally has tighter rules. For instance, federal courts do not allow cameras, video or audio recording in the courtroom.

“I don’t see this as prejudicial,” Marten said.

Marten will tell jurors not to view news coverage, including the posts on Twitter, which also feed into this blog and accompany related stories on Kansas.com.

Bloggers covered the federal trial of Scooter Libby in Washingon D.C., filing “live updates” while sitting in an adjacent press room in 2007.

A federal judge in Sioux City, Iowa allowed a reporter for the Cedar Rapids, Gazette to live blog a tax fraud trial last year.

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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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Thurber trial expected to last two weeks

Feb. 2, 200911:31 p.m.

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.

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Murder charges gets more serious for Wichita woman

Jan. 14, 20096:04 p.m.

Thursday’s update: Gloria Ibarra was arraigned this morning and pleaded not guilty. Judge Ben Burgess tentatively set her trial for March 9.

Gloria Ibarra told police she stabbed Kevin Hadley in an argument over $35.

This morning, after hearing Wichita homicide detective Tim Relph recount his conversation with Ibarra, Sedgwick County District Judge Joseph Bribiesca granted a prosecutor’s request to change the charges against her from second-degree murder to first-degree premeditated murder.

Ibarra, 45, told Relph she went to Hadley’s house last Oct. 24 in the 1600 block of North Hydraulic to spend the night. She said he was supposed to have $35 to buy drugs, but he only had $5.

The couple did a shot of cocaine, Ibarra told Relph, then began to argue over the money.

Ibarra told Relph:

Hadley pulled the knife and stabbed her in the leg. But she grabbed the knife after he dropped it. She plunged it into his chest.

“You’re going to kill me,” Hadley yelled.

Ibarra chased Hadley into the kitchen, where he threw something at her. Hadley then ran into the bedroom and barricaded it with a heater.

When police arrived at about 3 a.m. Oct. 25, they found Hadley at a neighbor’s house, clutching his chest with three knife wounds. The 49-year-old died of his wounds later.

Ibarra called 911 about 30 minutes later from her home across town in the 1900 block of West Dora.

Relph said when he reading his rights to Ibarra, she interrupted him.

“Is he OK?” she asked.

“No,” Relph said.

“Is he dead?” she asked.

When Relph told her Hadley was, she fell out of her chair, crying.

Officer Bradley Harris said he followed a blood trail from the neighbor’s house, where he found Hadley, to a window outside the bedroom. When he entered Hadley’s home, he found the bedroom door partially opened and blocked by a heater. There were drops of blood in other parts of the apartment but pools and a blood-soaked T-shirt in the bedroom.

Deputy District Attorney Kevin O’Connor said that the evidence added up to Hadley being stabbed in the bedroom, not the living room. That means Ibarra would have had to push through the barrier made by the heater and into the bedroom to stab Hadley.

“That shows premeditation,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor said Hadley broke the window in the bedroom to get to the neighbor’s house, trying to escape his assailant.

“There’s no evidence that this took place in the bedroom, or that it was even an intentional killing,” Ibarra’s public defender, Mark Rudy, argued.

Because it was a preliminary hearing, Bribiesca said he had to view the evidence in a light most favorable to the state in finding probable cause the crime was committed.

Bribiesca also acknowledged while it appeared Ibarra might have an argument for self-defense, that would be a decision left up to a jury.

Because O’Connor needed time to prepare the new charges, Ibarra is set to be arraigned as early as today.

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Wichita police officer to go to trial with sex discrimination suit

Dec. 22, 20086:38 p.m.

A Wichita police officer’s claims that she was sexually discriminated against should go to trial, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled today.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Monti Belot to dismiss the lawsuit by other women working for the WPD but reinstated the case of Greta Semsroth.

But the three-judge panel said a jury should decided whether the department treated Semsroth unfairly on two of her claims:

  • That she was subjected to a hostile work environment by other supervisors and officers repeatedly referring to her by a derogatory term usually reserved for women.
  • And that after she complained her supervisors retaliated against her by reassigning her to a job on what other officers called “the banishment beat,” in east Wichita, where there are few serious crimes and limited opportunity for advancement.

In the ruling, the judges said:

“The evidence indicates a work environment that was permeated with gender-based intimidation and insult. … The allegations suggest that sexual discrimination remains a concern within the Department.”

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How much prison time should a fake Indian chief get?

Dec. 9, 20088:30 a.m.

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.

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Man authorities call Nazi accused of sex with runaway

Nov. 13, 20087:38 p.m.

Update: Angel was found not guilty.

A local man prosecutors call a Nazi is set to stand trial next week, accused of taking in a runaway girl and having sex with her.

Harold Angel has pleaded not guilty to aggravated indecent liberties with a child and will take his case to a jury next week before Sedgwick County District Judge Greg Waller. Marc Bennett is prosecuting the case and Jama Mitchell is Angel’s public defender.

The trial begins with jury selection Monday.

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Murder investigation also turns up suspected child porn

Aug. 19, 20082:44 p.m.

Wichita police were searching Buddy Jones’ room, looking for evidence that might show he killed a missing woman, when they opened a nightstand drawer and found nude photos of a young adolescent girl.

Now Buddy Jones is standing trial this week, accused of sexual exploitation of a child, while he awaits another trial on charges of first-degree murder.

The jury is expected to get the case today of eight photos found in his nightstand. Prosecutor Kevin O’Connor has had police and medical witnesses describe the photos, which they said were of a young girl with her genitals exposed.

Defense lawyer Brad Sylvester told the jury that the pictures belonged to Jones’ sister’s boyfriend, who also lived in the house.

Jones is also charged with first-degree murder in the disappearance of Michelle Rawls in July 2006. Jones was arrested and charged with her murder nine months later. Her body was never found.

When police were searching the house where Jones lived, they discovered the Polaroid photos of the girl, along with a Polaroid camera and pictures from a child porn Web site that showed another young female in similar poses. O’Connor said authorities have not been able to locate the girl in the pictures found at Jones’ house.

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Dog owner goes to trial in Wichita’s first felony animal cruelty case

July 31, 20086:22 p.m.

Marques Eason is set for trial next week — the first under a state law that makes animal cruelty a felony.

Kansas legislators enacted Magnum’s Law, or Scruffy’s Law, in 2006, when Apollo, a a four-month old Dachshund mix puppy, died of blunt force trauma. Witnesses said at a preliminary hearing in December that Eason threw the dog down the stairs.

Lawrence Williamson represents Eason; Aaron Smith is prosecuting. The trial is set to begin Monday before Judge Rebecca Pilshaw.

Also set for trial Monday is Tiffany Berry, charged with felony murder stemming from a home invasion robbery in which a man died.

Prosecutors say Miguel Moya was shot multiple times in a house at 104 E. Eighth St. and Keena Elam was injured in a robbery that netted just over $400 in cash.

Berry, 26, is the first of two defendants to go to trial. Michael E. Phillips, 26, remained at large in the Nov. 19 shooting until he was arrested after a traffic stop on July 6.

Richard Ney is defending Berry against prosecutor Margaret McIntire before Judge David Kaufman.

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