A man charged with murdering two Wyandotte County sheriff’s deputies is trying to overturn Kansas’ death penalty with the aid of the ACLU, arguing the process for seating capital juries unconstitutionally discriminates against women and Black residents. The ACLU, along with public defenders who specialize in death penalty cases and other attorneys, filed motions in Antoine R. Fielder’s case on Tuesday challenging the death penalty as applied in Kansas as unconstitutional under both the state and federal constitutions. The filings come as Fielder, 36, is in the county detention center awaiting trial in Wyandotte County District Court, accused of killing two deputies in June 2018 as they transported him back to jail. He has waived his right to a speedy trial and numerous continuances have delayed the trial until at least 2025. Fielder’s case has been joined with the case of Hugo Villanueva-Morales, a Kansas City, Kansas, man accused of murder in a 2019 mass shooting at a KCK bar, for the death penalty hearing, the ACLU said. The legal challenges mark the latest effort to bring down Kansas’ death penalty. Capital punishment was reinstated in Kansas in 1994, but no one has been executed since then. Nine men are currently in Kansas prisons with death sentences. Fielder’s attorneys assert that robust evidence shows that how Kansas seats jurors in death penalty cases – a process called death qualification – skews capital trials. The process, which requires potential jurors to affirm they would be willing to impose the death penalty, discriminates against potential jurors on the basis of race, gender and religion, they argue. “Every person accused of a crime is entitled to a fair, impartial jury, but that’s never the reality in capital cases,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, said in a statement. “The evidence is overwhelmingly consistent that Black Kansans are disproportionately disqualified from serving on capital juries. Death qualification, like the death penalty itself, is unconstitutional and undermines justice for everyone. We are committed to ending both.” If Fielder, who is Black, is tried by a death-qualified jury in Wyandotte County, he will likely face a disproportionately white, male jury, a motion filed by his attorneys says. It points to a previous analysis of Sedgwick County, home of Wichita, which found that a majority of white residents support the death penalty, while a majority of Black residents do not. A survey of 600 jury-eligible adults in Sedgwick County in late December 2021 and January 2022 found that Black and white jury-eligible residents had significantly different views of the death penalty. Sixty-three percent of white respondents supported the death penalty, compared to 44% of Black respondents. The survey was conducted by a public opinion firm for Mona Lynch, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California-Irvine, who produced an expert report that the ACLU filed in a different case. The survey asked respondents the same kind of questions that a judge would ask when seating a jury qualified to impose the death penalty. A spokesperson for Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Fielder was being taken to a transport van after a hearing in the Wyandotte County Courthouse in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, on June 15, 2018, when the inmate overpowered and fatally shot sheriff’s deputies Theresa King, 44, and Patrick Rohrer, 35. He allegedly took a service weapon from one of the deputies before shooting both. At the time, Fielder was being held on multiple felony charges in Wyandotte County, including aggravated assault, aggravated battery and aggravated criminal sodomy. Before the deputies were killed, Fielder was charged in the 2015 killing of an Overland Park woman that ended in two mistrials after separate jury panels were unable to reach a verdict. He was then freed in September 2017 and three months later, Fielder allegedly shot and killed a woman across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, according to prosecutors in Jackson and Wyandotte counties. He faces a first-degree murder charge in Jackson County. Court records show seven days of hearings on the constitutionality of the death penalty have been scheduled, beginning Oct. 29. The judge in the case, Bill Klapper, is well known for striking down Kansas’ congressional maps in 2022, finding that lawmakers intended to dilute minority voter power. The Kansas Supreme Court later reversed the decision. Star file photo DEATH PENALTY CHALLENGES Fielder’s case isn’t the first challenge Kansas’ death penalty has faced. In 2023, the ACLU brought a similar challenge in the Sedgwick County case of Kyle Young, who was accused of a double killing in downtown Wichita in 2020. However, Young pleaded guilty and was sentenced to consecutive life sentences. The Kansas Supreme Court in 2022 rejected a facial argument against the state’s death qualification process. In other words, the court ruled the process itself wasn’t unconstitutional as written. The court affirmed the death sentences against Jonathan and Reginald Carr, who killed five people in Wichita in December 2000. But Fielder’s attorneys argue the justices also invited an as-applied challenge – to consider how the process is applied in a particular instance. In the Carr decision, the justices wrote that allegations that the death qualification process is racially biased “most certainly warrant careful analysis and scrutiny” but that the issue was a question of fact that wasn’t raised at trial. “The Kansas Supreme Court has really invited this challenge,” Stubbs said in an interview on Wednesday, adding that the challenge in Fielder’s case is in large part about bringing evidence forward for a “reasoned court decision about whether that kind of discrimination is going to be tolerated under the Kansas Constitution.” Kansas is one of 27 states with the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The last Kansas execution was carried out in 1965. Periodic attempts to repeal the death penalty have faltered in the Legislature. Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, has said she supports repeal. “The death penalty in Kansas is unjust from start to finish and goes against all of the most fundamental principles of justice,” Katie Ali, attorney at Ali & Lockwood who is assisting with Fielder’s challenge, said in a statement. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, has called for faster imposition of death sentences. He has also signaled he is preparing for an execution and earlier this year asked state lawmakers to take responsibility for issuing death warrants away from the Kansas Supreme Court and instead hand it over to district judges. “The public isn’t benefiting from the death penalty currently, because justice isn’t meted out,” Kobach wrote in a guest column for The Star in August. “That must change.”
Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article294071434.html#storylink=cpy