Wyandotte County residents who oppose the death penalty are potentially much more likely to be kept off juries in capital murder cases, a judge heard Wednesday as he weighs whether to strike down Kansas’ death penalty. Over the past few months, the murder case against Hugo Villanueva, a Hispanic man in his mid-30s accused in a 2019 shooting outside a Kansas City, Kansas, bar that left four dead, temporarily transformed into a trial of sorts against the state’s death penalty. Attorneys for Villanueva, including lawyers with the ACLU, spent weeks building a case that the way Kansas practices the death penalty is unfair and racially biased. More than a dozen witnesses testified on aspects of the state’s death penalty and jury selection process. “The people who are opposed” to the death penalty are “more likely to be excludable,” Mona Lynch, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California-Irvine, testified, summarizing the findings of a survey of 500 Wyandotte County residents. Wyandotte County District Court Judge Bill Klapper drew the mini-trial to a close on Wednesday after testimony from Lynch, Villanueva’s final expert witness. Klapper, who has sat on the bench since 2013, didn’t immediately rule and no timeline for a decision was announced. A jury trial on the criminal charges is currently set for February 2026. Klapper’s decision could set the stage for a pivotal legal fight over Kansas’ death penalty that may wind up in front of the state Supreme Court. Kansas’ last execution took place in 1965, but the state’s modern death penalty has been on the books since 1994 and nine men in Kansas prisons have death sentences. At the core of Villanueva’s challenge is the argument 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. 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 the Kansas Supreme Court’s justices wrote in the decision that allegations that the death qualification process is racially biased “most certainly warrant careful analysis and scrutiny” – a statement that death penalty opponents have interpreted as an invitation to further challenge the system. Lynch’s survey of jury-eligible Wyandotte County residents, conducted between August and October 2024, found that death qualification significantly changed the percentage of people in the jury pool who favored the death penalty – raising the percentage from 57% to 68.8%. Death penalty opponents were overwhelmingly excluded – 60.4% of opponents were excluded compared to roughly 34% of supporters. About 36% of white residents who participated in the survey opposed the death penalty, compared to nearly 59% of Black respondents. And women were much more likely to be excludable from capital juries than men – about 84% to 58% – because they were never willing to impose the death penalty. In a nearly hour-long closing argument, Megan Byrne, an ACLU attorney representing Villanueva, recounted Kansas’ long history of violence against Black residents and how discrimination had contributed to distrust of the legal system over time. As that distrust builds, Black residents in turn become more likely to be kept off death-qualified juries. “It really kind of creates a vicious cycle,” Byrne said. Wyandotte County prosecutors said little during Wednesday’s hearing. Assistant district attorney Nick Campbell chose to deliver a written closing argument, due in three weeks. Villanueva’s attorneys will then have a week to respond. During a roughly 10-minute cross-examination of Lynch, Campbell emphasized the limitations of the professor’s study, noting that the questions posed to the survey respondents are different than what a real-life jury would be told. “In a trial, it’s a lot more nuanced,” Campbell said at one point. “This is a prediction,” he asked of Lynch at another. Prosecutor’s stance In court documents, Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree has argued that both the United States and Kansas Supreme Courts have upheld the death qualification process. Jury selection in Wyandotte County “does not establish a program of systemic discrimination designed to eliminate prospective jurors based on race or gender,” he wrote. “Whether citizens from a racial or gender specific category view the death penalty differently than another category of citizens, their exclusion from jury eligibility is a response to their stated belief, not their race, gender, religion, political preferences, or strongly held regional biases,” Dupree wrote. Villanueva had previously been jointly challenging the death penalty with Antoine Fielder, who was charged with murdering two Wyandotte County sheriff’s deputies in June 2018 as they transported him back to jail. But Fielder pleaded guilty in December, effectively taking a death sentence off the table. If Klapper rules against the death penalty, it’s unclear whether Villanueva’s trial would proceed on time. If the challenge ends up before the Kansas Supreme Court, a decision could take months or years.
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