Research & Publications

Qualified immunity is a judge-made legal protection that shields government officials from claims of unconstitutional conduct. It is a unique and specialized defense available only to government actors and can, if applied, allow those actors to avoid responsibility for constitutional violations.

Kansas is one of 27 states that maintains the death penalty. In recent years, several states—including Virginia, a leading death penalty state with a legacy of racial terror and lynchings—have abolished the death penalty. Efforts to remove Kansas’s death penalty are not new.

Laws that criminalize poverty are a significant issue in Kansas and across the country. Law enforcement routinely targets houseless and impoverished communities for municipal ordinance violations that criminalize basic acts of human existence – like sleeping or asking for food.

Sedgwick District Attorney Marc Bennett cited Stand Your Ground laws in his announcement that he would not seek charges against county employees in the death of C.J. Lofton, even after it was medically ruled a homicide. This brought up questions about Stand Your Ground laws in Kansas.

Across the country, people convicted of serious crimes are required to register with the state after completing their sentence. Kansas has some of the strictest requirements for post-sentence registration, which dramatically increases the scope—and harm—of this registry.

Across Kansas, there are people in the custody of the Kansas Department of Corrections suffering from terminal medical conditions affords people compassion, fairness, and dignity. Often called “compassionate release” or, here in Kansas, “terminal medical release,” this process allows the Department of Corrections (KDOC) to release someone from incarceration before the end of their sentence because of a medical condition likely to cause death within a certain amount of time. In Kansas, terminal medical release is only available if a person is within thirty days of death. In other words, KDOC may release a terminally ill person early—but only if they are right at death’s door, and only after a lengthy, cumbersome review process.

Civil asset forfeiture is being used by police departments countrywide to take money, vehicles, or even homes from individuals with little oversight. Ezekial Edwards, former Director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project calls civil asset forfeiture “legalized robbery by law enforcement."

Kansas courts indiscriminately shackle and restrain children appearing before them. Courts are not required to first decide whether it is necessary, and nothing prohibits courts from using restraints on children as a matter of course.

If Kansas were a country, its incarceration rate would be second only to that of the U.S.1 Kansas faces a significant overcrowding issue in its prisons. A notable contributing factor to the state’s high rate of incarceration is imprisonment due to technical violations of probation.