![]() “I appreciate the Carr defendants seized on the recent decision in Hodes & Nauser to animate what amounts to an old - previously decided - issue,” Biles said. Justice Dan Biles concurred with the majority, but wrote the issues of Section 1 were decided more than 20 years ago in a separate death penalty appeal by Gary Kleypas, who was sentenced to die for the 1996 murder of Carrie Williams, a 20-year-old student at Pittsburg State University. “The natural right to life is forfeitable and the state’s imposition of the death penalty under Kansas’ capital sentencing scheme does not infringe upon the ‘inalienable’ right to life protected under Section 1,” Wall said in the opinion. Wall said the justices rejected the right-to-life argument as it related to capital punishment. The Carr brothers and other capital murder appellants seized upon that decision to argue the state’s capital murder sentencing scheme unconstitutionally infringed upon that right to life. In that ruling, the justices held Section 1 of the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights protected a broader range of rights than described in the U.S. The opinion also waded into complexities of the state Supreme Court’s abortion opinion of 2019 in the controversial Hodes & Nauser v. Justice Kenyen Wall said in the state Supreme Court’s 160-page opinion the Sedgwick County District Court trial of the brothers was “less than perfect” but fair. “The legal path to this day has been long and winding for the victims and their families, for the Wichita and Sedgwick County community, and for all of Kansas,” said Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, “but today’s decisions by the Kansas Supreme Court are welcome confirmations that although the wheels of justice may turn slowly they do ultimately propel us all forward.” Currently, nine people are under sentence of death in Kansas. Kansas statute allows death sentences to be carried out by lethal injection, but the state hasn’t executed anyone since 1965. “The death penalty is legal in the state of Kansas,” she said, “and there’s nothing I can do about that at this point.” Laura Kelly was asked during a bill-signing event whether she would allow an execution to proceed. ![]() The justices said the state was free to impose death sentences against the Carr brothers, who have been held at El Dorado Correctional Facility for two decades. The Carr brothers were convicted of capital murder by a jury that reached that determination beyond a reasonable doubt and through their criminal actions surrendered a foundational right to life, the state Supreme Court said. While framers of the Kansas Constitution intended the right to be inalienable, the Kansas justices said, they didn’t view it as nonforfeitable. In the long-awaited decision Friday, the state Supreme Court held capital punishment didn’t infringe on rights encompassed by the section that says: “All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That initiated a process in which the state Supreme Court reviewed more than 20 penalty-phase issues and examined two constitutional questions. Supreme Court overturned the state Supreme Court in 2016. They were sentenced to die for their crimes, but in 2014 the state Supreme Court affirmed capital murder convictions for both men while vacating their death sentences because the trial judge didn’t order separate proceedings in the sentencing phase of the case. The Carr brothers shot and killed five people in December 2000 and were convicted of murder, kidnapping, rape and robbery charges two years later. Attorney Lanny Welch for their work on the case.TOPEKA - The Kansas Supreme Court issued a pair of companion decisions Friday affirming death sentences of Jonathan and Reginald Carr for a series of brutal Wichita murders and concluding framers of the Kansas Constitution didn’t mean the inalienable right to life and liberty could never be forfeited. Grissom commended the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Assistant U.S. District Court Judge Monti Belot made Abner’s federal sentence consecutive to his sentence in the kidnapping. In August 2009, Abner was convicted in state district court on charges related to the kidnapping and sentenced to 570 months in state prison. On June 26, 2008, a clerk at the Viola General Station was found after being kidnapped and held for several days. Abner was arrested in Oregon in July 2008. ![]() The weapon later was determined to be a pellet gun. ![]() During the robbery he brandished what appeared to be a firearm and demanded money before fleeing on foot. Abner, 42, pleaded guilty to the June 27, 2008, robbery of the Garden Plain State in Garden Plain, Kan. WICHITA, KS-A Kansas man who is already in prison for abducting a store clerk in Viola has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison on a bank robbery charge, U.S. ![]()
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