Desperate Kansas politicians love to dredge up the Carr brothers case

Earlier this year, the Kansas Supreme Court overturned death sentences for Reginald and Jonathan Carr, perpetrators of a brutal 2000 quintuple homicide in Wichita, on somewhat of a technicality. (The trial judge didn’t hold separate sentencing hearings for the convicted killers.)

If you ask Gov. Sam Brownback, somehow this is Paul Davis’ fault.

Brownback, a name-brand Republican who would ordinarily coast to re-election in Kansas if not for his troubled fiscal policies, went Lee Atwater-style with his latest campaign ad. In it, Brownback’s campaign flimsily casts his Democratic challenger as being responsible for getting the Carrs off death row.

The ad says Davis supported many of the judges who sit on the Kansas Supreme Court, the same ones who interpreted law to rule that the Carrs had been sentenced improperly. Part of the “proof” for Davis’ alleged support of the so-called “liberal” panel of judges was a campaign event for Davis held at the Kansas Supreme Court Justice Carol Beier’s Topeka residence.

“One judge even held a Paul Davis fundraiser,” the ad’s narrator says.
That’s not actually true. It was held at Beier’s house, but her husband, a retired schoolteacher, organized last month’s event. The Pitch was sharply critical of both Beier and Davis for their lack of judgment in proceeding with the campaign event in the judge’s backyard. Even if Beier wasn’t there, it creates an appearance of impropriety for the Kansas Supreme Court. It lets people like Brownback make these kinds of leaps and makes it easy for less thoughtful followers to believe it.

Still, the barbecue could have made for a decent rhetorical target for Brownback’s campaign, but the campaign couldn’t even get the description of the event right. The rest of the ad is sleazy politics, preying upon uninformed fears of leniency on two of the state’s most notorious criminals.

Deceptive campaign ads are often the hallmark of a troubled candidate, one who would rather cast feeble aspersions upon challengers than stand on their own record.

Phill Kline once upon a time was one of these candidates. And like Brownback, he reached to the bottom of the campaign barrel to unearth a slipshod Carr brothers scare tactic. 

Kline, whose notoriety from carrying out a years-long abortion crusade as Kansas Attorney General has been well documented by this newspaper, found himself embroiled in a bitter re-election effort in 2006 against former Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison. 

One would easily have thought that Kline, a staunch Republican with an ideological bent against abortion providers, would garner mass popularity in a state like Kansas. But it’s easy to mistake Kansans as unflinchingly conservative; they will jettison elected officials who go too far (we’re looking at you, Connie Morris).

Kline’s “I’m just enforcing the law” rationale for his holy war against George Tiller and Planned Parenthood was transparent enough that Kansans warmed to the idea of voting for a candidate who left the GOP to become a Democrat.

So Kline leveled a dubious claim that Morrison had supported legislation that freed one of the Carr brothers, allowing him to commit a series of heinous murders. Kline said his opponent had backed a 2000 bill that sought to decrease Kansas’ inmate population and cut short Reginald Carr’s supervised release from a prior offense, early enough for Carr to go on the infamous killing spree. Therefore, Kline implied, Morrison had a hand in Carr’s crime binge.

The charge was bogus. Carr went off supervised release because of a clerical error by factotums at the Kansas Department of Corrections. If not for their mistake, Carr would have remained on supervised release well beyond the date of his killing spree.

While Kline was wrong about why Carr got off the state’s radar, he was right to be desperate about his political future — Morrison steamrolled him in that 2006 election.