A crowd of nearly 600 students saw the inner workings of the Kansas legal system Tuesday.
Students from Iola, Humboldt, Moran, Yates Center, Chanute and Fort Scott nearly filled the Bowlus Fine Arts Center to capacity to watch a special session of the Kansas of Appeals.
“If this isn’t the largest crowd we’ve ever had for oral arguments, I can’t think of where we could have had a larger one,” Judge Angela Coble said at the outset.
She and fellow judges Tom Malone and Sarah Warner heard oral arguments on two appeals out of separate cases, one dealing with an attempted murder; the other on a breach of contract civil filing.
Following the hearings, the judges fielded a number of questions from the students. They aren’t expected to rule on either of the cases for several weeks.
WATERMAN
Attorney Ethan Zipf-Sigler, who represents Brian Michael Waterman, started the proceedings with his arguments that Waterman’s convictions of attempted first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated burglary were improper.
Waterman’s case stemmed from a January 2016 incident in Cherokee County, in which he stormed into the Baxter Springs home of Bob Hopkins and repeatedly stabbed him.
Waterman went to confront Hopkins because he believed the man had sexually abused his daughter.
Once inside the home, Waterman locked the door, stabbed Hopkins 17 times with a pocket knife, dumped bleach on his head and fled to Oklahoma.
Hopkins survived the attack, but later died before trial.
In January 2022, Waterman was sentenced to 36 years in prison. His earliest possible release date is in 2047.
Zipf-Sigler focused on two elements of the case: the aggravated kidnapping charge, and that prosecutors came across a collection of letters from Waterman to his attorneys and kept them before handing them over to the defense.
The aggravated kidnapping charge was improper, the attorney argued, because even though he locked the door, the locking mechanism was different than what witnesses described in the trial, and a relative of the victim’s was still able to easily enter the home.
“There’s just no confinement, even given the best reading of the evidence,” Zipf-Sigler said.
