The statewide campaign to discredit Appellate and Supreme courts justices is rife with misrepresentations, Iola Rotarians learned Thursday.
Donald Noland, a retired judge, and Bob Tomassi, a retired attorney, helped explain the contoversy. Noland served for 21 years as a Crawford County district court judge. Tomassi practiced law there for 40 years.
Advertisements that have deluged Kansans claim justices are activists who favor late-term and other abortions and grievously tried to overturn death penalties for the Carr brothers, whose callous murders of four college students in Wichita several years shocked the state.
In that single sentence are three glaring errors, Noland said.
An activist judge is one whose personal prejudices and ideology are contrary to the law, which would be true if Kansas Supreme Court justices didn’t confirm a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Federal law (in Roe v. Wade) permits abortion, which consequently requires a state supreme court — any, not just in Kansas — to uphold the procedure. “Federal law is supreme, by the U.S. Constitution,” said Noland. “That is what ‘federal’ means,” a strong central government. The alternative, which surfaced more than 150 years ago, is a confederation — the Confederacy embraced states’ rights.
In simple terms, Kansas Supreme Court justices would have been activists if they denied abortion in the few cases to come before them, because that would have violated federal law.
The Carr brothers case was appealed to the Supreme Court, as all death penalty convictions are. The justices upheld the convictions, but “found numerous errors in the sentencing phase,” which ordered them be put to death, Noland said. The Supreme Court sent the sentencing part back to Wichita for retrial. Rather than follow through, the state responded by petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the original death sentences, which it did.
Is that extraordinary?
No, said Noland. Three times in recent years state Supreme Court rulings on death sentences have been upheld by the federal justices, including the Gary Kleypas case that was announced just last week.
Having a state decision overruled in Washington isn’t unusual, he added, or for other states either. However, only 0.38 percent of cases forwarded to the U.S. Supreme Court from Kansas have been reversed, Noland pointed out — or about one in 300. “That’s a good record.”
NOLAND AND TOMASSI assured that “what we’ve told you is the truth — the rest of the story.”
They also said that opposition to sitting justices, by Gov. Sam Brownback and conservative legislators and others, has little or nothing to do with abortion and the Carr brothers case.
“It’s about money,” from the state Supreme Court ordering the Legislature to fund public education equitably and in an adequate amount, as the Kansas Constitution mandates.
