Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline is a problem. He has been charged with ethics violations in connection with his effort to pillory abortion providers and violate the privacy of women who had had abortions, but is having difficulty finding a panel to try his case.
The controversial Kline managed to offend a great many people while he was in office. When his case came before the Kansas Supreme Court on May 18, five of the seven justices recused themselves from the case, saying, in effect, that they had strong opinions about Mr. Kline and couldn’t trust themselves to reach an unbiased decision about his legal ethics.
Last week Kline’s lawyers said Justice Dan Biles, one of the two justices left available, also took himself out of the case since he and Kline had clashed over education funding.
The AP report didn’t go into detail. It would be a good guess that Justice Biles took the position that Kansas should fund its public schools adequately; Kline, needless to say, disagreed.
The Kline dilemma prompts a suggestion. Since cases dealing with ethical violations by elected officials should always be decided by a competent, well-informed panel composed of unbiased men and women and since it is very difficult to create such a neutral panel from the citizens in the state where the defendant was elected and held office, therefore such cases should be litigated where the defendant is not known.
In this instance, perhaps the justices of the Supreme Court of Maine — or a majority of them — have not kept up with Kansas and could therefore hear the evidence before deciding that, sure enough, he deserved censure.
Kansas could be a leader in interstate change of venue. We should take the plunge to keep Mr. Kline’s confidence in the impartiality of the law untainted by nagging doubt.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
