Every capital murder, by definition, involves a horrible crime. And we acknowledge that the victims in these cases were loved and are missed by their families every single day.
But even so, these cases were infected with the types of racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, and unfair jury selection that we see in death penalty cases across the county. It’s also taken 20 years and millions of dollars to get to this point, and the collateral review process could easily still double those numbers.
The foundational principle of KCADP is that the death penalty is wrong in every case. That includes these two cases.