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BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a Kansas undersheriff in the fatal shooting of an unarmed man with a homemade beanbag round out of his personal shotgun, a case that comes amid a national reckoning on police violence. Virgil Brewer, who was with the Barber County Sheriff's Office at the time, is facing a charge of reckless involuntary manslaughter for his deadly encounter with Steven Myers on Oct. 6, 2017. The shooting occurred in Sun City, a rural area about 300 miles (555 kilometers) from Kansas City, K...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Democrats, a civil rights group and a national elections watchdog filed two lawsuits Monday against Kansas officials over a Republican redistricting law that costs the state's only Democrat in Congress some of the territory in her Kansas City-area district that she carries by wide margins in elections. Kansas is part of a broader national battle over redrawing congressional districts. Republicans hope to recapture a U.S. House majority in this year's elections, and both parties are watching states' redistricting efforts b...
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas prosecutor said Tuesday that he won't file criminal charges over the death of a Black 17-year-old who became unresponsive while being restrained facedown for more than 30 minutes following an altercation with staff at a Wichita juvenile center in September. Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said the state's "stand-your-ground" law prevents him from bringing any charges in the death of Cedric Lofton because staff members were protecting themselves. Bennett said that if he did bring charges, "a judge w...
A coalition of community groups demanded Monday that a special prosecutor be appointed in the case of a Black youth who died following a physical struggle with staff at a Kansas juvenile center. In a Wichita rally and letter to local officials, community activists also called for the release of video and the names of the individuals involved in the death of 17-year-old Cedric Lofton. It comes after an autopsy report released last week contradicted an earlier, preliminary finding that the teenager hadn't suffered life-threatening injuries. The a...
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A former Kansas police detective, who last year sued a sheriff's deputy for running over him in a rural field, has been fatally shot by a police officer in Kansas City after disarming another officer and pointing the service weapon at both of them, police said Tuesday. Lionel Womack was killed during the encounter Monday after police received 911 calls about a man standing in a road pointing at the sky and trying to jump in front of traffic. "Those officers had no choice — this whole incident took place in 26 sec...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A federal judge ordered Kansas on Friday to suspend a new law prohibiting out-of-state groups from mailing advance ballot applications, siding with two national nonprofit groups that contend it disenfranchises voters. U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil granted the preliminary injunction against the law sought by VoteAmerica and the Voter Participation Center. She also rejected the state's efforts to dismiss the lawsuit. Vratil noted in her ruling the critical constitutional issues that still need to be decided in the c...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas sheriff's deputy caught on dashcam video running over a Black man who was fleeing shirtless across a field is now working at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility while under criminal investigation, according to the attorney for the injured man. Lionel Womack, a former police detective from Kansas City, Kansas, alleges in an excessive force lawsuit filed last year that Kiowa County Sheriff's Deputy Jeremy Rodriguez intentionally drove over him during the Aug. 15, 2020, incident that was captured on dashcam v...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Multiple staff members at a Kansas juvenile facility engaged in a physical struggle with a 17-year-old youth who was restrained and died two days later at a hospital, authorities said. Details of the events leading up to the in-custody death of Cedric "CJ' Lofton emerged late Tuesday in a news release from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation that also identified the Wichita teen for the first time. An autopsy has been conducted and a cause of death is pending further investigation and toxicology results, the agency s...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A former high-ranking election official violated federal law in 2016 when he granted requests by Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to modify the national voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship in those states, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon threw out the contested decisions made by Brian Newby, then-executive director of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency, after finding on Thursday that Newby failed to determine whether the proposed requirem...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Cattle producers for 35 years have been bankrolling one of the nation's most iconic marketing campaigns, but now many want to end the program that created the "Beef. It's What's for Dinner" slogan. What's the ranchers' beef? It's that their mandatory fee of $1 per head of cattle sold is not specifically promoting American beef at a time when imports are flooding the market and plant-based, "fake meat" products are proliferating in grocery stores. "The American consumer is deceived at the meat counter and our c...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A privately run maximum security federal prison in Kansas is dangerous and should be shut down when its contract expires at the end of this year, civil rights advocates and federal public defenders urged the White House in a letter. The 10-page letter emailed Thursday to a White House office and local officials details stabbings, suicides, a homicide and inmate rights violations that happened this year at the Leavenworth Detention Center. The letter blamed understaffing and poor management by operator CoreCivic. A...
Congress provided hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the nation's election system against cyberattacks and other threats, but roughly two-thirds of the money remained unspent just weeks before last year's presidential election. A recently released federal report says the states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories had spent a little more than $255 million of $805 million in election security grants through Sept. 30 of last year, the latest figures available. States were given leeway on how and when to spend their shares...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A federal appeals court has blocked enforcement of provisions in a Kansas law that ban the secret filming at slaughterhouses and other livestock facilities, finding that the statute seeks to stifle speech critical of animal agriculture. A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a split decision Thursday ruled that even if deception is used to enter private property, Kansas may not discriminate based on whether the person intends to harm or help the enterprise. "But that is the effect, and s...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A judge is considering whether Kansas' Republican secretary of state ran afoul of the state's open records law by ordering the removal of an election database function that generates a statewide report showing which provisional ballots were not counted — a decision civil rights advocates say will have far-reaching implications for government transparency. Shawnee County District Judge Teresa Watson heard arguments last week in a lawsuit filed by voting rights activist Davis Hammet, who is the president of Loud Lig...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — More than a year after two U.S. Department of Agriculture research agencies were moved from the nation's capital to Kansas City, Missouri, forcing a mass exodus of employees who couldn't or didn't want to move halfway across the country, they remain critically understaffed and some farmers are less confident in the work they produce. The decision to move the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture in September 2019 was pitched as putting them closer to farmers in the nation's breadb...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A foul-mouthed Kansas judge accused of bigotry who cursed at courthouse employees so often that a trial clerk kept a "swear journal" documenting his obscene outbursts was on Friday suspended from the bench for one year. The Kansas Supreme Court called Montgomery County Judge F. William Cullins' behavior "quite troubling" while meting out a punishment that was harsher than the censure and coaching that a disciplinary panel recommended last year. "He has intimidated and publicly humiliated court employees. He has s...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — An Arizona woman charged in the Jan. 6 onslaught of the U.S. Capitol bragged in a Snapchat video that she was recently recruited by a Kansas City chapter of the Proud Boys, a neofascist organization that describes itself as "Western chauvinists" and has long forbidden female members. Felicia Konold's claim that the chapter recruited her and she was "with them now," even though she's not from the Kansas City area, has intrigued experts who study extremist right-wing movements. "It is ironic that such a deeply m...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Kansas could be on the hook for nearly $3.3 million in attorney fees and expenses after losing a lawsuit that challenged a state law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The law was championed by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who led former President Donald Trump's now-defunct voter fraud commission. Kobach was a leading source for Trump's unsubstantiated claim that millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally may have voted in the 2016 election. The latest filing in t...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Republicans in the Kansas Senate on Thursday rejected Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly's nomination of a public defender to the state's second-highest court for the second time in eight months, despite support for him from the state's top federal prosecutor and other attorneys. The vote on Carl Folsom III's nomination was 18-17, but he needed 21 votes in the 40-member Senate to join the Kansas Court of Appeals. It was a stinging defeat for Kelly, who said in nominating Folsom a second time after the Senate rejected him in June t...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday upheld a state law which governs how much money workers who are injured on the job can collect. The court ruled that an amendment to the Kansas Workers Compensation Act was constitutional because it did not alter the requirement that a worker's impairment be "established by competent medical evidence." The court last year heard arguments over which edition of the American Medical Association guide should be used for evaluating injuries in determining compensation to injured workers i...
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Attorneys for the family of a Kansas man killed by police responding to a hoax emergency call are using the case to try to hold the city of Wichita accountable for what they call a troubled history of police shootings. In the six years leading up to the December 2017 shootin g of 28-year-old Andrew Finch, Wichita police shot at citizens 21 times — resulting in the deaths of a dozen people, many of whom posed no threat, according to a brief filed Friday at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief comes amid calls aro...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A former Kansas teacher who was caught on security camera kicking a kindergarten student in the school library has been sentenced to 30 days in jail and a year of probation. Crystal Smith, 55, was also ordered to attend anger management classes after pleading guilty to battery at a video hearing Thursday in Johnson County District Court, online court records show. A security camera at the Bluejacket-Flint Elementary School in Shawnee, Kansas, captured footage of the February 2019 incident, which unfolded after the r...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — He was born as America was recovering from the Great Depression and about to enter World War II — periods of national sacrifice his son would recall decades later in an obituary lamenting his death from COVID-19 even as many people refused to wear "a piece of cloth on their face to protect one another." After Dr. Marvin James Farr of Scott City, Kansas, died Tuesday in isolation at a nursing home, his son penned an obituary in which he noted that his father was preceded in death by more than 260,000 Americans inf...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — Anticipated staffing shortages amid surging coronavirus cases could hit rural hospitals especially hard because smaller communities have more limited options for finding providers to cover for sick workers, medical providers say. "We are doing what we can to make sure our staff are staying healthy and safe and able to be available to treat the community, but we also have heard that with post-holiday, this could be a challenge," said Cindy Samuelson, senior vice president for the Kansas Hospital Association. "There i...
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — A small community college in northeast Kansas has settled a lawsuit accusing it of directing coaches to recruit more white athletes and subjecting Black students to excessive scrutiny such as background checks before offering them scholarships. Terms of the settlement were not immediately made public. A brief stipulation of dismissal was filed Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. The ACLU had alleged in the lawsuit filed in March that Highland Community College instituted a plan to reduce the n...
