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Sedgwick County district attorney candidate Kevin O’Connor said a claim by his opponent, Marc Bennett, that a convicted felon is on his campaign team is incorrect.
Bennett made that claim in an ad that ran in Sunday’s Eagle. In an interview on Thursday, Bennett said the ad was referring to Greg Rose walking in a recent Kechi parade with a group of O’Connor supporters and wearing an O’Connor T-shirt.
Rose was convicted in September 2009 of threatening District Court Judge Anthony Powell in March of that year, according to court records.
O’Connor said Rose is not on his campaign team.
“A campaign team is made up of people advising you,” he said. “If Greg Rose supports me, what am I supposed to do? I can’t help who supports me.”
To say Rose is on his campaign team “is an out-and-out lie,” O’Connor said.
Bennett said, “If Kevin says (Rose) is a supporter and not on his team, then I take Kevin at his word and leave it at that. Kevin is an honest guy.”
At the same time, Bennett said he’s not saying the ad misstated anything.
“If I have people walking in parades, wearing my shirts, they’re part of the team,” he said. “ ‘Team’ is the word I would have used for a supporter. Team and supporter in this context are synonymous to me. I’m not saying (Rose) is part of his inner circle.
“I can’t expect him to know everyone who is walking with him, but I would think someone who has threatened a judge would be on his radar.”
O’Connor said he met Rose at a recent Pachyderm Club meeting.
“He asked me about gold fringe on the American flag,” O’Connor said. “I know who Greg Rose is; he’s not a friend. I’m not saying he wasn’t in the parade, but I don’t know everyone who was in the parade. A lot of people brought friends to walk in the parade. But does it really matter that Greg Rose walked in the parade? It’s just a bunch of baloney.”
Bennett is a deputy district attorney; O’Connor is a former deputy district attorney, leaving the office in late 2009. Both are running in the Aug. 7 Republican primary to replace retiring Nola Foulston.
The ad also said O’Connor was cited by the Kansas Supreme Court for committing prosecutorial misconduct during the 2007 conviction of Billy J. McCaslin for rape and murder. That’s true. But the conviction was not overturned.
But O’Connor said it was misleading because Bennett prosecuted a case that was overturned when the Kansas Appeals Court cited Bennett for misrepresenting evidence during a trial to have Robert C. Ontiberos confined to a mental hospital indefinitely as a sexually violent predator. The conviction was overturned based on ineffective work of Ontiberos’ defense attorney and Bennett’s misrepresentation of a duct-taped pen as a “crude knife of some sort.” The state is appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court.
Both cases were dealt with in more detail in profiles of O’Connor and Bennett in Sunday’s Eagle.
O’Connor also disputed the ad’s claim that he’s had four jobs since 2010.
Bennett said the four jobs were O’Connor working for two attorneys, the state attorney general’s office and Butler County’s attorney.
O’Connor said he’s had three jobs. He worked for two lawyers — Brad Pistotnik, August to September 2010; and Gary Patterson, October 2010 to July 2011.
But he said his work as a special assistant to the attorney general and special prosecutor for Butler County should count as one job. “I’m working as a lawyer contracted out working on two different contracts,” O’Connor said. “If I’m a homebuilder building three houses, I still have one job — homebuilder. When I was working for (Pistotnik and Patterson), I was still prosecuting cases for Butler County.”
He has also served as a special prosecutor for a case in Reno County.
Other claims in the ad:
• O’Connor left the DA’s office twice. True. He left in October 2001 to work for the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., then returned in July 2002 at the request of Foulston. He left the office in late 2009. Foulston said she asked him to return in early 2011, but he declined.
• O’Connor ran unsuccessfully for Reno County district attorney. True. He lost to Keith Schroeder in 2000.
O’Connor added, “I have yet to say in public a negative thing in campaigning. I’ve been trying to run a positive campaign.”
Bennett said, “I’m not trying to attack Kevin here. I’m just trying to point out some distinctions here.”
