Questions about Kansas’ death penalty, answered

Kansas is one of 27 states that currently have a death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that studies capital punishment in the United States.

So far, no one sentenced to die in Kansas has been executed. But more than a dozen men have been given death sentences since lawmakers brought back capital punishment in the mid-1990s.

Currently in the U.S. more than half of capital punishment prisoners have been on death row for more than 18 years. Typically, it takes more than a decade before a death-row inmate is exonerated, executed or court rulings overturn their sentences, a report from the center says.

Kansas is no exception. The longest-serving Kansas death row inmate, Gary Kleypas, received his first death sentence for the 1996 murder of a Pittsburg State University student about 24 years ago, in 1998.

It’s been more than 21 years since death row inmates and brothers Jonathan and Reginald Carr killed five people during their infamous 2000 Wichita crime spree, and almost 20 years since jurors voted to execute them.

The oldest Kansas death row inmate still alive today, 78-year-old Kansas City-area serial killer John Robinson Sr., was convicted and sentenced nearly 20 years ago, when he was 59. At 74, Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., a white supremacist who fatally shot three people at Kansas City-area Jewish sites in 2014, was the oldest person sentenced to death under the state’s contemporary capital punishment law; he died in prison last year from natural causes at age 80.

The last time a Kansas jury recommended someone die for their crimes was in 2016.

Under current law, the only other sentence for a capital murder conviction is life in prison with no parole.

All of the nine men still on death row in Kansas are in various stages of their appeals.

Kansas reinstated capital punishment in 1994, years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty nationwide in 1972 and allowed it again in 1976. The last state executions, by hanging, occurred in 1965.

Here are some other facts to know about the death penalty in Kansas.

What crimes are death eligible?

In Kansas, seven types of intentional and premeditated murder can receive a death sentence. They are:

• Killing a kidnapping or aggravated kidnapping victim held for ransom
• Killing of a kidnapping or aggravated kidnapping victim under 14 held for a sex crime
• Killing of a victim of rape, criminal sodomy and aggravated criminal sodomy or those attempted crimes
• Murder for hire or participation in a murder-for-hire scheme
• Killing of any person by an inmate or prisoner held in a state correctional facility, community correctional institution or jail
• Killing a law enforcement officer
• Two or more killings at once or killings “connected together or constituting parts of a common scheme”

How does a defendant receive a death sentence?

Defendants can receive a death sentence if prosecutors seek execution as a possible punishment, and the defendant is unanimously convicted of capital murder by a jury during a trial. Death penalty trials happen in two phases: a guilt phase, where the jury votes to convict or acquit, and a penalty phase, where the jury hears the reasons why a defendant should die or be spared. The jury then decides between life or death.

If a jury votes to recommend execution, the decision must be unanimous. A judge decides whether to accept the recommendation.

To receive a death sentence, a defendant must be convicted of capital murder by a jury that also unanimously finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did at least one of the following things (called aggravating circumstances):

• Have a prior felony conviction where great bodily harm, disfigurement, dismemberment or death was inflicted on a victim
• Knowingly or purposely killed or created a great risk of death for two or more people
• Killed to receive money or valuables for self or another
• Authorized or hired another to kill
• Killed to avoid or prevent arrest or prosecution
• Killed in an especially heinous, atrocious or cruel manner, including stalking or criminal threats of a victim, torture, desecration of a victim’s body indicating depravity, mental anguish or physical abuse of a victim
• Killed while serving a prison sentence for a felony at the time of the crime
• Murdered a witness in a criminal proceeding

Jurors can refuse to recommend a death sentence for these or other reasons (called mitigating circumstances):

• The defendant has no or little prior criminal history
• The defendant was influenced by extreme mental or emotional disturbances or acted under extreme distress or was forced by another person
• A crime victim consented to or willingly participated in the conduct
• The defendant was an accomplice in the crime or had a minor role
• The defendant’s age or mental capacity, or whether he or she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by violence or abuse at the victim’s hands
• Whether imprisonment would protect public safety

How many people have been sentenced to death in Kansas?

In total, 15 men have been sentenced to death in Kansas. But four had their cases overturned and are now serving life prison sentences.

Two death row inmates, Douglas Belt and Frazier Glenn Miller, died from natural causes while waiting for their sentences to be carried out. Miller, who was 80 when he died, killed three people at Kansas City-area Jewish sites in 2014. Belt, who was 54, sexually assaulted and decapitated a housekeeper in Wichita in 1998.

The other nine remain on death row. All but one are housed in solitary confinement at the maximum security correctional facility in El Dorado. The other, Scott Cheever, is housed at the Lansing prison because family members of the sheriff he killed work at the El Dorado facility.

To date, no woman has received the death penalty in Kansas. If there ever is one, she would be housed in solitary confinement at the state correctional facility for women in Topeka until execution occurs.

Where is the Kansas death chamber located?

The Kansas death chamber is in the Lansing prison. It’s a small room with a hospital bed, a clock, a phone and one-way windows so witnesses and the executioner can see in but the inmate can’t see out. Kansas’ method of execution is lethal injection, using three drugs delivered intravenously.

The Kansas Department of Corrections does not keep the drugs on hand.

How much does a death penalty case cost?

A 2014 Kansas Judicial Council study which is still cited by the Death Penalty Information Center estimated the average defense costs for death penalty trials at around $400,000 per case, compared to $100,000 per case when capital punishment was not sought.

By now that figure is almost certainly higher, according to Mark Manna, head of the state’s Death Penalty Defense Unit, which on average defends around 12 capital murder cases statewide at any given time. Expenses include paying fees for attorneys and investigators, testing evidence, travel and experts to evaluate cases and testify at trial.

“It can quickly balloon up to almost a million dollars” for one case, Manna said in a recent interview. “And that’s not an exaggeration.”

Prosecution costs add to the overall price tag, funded by taxpayers.

Housing inmates in prison while they appeal their sentence and await execution is extra. Last year, the state spent an average of $33,227 per inmate at the El Dorado prison, up from $25,000 in 2014.

Why hasn’t Kansas executed anyone after 28 years, but other states have?

Death penalty statutes vary across the country. Kansas has one of the most restrictive, allowing death sentences only for capital murder when a limited number of additional circumstances — called aggravating factors — exist and when the jury unanimously recommends it.

Other states, including Texas, allow death sentences for a wider range of murder crimes, which generally means they have had more cases appealed and more chances to identify and fix legal problems with their laws. Other states also have had their death penalty laws longer.

Will Kansas ever execute an inmate?

Experts say execution is inevitable if Kansas keeps the death penalty. The looming question is when. That’s not known yet, but the time is most certainly getting closer since the Kansas Supreme Court began upholding death sentences in 2015.

All of the state’s surviving death row inmates are still working their way through appeals.

What about executions across the rest of the U.S.?

There have been 1,543 executions in the U.S. since 1976, more than 80% of which occurred in southern states where murder rates were also highest in 2019, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Nationwide, annual executions peaked in 1999 — with 98 that year — and have steadily tapered off over the past two decades.

Last year, 11 people were put to death in the U.S. This year, there had been three executions as of Feb. 22, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s website.

The number of death sentences handed down to defendants nationwide has also drastically dropped since the late 1990s. Across the U.S., there were 295 death sentences imposed in 1998. Last year, execution was recommended 18 times.

Between 1984 and 2017, the average time between sentencing and execution had more than tripled nationwide, from 74 months (more than six years) to 243 months (more than 20 years), the Death Penalty Information Center says.

As of Jan. 1, there were 2,436 prisoners on death row across the country, including those condemned in federal and military courts. California had the most death row prisoners (692), followed by Florida (330) and Texas (199), the center says.