18 years later, Carr brothers’ death sentences re-argued in Kansas Supreme Court
Twenty years after one of Wichita’s most vicious crimes, the cases of Carr brothers Reginald and Jonathan were back before the Kansas Supreme Court for arguments over whether their death sentences should be carried out or commuted to life in prison.
Lawyers for the brothers argued that their sentences were tainted because they shared a joint penalty phase and procedural errors in the trial conducted by Judge Paul Clark, who died in 2011.
None of the current justices were in office when the crimes were committed and only three of the seven were on the court in 2014 when it upheld the guilty verdicts but vacated the brothers’ death sentences. That ruling, based on the state court’s interpretation of federal law, was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court two years later.
The case is now back in the Kansas high court for consideration of additional appeal issues that weren’t part of that 2014 decision.
The brothers were sentenced to death in 2002 for a brutal home invasion in December of 2000 that included robbery, rape, torture and eventually the execution-style murders of four people. It was part of a six-day crime spree that left one other person dead.
The brothers turned on each other at trial, with each seeking to maximize the other’s blame and minimize their own.
Reginald Carr’s case
On Monday, Reginald Carr’s attorney, Debra Wilson, argued that the the jury’s recommendation for the death penalty was unduly influenced by the “presence of Jonathan Carr acting as a second prosecutor of Reginald Carr.”
She also argued that errors by Judge Clark early in the case had prevented Reginald Carr from testifying in his defense during the penalty phase.
Reginald Carr’s defense would have been that he was the victim of mistaken identity and that a third individual committed the crimes with Jonathan Carr, Wilson said.
“He didn’t take the witness stand either in the guilt or penalty phases of his trial because of the trial court error which precluded him from testifying to anything useful to his defense,” she said.
The current issue is whether the jury should have been instructed during the penalty phase not to hold Reginald Carr’s silence against him.
The justices peppered Wilson with questions on whether it would have made a difference.
“It’s perfectly sensible to me in guilt or innocence why silence could give rise to a reasonable inference of admission (of guilt),” Justice Keynan “K.J.” Wall said. “But on the penalty phase . . . help me understand what logical inferences a juror would make.”
Wilson replied that jurors may believe a defendant committed a crime by the legal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but still harbor some “lingering doubt” that would be enough to spare him from the death penalty.
“The jury that sentenced Reginald Carr to die saw a man who for weeks sat with seeming nothing to say about those accusations lobbed against him both by the state and by Jonathan Carr,” she said.
Prosecutor David Lowden argued that even if there were errors, the crimes were so horrific that there’s practically no chance that any mitigating factors could have outweighed arguments for the death sentence.
The crimes on Dec. 14, 2000
On the night of Dec. 14, 2000, the brothers burst into a home and forced five young adults to perform a variety of degrading sexual acts with the brothers and each other.
The Carrs also kidnapped the victims, forced them to drain their bank accounts at automatic teller machines, and finally, shot each victim in the head execution-style in a frozen field and ran over the sprawled bodies with a pickup.
Jason Befort, 26; Brad Heyka, 27; Aaron Sander, 29, and Heather Muller, 25, died at the scene.
The fifth victim, identified in court by the initials H.G., survived because the bullet was deflected by a hair clip she was wearing. Naked, shoeless and grievously wounded, she managed to stagger to a home more than a mile away and alert authorities to what had happened.
The Carr brothers were arrested and later linked to two crimes earlier in the month: the carjacking and robbery of a 23-year-old man and the shooting death of Wichita symphony cellist Linda “Ann” Walenta, 55.
Lowden disputed that Reginald Carr wasn’t allowed to mount an effective defense against the death penalty.
“What is so compelling about some of these alleged errors (in the trial) that would cause somebody to say ‘You know what, I think I’m going to find mercy?” Lowden said. “In the face of overwhelming evidence, he made a choice (of) let’s let the jury know I’m guilty and then beg for sympathy and mercy, and that’s exactly the way it went down.”
Jonathan Carr’s case
Jonathan Carr has maintained that he has mental disabilities brought on by abuse from his brother and others in their family, and that Reginald Carr was the primary actor in the crime.
While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the brothers didn’t have a federal 8th Amendment right to separate penalty phases, Jonathan Carr’s lawyer that they should have been handled separately handled under state law.
Lawyer Clayton Perkins said the decision to join the cases is something that happens early in a case and shouldn’t necessarily carry through to the end. He said state law requires that each death-penalty defendant be sentenced for their own actions.
“I think joint sentencing is inconsistent with our statutory mitigations, several of them that were brought up in this case,” he said. “That the defendant (Jonathan Carr) was an accomplice in the crime committed by another person and the defendant’s participation was relatively minor, or the defendant acted under extreme distress or under substantial domination of another person.”
Perkins also raised issues of allegedly improper statements by prosecutors in closing arguments.
Lowden replied it wasn’t the prosecution that made Jonathan Carr look like a terrible human being.
“He did that himself on the night of Dec. 14th and the morning of Dec. 15th (2000) by his actions against the five victims in this case,” Lowden said. “He couldn’t look any worse and it wasn’t because of what we did in closing or at the penalty phase.”
This story was originally published May 24, 2021 at 5:05 PM.
