Wyandotte County will borrow, use COVID relief money to pay for Golubski case review
Wyandotte County officials voted Tuesday to borrow money and use federal coronavirus relief funds to pay for the district attorney’s $1.7 million project to digitize decades of files, in part to review every case touched by an indicted former detective.
The Unified Government Board of Commissioners unanimously approved the approach, which will use more than $1 million of debt funding and $378,000 of city-side American Rescue Plan Act funds. The project is expected to have a $300,000 annual expense to manage the digitizing software and to pay an attorney and a victim’s advocate who will assist on the effort.
Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree got a commitment from commissioners for the funding last week, but at the time they were not sure how they would pay for it. The DA said he wants to find and review each case that involved then-detective Roger Golubski, who faces federal charges for allegedly using his position to rape women and protect sex traffickers.
Golubski worked at KCKPD from 1975 to 2010, including as a captain, and then at Edwardsville, where he was a detective until 2016. DA case files currently sit in the county’s old jail and are not organized or searchable, Dupree has said. It means his office can’t simply type in Golubski’s name and determine which cases he worked.
Before the vote, Commissioner Tom Burroughs said he was concerned about the county taking on additional debt, but called the DA’s project a “worthy cause.”
Commissioner Mike Kane said it was “a lot of money” but that it needed to be spent. He asked that the district attorney provide quarterly updates on how the funds are being used.
Commissioner Harold Johnson Jr. asked Dupree what would happen if his office could not digitize the files.
“The short answer is: justice can’t be served,” Dupree responded.
Digitizing files will help the DA’s office bring about justice if Golubski “negatively affected” someone in a case and if any case is determined to be wrongful, Dupree said. He said having searchable files will also assist in other investigations, including ones being conducted by the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department’s cold case squad.
“This will assist in all of that,” he said.
For several years, the DA’s office has been reviewing cases with Golubski’s name on it when it is asked to. Prosecutors, however, have not reviewed a quarter of the cases Golubski is believed to have touched during his tenure, Dupree said.
At a news conference Monday, Police Chief Karl Oakman said his department planned to review the 155 investigations Golubski was involved in when he was a detective from 1988 to 2002. KCKPD is working with Dupree’s office on the project, which was met with criticism by outside groups that said the review should be done by independent, federal officials.
Commissioner Melissa Bynum asked Dupree to state how the COVID-19 pandemic affected his office’s ability to digitize files, considering ARPA funds are being used for the project.
Dupree said the courthouse was shut down and employees were out of the office during the pandemic, so it delayed the process. His office had hired temporary employees to scan files, but they were down from four employees to one at times.
“Because during COVID, no one wanted to be in an old, moldy jail and trying to avoid COVID at the same time,” he said.
