After firings, Wyandotte County DA hires lawyer to run Community Integrity Unit
The Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office has hired a lawyer to lead its Community Integrity Unit following last year’s firings of its three employees, The Star has learned.
Attorney Mark Kind was hired March 31 with a salary of $88,192, according to employment data obtained by The Star through a Kansas Open Records Act request. He is listed as a senior assistant district attorney and, two sources confirmed, oversees the unit charged with investigating complaints of police misconduct and potential wrongful convictions.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Kind referred The Star to DA spokesman Jonathan Carter, who in an email said “no interview” with Kind would be available. Weeks ago, when The Star asked who was running the unit, Carter said the DA’s office “does not discuss personnel matters.”
Kind was hired 10 months after the DA’s office in May 2021 fired two unit employees for making remarks that violated the office’s code of conduct. Those firings were announced as KCTV5 published secret recordings taped by a third employee, who had been terminated before the other two, that revealed unit members made disturbing comments, including about Black people.
Some of the recordings were particularly troubling, given that Black people are seven times more likely than white people to be wrongly convicted of murder, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations.
The firings left the unit, known as the CIU, empty.
After the terminations, District Attorney Mark Dupree wrote in a column in The Star that he was “committed to creating a workplace culture free of homophobia, sexism, and bigotry.” He said an outside agency would step in to review cases handled by the fired employees.
The DA’s office did not announce Kind’s hiring. Asked if Dupree wanted to comment, his spokesman said in an email: “No, thank you.” Dupree did not return a voicemail left on his cellphone Thursday.
Prosecutors in other parts of the country have publicized the names of lawyers running similar units. In Wayne County, Michigan, whose county seat is Detroit, the DA lists contact information for the director of its conviction integrity unit. That director, whose unit has helped free 30 prisoners deemed wrongly convicted, has also been quoted in numerous news stories.
There are dozens of CIUs housed in offices of prosecutors and attorneys general across the country as part of a growing trend to work with innocence projects to prevent and identify wrongful convictions. In recent years, CIUs have played essential roles in dozens of exonerations as prosecutors seek to correct mistakes.
Dupree’s CIU was created after the exoneration of Lamonte McIntyre, who was freed in 2017 after spending 23 years in prison for a double murder in Kansas City, Kansas, he did not commit. The next year, Dupree secured funding from the Unified Government for the unit.
Since then, Dupree’s unit has one exoneration under its belt: the release of Olin “Pete” Coones, an innocent man who spent 12 years in prison. Coones died 108 days after his release from cancer that went undiagnosed behind bars.
Before his current role, Kind was hired in 2014 as an associate at the Kansas City law firm Morgan Pilate, according to an issue of KU Law Magazine. He focused on “litigation, writing, research and investigation in criminal, civil, appellate and habeas corpus matters, including actions in federal, Missouri and Kansas courts,” the magazine for University of Kansas alumni noted.
Kind was listed as one of McIntyre’s lawyers in a 2016 court filing as he tried to prove his innocence.
McIntyre and his mother in 2018 sued Wyandotte County, alleging that former KCK police detective Roger Golubski framed McIntyre because his mother rebuffed Golubski’s sexual demands. UG commissioners voted Thursday to settle the lawsuit for $12.5 million.
Darryl Burton, who spent 24 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted in a St. Louis killing, said Kind called him after he was hired at the CIU. Burton, who with McIntyre co-founded Miracle of Innocence, an Overland Park-based organization that aims to assist exonerees, said he looked forward to working with Kind and described him as a person who believes in “doing what is right.”
Lora McDonald, executive director of the Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity, an interfaith social justice organization that petitioned for the CIU to be funded at its inception, said Kind was the right type of lawyer for the job. She called him a “person of integrity who pursues justice.”
“It’s promising,” McDonald said, later adding: “It has to be somebody who actually believes that these systems fail. And so, I know that to be at least a part of his background and repertoire, is some understanding that sometimes these systems fail people.”
This story was originally published July 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
