AG office tries again to send woman back to prison where she says workers raped her
Karen Backues Keil thought it was over.
She thought there was no way she could be sent back to the prison where she says two workers raped her, after the Missouri Supreme Court last month refused to consider the state attorney general’s request to reinstate her original sentence for financial crimes.
But now the attorney general’s office is trying again.
In a move that Keil’s Kansas City attorney, Kent Gipson, described as “real rare,” the attorney general’s office has now asked a lower court, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District, to hear its challenge of Keil’s reduced sentence.
“I’m just amazed that they don’t have better things to do,” Gipson said.
A spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said the office doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.
The push to reinstate Keil’s original sentence began when the office was led by Josh Hawley, now a U.S. senator, and has continued into the tenure of Schmitt, also a Republican. Assistant Attorney General Gregory Barnes has handled Keil’s case under both men.
Gipson said he’s not sure whether the the state constitution would even allow the appeals court to make a ruling that would go against the Supreme Court, and the appeals court judges may just dismiss the latest request, which was filed Wednesday.
But he noted that Barnes didn’t include the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case history he wrote up for the latest filing.
“I’m going to make sure they know about it when I respond to it,” Gipson said. “That’s going to be the first paragraph.”
Keil had served six years of a maximum 15-year sentence when she was released early from Chillicothe Correctional Center in February 2017 after a Platte County judge reduced three of her six felony embezzlement charges to misdemeanors.
The Missouri attorney general’s office then sought to have her original sentence reinstated on the grounds that the judge, James Van Amburg, overstepped his authority.
Gipson has said there were probably legitimate grounds to file the petition based on legal precedent, but sending Keil back to Chillicothe would be unnecessarily cruel given the trauma she says she endured there.
Keil is one of three former Chillicothe inmates who have filed federal lawsuits accusing a former guard of sexually assaulting them in a supply closet, a locker room or other concealed locations at the prison. Keil’s suit says he raped her repeatedly.
Keil said that when she reported the guard’s rape to a mental health counselor at the prison, he sexually assaulted her too. That counselor has since pleaded guilty to improper sexual conduct with another prisoner, a felony.
Neither man works at the prison now, but Keil said she remains traumatized by what they did, and going back to the prison where it happened would be unthinkable.
Keil, who lives in Georgia now, said she thinks the attorney general’s office is retaliating against her for filing the lawsuit against the prison system. Gipson said he’s “not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories,” but the office’s continued pursuit of his client is making him wonder.
“I can’t imagine why they would do this otherwise,” Gipson said.
