Is this a joke? Douglas County DA running on his appalling record with rape victims

It takes a lot for us to weigh in on a political ad, but the one that Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson ran in the Lawrence Journal-World ahead of the August 4 Democratic primary caught our eye because it was just so darn true.

“Charles Branson transformed the way that Douglas County helps victims of sex crimes,” it said.

Mr. Branson, you sure did. In fact, your way of “helping” victims of sex crimes drew national attention to your office in the last couple of years, as you made some highly newsworthy decisions.

You declined to charge a University of Kansas guest lecturer with any crime, even after four women alleged that he’d sexually assaulted them.

You tried to send a KU law student to prison after falsely charging her with filing a false rape claim. The police “investigators” on the case admitted on the witness stand that they never investigated her claims and almost immediately decided she was lying after seeing that she’d sent texts to a friend downplaying the situation while she was still in it. Your office ignored evidence that included bruises on her neck and torso and vaginal abrasions and tears.

You also ignored texts from the man she’d accused, joking about how drunk she was and what he intended to do. He was only ever interviewed in connection with the case against her. And even when you finally dismissed the charges — not in some distant century, but just last October — you never apologized and continued to insist she would have been found guilty in court.

You charged two other women with filing false reports and only dropped those charges after The Star started reporting on them.

But rape cases, well, those are really hard to prosecute, because juries just don’t get it: “Regret’s a big issue for juries. They’re going, ‘Well, you know, maybe she’s upset now that this has occurred, but it was OK at the time.’ And so those are really hard concepts for juries to sort out and figure out. Juries don’t like these cases.”

Maybe if you yourself better understood it?

You not only prosecuted a 19-year-old rape and abuse victim for murdering the man who was essentially holding her in sexual slavery, but also presented her in court as someone who killed for kicks, and was one smooth criminal: “She carried it out with almost flawless execution,” you told the court. “If she hadn’t got caught in Florida, we probably wouldn’t know where she was at today.”

Again, you ignored plenty of evidence to the contrary, and knew exactly what had been going on in that house. You asked for and got a minimum 50-year sentence for this young woman. And at hearings in December of last year and February of this year, you stood by how the case was handled.

After all of the above was reported in The Star, you did belatedly make some changes, like getting your team the trauma-informed training they should have had years ago.

Now, in your fifth run for this office, you have your first opponent in 16 years.

But if the best thing you have to run on is your record on helping sex crime victims, maybe you should not be running at all.

This story was originally published July 24, 2020 at 5:00 AM.