Problem prosecutor Terra Morehead can’t send innocent Kansans to prison anymore

Kansas prosecutor Terra Morehead won’t be able to send any more innocent Kansans to prison after coercing false testimony.

Acting U.S. Attorney Duston Slinkard confirmed to The Kansas City Star Editorial Board that Morehead will no longer be prosecuting criminal cases. “She is handling civil cases now.”

Slinkard couldn’t say any more about a personnel decision, but public court documents show that Morehead withdrew as the attorney of record in her criminal cases shortly after now former U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister stepped down on Feb. 28.

That suggests the public owes a debt of gratitude to Donald Trump-appointed McAllister, for transferring Morehead, as one lawyer aware of the situation put it, to “where she can’t hurt anybody.”

That may be overly optimistic, and it’s unfortunate that she still has any job on the public payroll. Or for that matter, a law license.

But we’re glad that Morehead, who did not immediately return a phone message, won’t do again what she did to Lamonte McIntyre, who spent 23 years in prison for a 1994 double murder he did not commit. His record was only expunged last year.

Two witnesses told Morehead, who was then a prosecutor in Wyandotte County, that she was trying to send the wrong man to prison. Her duty under the law was not to get a conviction anyway, but to see justice done.

Morehead had also dated the judge in the McIntyre case, J. Dexter Burdette, and neither of them thought to disclose that fact.

How many cases did she have before Burdette while they were still involved? Yale Law’s Lawrence Fox, who specializes in legal ethics, testified in a hearing for McIntyre that “Nothing, it seems to me, could more taint a proceeding than that kind of relationship” between a judge and prosecutor “even after it’s over, long after it’s over.”

On Monday, when we reached McIntryre and told him that Morehead had been reassigned, he said that’s a victory for anyone else she’d ever prosecute, not only the innocent.

Prosecutors “have an obligation to do it the right way,” he said. “Even while I was being prosecuted wrongfully, I was still expecting her to do her job. She was supposed to protect me, too.” By following the law.

Niko Quinn, who saw her two cousins killed in the murders McIntyre went away for, says Morehead told her that she’d either say under oath that she’d seen 17-year-old McIntyre shoot them, or “I’ll throw your Black ass in jail and you’ll never see your children again.”

Repeatedly, Quinn says, she told Morehead that McIntyre wasn’t guilty. And again and again, what she heard back was that that was the wrong answer. After finally giving in to the pressure to testify against McIntyre, she said, she was so upset that she stepped down from the stand, walked home and tried to take her own life. On Monday, Quinn said that Morehead should have been fired rather than just moved to the civil side.

“She should be fired because she abused her power and destroyed people’s lives, including mine,” Quinn said. “I will never be the same.”

Deione Burt, who served 9 years on a drug charge that Morehead prosecuted as a U.S. attorney, was not innocent, and Burt doesn’t claim otherwise. But she does accuse Morehead of improving the case against her by drafting a woman she didn’t even know to lie about her on the witness stand. And Morehead herself told the court things about her that weren’t true, Burt said. “She said I had a drug house and that I was on drugs and all that was lies. I had never been in trouble before, and she treated me like garbage.”

In 2017, a judge found Morehead to have committed prosecutorial misconduct by threatening a witness and only belatedly disclosing evidence in a drug case.

Former Kansas City, Kansas Police Detective Max Seifert is someone who was pushed out of the KCKPD as the result not of wrongdoing, but of right-doing. After he told the truth about a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who’d beaten a man in a road rage incident after a collision, he was forced into retirement for crossing “the thin blue line,” U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson wrote. “Seifert was shunned, subjected to gossip and defamation by his police colleagues and treated as a pariah. … The way Seifert was treated was shameful.”

On Monday, Seifert said no one had done more to slander his name than Morehead.

“I can only think of one word for her, and that’s ‘evil.’ After all the things she’s done, she should feel fortunate to still have a position there at all.”

Yes, she should. But given the almost unchecked power of prosecutors, this is still a step in the right direction.

This story was originally published March 15, 2021 at 1:48 PM.