When a ‘snitch’ lies, innocent people go to prison. Justice can wait, says KS Senate

Olin “Pete” Coones, Jr. died just three months after he was released from prison for a crime he did not commit. Before cancer took his life in February, the 64-year-old Kansas City, Kansas, man said he wanted to help keep other innocent people from being convicted, as he had been, by the false testimony of a prison informant who was known to be unreliable and had a history of dishonesty and mental illness.

The Kansas House unanimously passed a bill that would require prosecutors to disclose specific information about jailhouse witnesses. But this important measure has stalled in the Senate.

Why? Republican state Sen. Rick Wilborn is co-chair of the Judiciary Committee. The Senate just didn’t have time to act on the bill, a spokesperson for Wilborn’s office told The Star Editorial Board. Wilborn has said the Senate has other pressing issues, but there’s no good reason to delay this bipartisan, uncontroversial and necessary reform.

It would move Kansas a step closer to a justice system that rejects false testimony and produces more reliable convictions.

Is that not pressing enough?

Since lightening the burden on Kansas taxpayers is the Senate’s first, second and third priority, maybe think about this: Incarceration itself is expensive. And in 2018, the Kansas Legislature approved a compensation package for wrongly convicted people that includes $65,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment and $25,000 per year wrongfully served on parole, probation or the sex offender registry. Social services such as housing and tuition assistance, counseling, health care and financial literacy training are also paid for in public funds. So injustice also costs more.

Coones, a Kansas City, Kansas, mail carrier with five children, spent 12 years in prison for murder. No physical evidence tied him to the shooting death of Carl Schroll, 64, and his wife, Kathleen Schroll, 45, in their Kansas City, Kansas, home. His conviction was based heavily on the testimony of a jailhouse “snitch” with a history of deceit. The unreliability of this convicted thief and burglar should have been disclosed to Coones’ defense team from the start.

Wyandotte County Prosecutor Ed Brancart’s written threats to the informant, who at one point did not want to testify, should also have been revealed.

When informants testify in return for a deal, that’s already supposed to be disclosed, but some prosecutors get around that requirement by formally cutting the deal after the testimony.

Coones was only released in November, after a lengthy legal fight, and he died in February.

After stealing his life, and stealing him from his family, you’d think that making sure the state of Kansas never allows this to happen to anyone else would be quite pressing. Justice shouldn’t have to wait.