‘I think I let her down’: Olathe lawyer is why teen who killed abuser needs new trial

Defense attorney Carl Cornwell was a terrible witness for Carl Cornwell at Tuesday’s hearing on whether he adequately represented Sarah Gonzales-McLinn at her sensational 2015 murder trial here.

He was so emotional and all over the place — furious and then defensive and then self-flagellating — that I’m not sure Cornwell the Olathe “superlawyer” would even have put Cornwell the witness on the stand.

The one thing he did make clear, though, was that if there was any deficiency in his defense of Gonzales-McLinn, who was 19 when she almost decapitated the 50-year-old she tearfully testified had been raping her several times a week, it wasn’t because he didn’t care about his client.

Instead, Cornwell came across like the legal equivalent of the doctor too attached to his patient to give even an approximation of the best care.

So did he or did he not fully explain the prosecution’s offer of a 25-year plea deal to his client, which the Supreme Court has said is not optional — and which as it turned out would have cut her 50-year sentence in half? Gonzales-McLinn and her family say he did not. And in court on Tuesday, Cornwell said both yes and no.

If Douglas County District Court Judge Amy Hanley finds that he didn’t, Gonzales-McLinn could get the new trial she deserves — and that Cornwell, too, seems to want for her.

Her history of abuse, both before and after she went to live with a man three times her age when she was just 17, was somehow not a major focus of her trial almost five years ago. A jury found her guilty after only four hours, and she got a 50-year minimum sentence, though she’d essentially been held in sexual and financial bondage by the man she killed, Cicis pizza owner Hal Sasko.

Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson argued that she’d slit his throat for the fun of it, and Cornwell tried unsuccessfully to sell the jury on the idea that it wasn’t really Sarah who’d killed him, because of her diagnosis of dissociative disorder, or DID, which we used to call multiple personality disorder. No, it was the more aggressive and avenging part of her called Alyssa who had done that, to keep the hopeless part of her called Vanessa from escaping Sasko by committing suicide.

Though even the prosecution’s expert witness said she might have DID, “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect” is extremely difficult — maybe even unconstitutionally difficult — to prove in Kansas, which did away with a traditional insanity defense way back in 1996.

Asked by Gonzalez-McLinn’s current lawyer, Jonathan Sternberg, whether he’d nonetheless assured her he was going to win in court, Cornwell answered, “Every time I saw her! She was going to commit suicide, I was afraid. That’s why I told her that.”

And did she believe you, Sternberg asked?

“She’s here today,” he answered. For a minute there, it sounded like he was saying that he’d felt he had to lie to his client just to keep her alive.

But no, then Cornwell also suggested that he’d really believed that they couldn’t lose. “I thought a jury was going to say you know what, this is a horrible thing that’s happened to this young woman.” And even when that’s not what happened, he was sure the judge would go far easier than she did.

“My opinion was Judge [Paula] Martin, after she’d heard everything, would never give this young girl a hard 50.” Wrong again.

Cornwell said he must have told his client in some detail about the 25-year plea offer because that’s what he always does. But no, he doesn’t remember doing so, and yes, he knows he did tell her that he was going to get her a better deal than that in court.

In the end, did he leave it up to her, as the law requires? “It’s kind of hard to have her make the final decision,” Cornwell said, “because there’s four of her.”

Had Cornwell encouraged her to take the deal, then “she’s going to go to prison and lose hope.”

His failing, he said at one point when he was almost too distraught to speak, was in not pushing her harder to take the deal — though he also indicated more than once that he didn’t push, whisper or even think that she should take it.

Asked about his trial strategy, Cornwell shouted, “That there were four people!”

“Sarah’s dead!” he said, pointing at her. “Sarah died at 16 years of age!” after being raped and burned with cigarettes by an acquaintance before she moved in with Sasko, who soon began violating her, too.

But, Sternberg prodded, how did any of that counter the state’s contention that the crime was premeditated?

Cornwell threw his hands in the air. “She’s crazy and doesn’t know what she’s doing! The girl that was born and had all that crap done to her could not have done that.”

He took great umbrage when Sternberg said that Gonzales-McLinn and her family would testify to the opposite of what he was saying. If they contradicted him, were they lying, then?

“You know what?” Cornwell said angrily. “This family doesn’t lie. They’re hurting is what they are.”

He also suggested that he’d been hurt just by hearing about Gonzales-McLinn’s experiences: “The day she told me about the rape,” he said, “that was a horrible, horrible day.”

Were his meetings with his client long or short? “Long because it was horrible, what I heard.”

He also said his client had had a horrible life, and that “my defense was that this was a horribly, horribly damaged person.”

Gonzales-McLinn didn’t want to take any plea, he said, because she wanted the world to know about “the idiot next door” who’d sexually abused her as a toddler, as well as about “the SOB” Sasko.

When Sternberg told him that she actually did not want any of this story told and would have gladly skipped a trial, Cornwell said, “She’s got a misunderstanding.”

Twice, Sternberg asked the judge to classify Cornwell as a hostile witness who was making contradictory statements. No and no, she said.

It was under the friendlier cross-examination from prosecutor Kate Butler that Cornwell broke down. Asked whether he had any reason to believe he’d deviated from his usual habit of helping clients weigh the pros and cons of a plea deal, he paused for a long time before answering.

“That’s a hard question,” he said finally, “because I think I let her down. This was a very hard case for me … I was so sure people would see what was going on with her. I should have spent more time saying, ‘Hon, you’re going to get the 50 and die in the penitentiary.’”

What Cornwell definitely should have been is more professional and less paternalistic.

What he thinks he did tell her, he said, is that if the jury thinks you’re a horrible person, the judge will have the option of giving you 50 years in prison.

Whatever he said, “I just tried to be very careful,” because of her mental state. “Sometimes I just went over to make sure she was OK. We talked about the Bible and Bible study, books she was reading. We talked about how she woke up in cold sweats with blood on the walls” in her dreams.

Did she understand what you told her? “To some extent,” he said. “She’s damaged.”

And despite all of his good intentions, so was his defense.