The state of Kansas is falsely accusing exoneree Lamonte McIntyre all over again
Lamonte McIntyre avoids even choosing what clothes to put on in the morning before heading off to his job in the barber shop. Because after all the years he spent making almost no decisions, large or small, while in prison for two Kansas City, Kansas murders he did not commit, options make him anxious.
“I don’t know why it’s such an issue,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know why I’m so overwhelmed. It causes so much frustration and anxiety, I just don’t do it. I feel bad, I start sweating, my attitude gets bad.”
His wife has stopped asking him what he’d like for dinner because that’s sure to lead to an argument.
He can’t stand to stay out past sunset because he wants — no, needs — to be in before the streetlights come up. “Before it gets dark outside, I’m in the home. I don’t like being out at dark.”
He can’t sleep for more than a couple of hours a night, and when he does drift off, dreams that he’s back in prison and can’t call anyone. “I just don’t sleep. I learned not to do it.”
Then, when he wakes up, he finds he’s taking up only a tiny corner of his bed, as if he were still back on the cot in his cell.
If you’re thinking the man needs help for these obvious symptoms of PTSD, you’re right but win nothing, just like Lamonte McIntyre.
“Every day, I wake up and feel like I’m missing something,” that something being the 23 of his 43 years that he spent behind bars. “I need therapy, but I can’t afford therapy.”
And he can’t afford it because the State of Kansas, which passed a law specifically to compensate him, still owes him more than $1.5 million, educational assistance, counseling and other social services — and apparently has no intention of paying up. Nineteen months after then-Gov. Jeff Colyer signed the law in McIntrye’s church, because he got to pick the place, it’s Kansas that is the recidivist.
Because this isn’t some bureaucratic holdup, but a sick reenactment of the original crime against McIntyre, about whom Kansas City, Kansas officials are whispering all over again that he’s not so innocent.
The facts haven’t changed. The only thing linking then-17-year-old McIntyre to the April 1994 broad-daylight murder of two men he did not even know was the detective who worked the case, Roger Golubski. McIntyre’s mother has accused the detective of forcing her to have sex with him, and of framing her son to get back at her for objecting.
Three of the five photos used in the lineup were of her two sons and her nephew. Eyewitnesses who said McIntyre was not the shooter and someone else was were ignored, as were relatives who said McIntyre had been home all day, right up until he was arrested.
One of the two women who initially said they saw McIntyre shoot the men has long since recanted, and said that police and the prosecutor forced her to lie under oath. The other woman, Ruby Mitchell, who has not recanted but has merely said she’s sorry if she got it wrong, and that Golubski had frightened and pressured her sexually en route to the police station, is the one person Kansas City, Kansas officials point to as preserving the possibility that McIntyre really was guilty all along.
In her initial audiotaped statement, Mitchell said the shooter was definitely a guy she knew named Lamonte McIntyre. In the witness statement she signed, she said, “he’s brown skinned, that’s all I could tell.” At a preliminary hearing in June of 1994, she said she’d never before laid eyes on Lamonte McIntyre.
At trial, she said that since she didn’t know McIntyre, she didn’t and couldn’t have given police his name. And in an affidavit in 2011, Mitchell said, “From the beginning, I told the police that the person who did the shooting had french braids.” McIntyre at no point wore braids. A neighbor of Ruby Mitchell’s, Jackie Poole, who has since died, gave a sworn statement that Golubski was a frequent visitor of Mitchell’s.
Approving compensation for McIntyre, who is suing the state to get it, has always been up to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, who in July of 2018 received a letter signed by police officials in Kansas City, Kansas, urging him not to sign off on funding to look into other wrongful convictions like McIntyre’s because his wasn’t so wrongful.
Maybe Schmidt doesn’t know any better than to believe this falsehood, though as the attorney general, he could easily find out.
The attorney general, who has eyes on higher office, would be wrong but not incorrect if he figured that a Republican never lost a vote over denying a dollar, or won one by going up against the police union. What he says, though, is that it’s up to the courts and not up to him to decide.
That’s a dodge, since all Schmidt has to do is go to the court and say he approves the payment.
This isn’t one of those stories where all the wrong is on one side of the political aisle, though. Kansas City, Kansas, has forever been run by Democrats like Mayor David Alvey, who when I asked him about McIntyre, only said on the record that he couldn’t talk about ongoing litigation, and that “I don’t think all the facts have come out.” Which is true, though not in the way he means it.
A spokeswoman for Democratic U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids said that at some point after the holidays, the Kansas congresswoman intends to reach out to Schmidt for an update, but I can save her the trouble: There isn’t one.
Even the district attorney, Mark Dupree Sr., who threw out the charges against McIntyre after calling the case “a manifest injustice” back in October of 2017, apparently does not want to hear or say another word about him.
Dupree spared Kansas City, Kansas officialdom a lot of embarrassment, ending a hearing on McIntyre’s exoneration right before McIntyre’s mother was going to testify that Golubski, the detective, had raped her. Also scheduled to testify later that day was the judge in McIntyre’s case, who had failed to disclose that he’d had a romantic relationship with the prosecutor.
“We’ve addressed the McIntyre thing ad nauseam,” said Dupree’s spokesman, Jonathan Carter. Ad nauseam as in you’re sick of it? “We’ve moved past it,” he answered. McIntyre is sick of his situation, too, and would love to move past it.
On Friday, I had an appointment with Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to talk about McIntyre, but when I arrived, I was told that the governor had been advised that it would be unwise to say anything at all about his case.
I drove home from Topeka heartsick, and not wanting to think that because no Democrat can win in Kansas without Wyandotte County, no Democrat will acknowledge, much less challenge, what goes on there.
I do think that, though. One exception is state Rep. Cindy Holscher, of Overland Park, who has met with McIntyre a number of times, and keeps checking in with the attorney general’s office via various intermediaries. Every time she has, Holscher said, what she’s heard back is “different reasons that don’t seem real clear.”
It is clear, though, she said, that the Fraternal Order of Police helped elect Schmidt and that police are waging a whisper campaign against McIntyre that “feels like a lot of cover-up.”
If only Schmidt could meet McIntyre, too, I told my family at dinner one night, then he would see who he is dealing with, and might even be moved to do the right thing. I amuse my household sometimes, and this was one of those times. “Who do you think you’re dealing with?” my son asked.
The man who was recently in Washington, D.C., to collect a big award from his peers? The one who was named attorney general of the year for “his dedication to protecting vulnerable citizens”?
In the barber shop where McIntyre works, and trains other men coming out of prison, he says he often hears from customers that they, too, have had frightening experiences with Golubski, who is retired now and has denied all wrongdoing, and with other Kansas City, Kansas cops.
“People come in, they know who I am, so they always speak on it. So what I say is, ‘Would you be willing to talk to my lawyer?’ But no one’s willing to talk. Seem like everybody’s still afraid.”
McIntyre is, too, of course: “I don’t want to be pulled over. That’s a constant fear of mine. I don’t want anything to happen where I’m not accounted for. So I just don’t be out at nighttime. At all. At all. I don’t want to live like that; this is my battle. I don’t want to live in fear because that’s another prison.”