At age 19, she killed her abuser. Now, she deserves a new trial in Kansas
Whether Sarah Gonzales-McLinn will get a new trial or spend the rest of her life in prison for killing her rapist when she was 19 will turn on two questions: Did her lawyer, Carl Cornwell, ever explain the plea deal that would have cut her sentence of a “hard 50” behind bars in half?
And was Cornwell’s decision not to pursue a “battered woman’s defense” so egregious that his young client was effectively denied counsel at her 2015 murder trial?
Under cross-examination at a Tuesday hearing here, Gonzales-McLinn repeatedly said that Cornwell never went over the deal Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson had offered her, other than to tell her not to worry about that or anything else because they were sure to win at trial.
Not once, she said, did he even fleetingly spell out that if she turned the deal down and they lost, she could go away forever for nearly decapitating 52-year-old Cici’s pizza restaurant owner Hal Sasko, who had essentially been holding her in sexual and financial bondage at his home in Lawrence.
“The amount of time we talked about the case was minimal,” Gonzales-McLinn told Douglas County District Court Judge Amy Hanley. Instead, she said, Cornwell mostly talked about “his family, his daughter, other cases he’d done and won.”
At her trial, Branson said she’d killed Sasko for entertainment. Cornwell tried to make the case that it wasn’t really Sarah herself who had killed him at all, because of her diagnosis of dissociative disorder, or DID, which we used to call multiple personality disorder.
“Not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect” might even be unconstitutionally difficult to prove in Kansas, which did away with a traditional insanity defense in 1996. After deliberating for only four hours, the jury found her guilty.
Ineffective counsel is extremely hard to prove, too. The bar has to be high, since by definition, every losing defense strategy has in some way fallen short. But the Supreme Court has ruled that an attorney does have an obligation to fully explain any offer of a plea deal.
At a December hearing, Gonzales-McLinn’s current lawyer, Jonathan Sternberg, asked Cornwell whether he’d really assured her that there was nothing to worry about because he was going to win in court.
“Every time I saw her!” Cornwell testified. “She was going to commit suicide, I was afraid. That’s why I told her that.”
He also said he really believed that they would win, and that though he doesn’t remember telling her about the deal, he must have because he always does.
Did he leave the final decision up to her, as required by law? “It’s kind of hard to have her make the final decision,” Cornwell answered, “because there’s four of her.”
On cross-examination Tuesday, Douglas County prosecutor Kate Duncan Butler asked Gonzales-McLinn in a bunch of different ways how she could possibly have failed to know the contours and implications of the plea deal.
“Did he ask you what you wanted to do?...Did you understand it was your decision?”
No and no.
After Gonzales-McLinn repeatedly said Cornwell never so much as hinted that she might be found guilty, Butler asked her, “But you understood that was a possibility that existed in the universe?”
“Did I understand that was a real possibility? No. At the time, honestly, no.”
Butler also wanted to know whether she’d asked the judge for more time to mull the deal, or informed the judge that her attorney had only briefly mentioned it, or used her pre-sentencing statement to speak out against Cornwell. No, no and no, of course.
And why didn’t she tell him she would have preferred not to have gone to trial at all? “You didn’t say, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ flat out?...You never said, ‘I’m not comfortable with this game plan?’...Did you ever say, ‘Hey, I would like to know more?’’’
“I didn’t know there was more,” Gonzales-McLinn answered.
“And you never told the judge, ‘Judge, I don’t understand?’’’
“I didn’t even know I could talk to the judge.”
To expect a young woman with a long history of abuse and and no experience with the criminal justice system to confront her lawyer or pipe up in court seems right in keeping with the way abuse victims are treated in Douglas County.
I hope that after having been found insufficiently mentally ill to be sent to a hospital instead of to prison for the rest of her life, she won’t now be written off as too mentally ill to know what she was told. Her family also says they knew nothing about any deal other than that they weren’t to even think of taking it.
And is it too much to hope, too, that the judge will give at least as much weight to Gonzales-McLinn’s calm and consistent testimony that she really wasn’t ever consulted than to her former attorney’s anguished, all-over-the-place insistence that he must have done the right thing, even if he doesn’t remember doing so?
After the hearing, her current counsel said he wanted to just note that “the state didn’t ask any questions about her abuse or her history.”
Just as at her trial, the prosecutor showed no interest in any of that.
This story was originally published February 28, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
