Lawyer hired to lead WyCo DA’s integrity unit has already left, and no wonder | Opinion
Mark Kind, the respected lawyer that Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree hired just a year ago to run his Community Integrity Unit, has already left the office, leaving the important work of reviewing police misconduct and wrongful convictions where it has apparently been all along, in the realm of make-believe.
When I reached Kind on Tuesday, he said he was on vacation and anyway “not sure how eager I am to speak about why I left. I don’t even know why I picked up the phone.”
Anyone with integrity would have left the integrity unit, because Dupree is not keeping his promise to right old wrongs.
On the contrary, the DA stood shoulder to shoulder with indicted former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski in trying to keep Brian Betts and Celester McKinney in prison, where they served 25 years for a murder that the evidence says they didn’t commit.
Dupree brags about his integrity unit, always listing it as one of his top priorities. But what has it accomplished since its creation in 2018? Or since its prior implosion in 2021? Anyone serious about its mission would be frustrated.
That the office couldn’t keep someone like Kind, once one of Lamonte McIntyre’s lawyers, is telling.
Charges against McIntyre, who thanks to Golubski and then-WyCo prosecutor Terra Morehead spent 23 years behind bars for a double murder he didn’t commit, were dropped in 2017. The McIntyre case, Dupree has said, “showed me that if there was one person who was wrongly convicted and incarcerated, there were probably more.” No question, so when will his CIU do something for them?
Pete Coones, a KCK mailman who served a dozen years for murder, was exonerated in 2020 after a judge ruled that another former WyCo prosecutor had suborned perjury, suppressed exculpatory evidence and presented “patently untrue” testimony. Coones died of cancer just 108 days after his release.
So what has Dupree’s CIU done since then? The DA’s office is so Kremlin-like (in its secrecy; I don’t think they’ve poisoned anyone) that it’s hard to say. But if it had pushed to exonerate even one other person, that we’d know.
Dupree’s spokesman, Jonathan Carter, did not respond to a message asking if there is still a CIU since Kind’s departure.
Against new trial for Brian Betts, Celester McKinney
Last fall, Dupree opposed a new trial for Betts and McKinney, who were convicted of murder in the shooting death of Golubski’s 17-year-old nephew by marriage. Prosecutors at the original trial presented testimony from Golubski’s brother-in-law, who sold drugs at the time and kept changing his story.
The key witness, though, was the dead boy’s neighbor, Carter Betts, an uncle of Betts and McKinney, with whom they were staying. Carter Betts recanted almost at once, and has said ever since that he’d been coerced by police and prosecutors to claim that his nephews had confessed to him. At the hearing last fall, Carter Betts identified Golubski as the heavy white cop with a beard who had threatened him.
Dupree, however, accepted Golubski’s testimony that he’d had nothing to do with the case, and a judge ruled that the cousins had failed to prove otherwise. They were paroled on June 1, and are still seeking exoneration.
The DA has promised that his office would review every case touched by Golubski, who has been charged with allegedly using his position to rape women and protect sex traffickers, but how is that review coming? Last year, Dupree said that he was being held back because decades worth of moldy files needed to be digitized.
That may well be, but he’s been DA for six years, and had he made that clear before, he could have found the funding. In November, Wyandotte County officials voted to borrow money and use federal coronavirus relief funds to pay for $1.7 million to digitize the files.
His spokesman didn’t respond to my questions, either, about how that process is going, whether I could see some of the boxes of files too moldy to review, and if Dupree had any response to Brian Betts’ Juneteenth speech calling for his resignation.
A Juneteenth call for Mark Dupree’s resignation
Because it was a holiday, no one much was around to hear what Betts had to say. But it was because it was Juneteenth that he was standing there in front of the WyCo courthouse.
“On this holiday, Juneteenth,” he told me, two TV cameramen and a man wandering around in a Nebraska Huskers t-shirt that “while everyone is celebrating on this day that marks the emancipation of slaves in this country, I’m here to let everybody know that that’s a deception, because there are a lot of people that are still enslaved,” incarcerated for no good reason. “This peculiar institution still exists.”
“Even though I’m standing alone here today,” he said, “I come with a whole army behind me, a whole community that has had enough, enough of the injustice, enough of the terror at the hands of the cops, enough of the false and/or broken promises from our elected officials, and enough of each and every public official who has allowed Roger Golubski and his ilk to run amok, rape and pillage our communities, incarcerate our innocent men and women and violate the human rights of the citizens of KCK all day every day.”
“The community is done waiting for Mr. Dupree to follow through with any of the promises he made to get elected. He has clearly pandered to the Black vote in this community to get elected, but hasn’t had the integrity to give us the justice our community so desperately needs and deserves.”
He’s right that many former supporters of Dupree’s feel betrayed.
When Betts first heard that Dupree was running to fight corruption, he said, he urged his family to work for his election, which they did, along with many others who felt change was overdue.
Later, though, friends in prison told Betts that when members of Dupree’s CIU came to talk to them, it wasn’t to interview them about their innocence claims but to pressure them to reveal damning information about other crimes.
To Betts, the CIU’s lack of results is no accident. “Do we think Lamonte McIntyre is the only person Roger Golubski had wrongfully convicted? … That’s preposterous.”
As he sees it, Dupree is “intentionally supporting the corruption” in Betts’ hometown instead of taking it on.
Whether it’s intentional, I can’t say, but the other possibility is staggering incompetence. And either way, the result is the same.
This story was originally published June 21, 2023 at 5:03 AM.
