Of course ex-KCK cop Golubski’s defense wants to delay. But why does the prosecution? | Opinion
Here’s what happened at the latest status hearing for both the federal case against former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski, which involves allegations of rape and kidnapping, and the separate sex trafficking case against Golubski, drug kingpin Cecil Brooks and two other men: Nothing.
In fact, we seem to be even further away from setting a trial date than we were at the last such courtroom get-together more than a month ago. Justice is not soon going to be riding over the hill.
The summary put out by the court after the hearing put it this way: “Parties request additional time.” Again.
First, let’s walk through the weeds that explain how the delay just keeps being extended, more than a year after Golubski’s arrest in September of 2022. Then we’ll talk about why that might be.
In January of this year, the prosecutorial team led by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Hunting agreed to the defense team’s subpoena of all documents related to Lamonte McIntyre’s civil case against the Unified Government of Wyandotte County, which the UG settled for $12.5 million in June.
McIntyre, of course, is the exoneree who served 23 years for a 1994 double murder that he did not commit. Golubski led that homicide investigation, such as it was, and was found to have coerced testimony against McIntyre, whose mother Golubski is accused of having sexually assaulted.
William Skepnek, an attorney for several Golubski victims who intend to file a civil suit against him and the UG, immediately objected to the release of the McIntyre documents, some of which contain private information about his clients, including social security numbers and medical records.
On March 14, U.S. District Judge Toby Crouse sustained Skepnek’s objection, and said the file could be released only after being redacted — stripped of that personal information.
‘Rug pulled out from under us’
In the seven months since then, getting those documents redacted has supposedly been what’s delayed the case.
Only, as Skepnek says, “nothing’s been done to comply” with the court-ordered redactions in all that time. “What have you been doing for the last seven months?” he wonders. “Why wasn’t this done in May? Or June? Or July?”
At a hearing on Sept. 20, a defense attorney told the court that his team had found a vendor who was going to do the redactions. Crouse said to send him the bid and he’d approve it right away.
But at Wednesday’s hearing, on Oct. 25, another defense attorney said that vendor hadn’t worked out after all: “We had the rug pulled out from under us.” They had found a different one, though, so maybe in 45 to 60 days they could all meet again?
Crouse said the state and defense teams should go ahead and work out a briefing schedule — dates that briefs in the case would be due — or else he’d help them with that when they meet for another hearing on Nov. 21. “I feel like I’m playing a game of telephone,” the judge said, in trying to move things along.
It should not be this difficult to accomplish something so simple.
‘The prosecution should be hurrying’
Skepnek said that though he’d never represent a Roger Golubski, “if I were representing him, I’d do exactly” what his legal team is doing, which is to “kick the can down the road. But the prosecution should be hurrying,” especially with Golubski in such poor health that he was recently hospitalized.
Golubski’s team wants the McIntyre file to see what information the state is going to use to show a pattern of “prior bad acts” of the kind that former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s prosecutors showed at his rape trials.
The state is only going to bring in a limited number of such witnesses, though, rather than everyone mentioned in the civil case, so why haven’t the names of those people who will actually be called to testify already been provided to defense attorneys?
“How hard is that?” Skepnek asks. “It’s as complicated as the government wants to make it. The ‘other acts’ evidence should have been winnowed a long time ago. When they indicted him 13 months ago, they had to know how they’d prove the case. This whole thing is a manufactured problem — a mountain that could have been turned into a couple of anthills.”
It can’t be more complicated or unwieldy than, say, the Georgia election case against Donald Trump and the 18 others who were originally indicted, and you don’t see Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis slow-walking around the block.
So why the leisurely approach from federal prosecutors in this case?
Are prosecutors waiting for Golubski to die?
I dare to hope that incompetence doesn’t explain this lack of urgency.
Some victims, who have themselves been patient for a long, long time, have come to believe that prosecutors are in no particular rush because they are simply waiting for Golubski to die. As they see it, the feds would rather run out the clock than convict a white ex-cop with powerful enablers for exploiting mostly poor Black women. I am not convinced of that, though I can certainly see why they are.
Others believe he will eventually be put on trial, if only because their former tormentor is really just pretending to be in poor health, in the same way that mobsters and other predators often start showing up with oxygen tanks and in wheelchairs as their trials approach. And I definitely don’t see that, since the average mortality rate for end-stage renal disease, even with dialysis, is somewhere between 20% and 50% over two years’ time. The man is not in good shape.
What I can’t help but conclude, though, is that if this case were for whatever reason more of a priority, prosecutors would not have spent seven months patiently waiting for some redactions.
Only they know why they have, and so far, they haven’t responded to my messages asking them to fill in the rest of us. But a lot of us do know how devastating it will be to a whole community if that doesn’t change, and soon.
This story was originally published October 27, 2023 at 5:12 AM.
