Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly would be brave to grant clemency to Sarah Gonzales-McLinn | Opinion

It would be brave of Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly to grant clemency to Sarah Gonzales-McLinn, who a decade ago, when she was just 19, nearly decapitated her abuser. Hal Sasko, her 52-year-old former employer, had presented himself as a father figure before moving her into the house in Lawrence where he essentially held her in sexual and financial slavery.

Given the furious backlash that follows any effort to bend that notoriously solid arc of the moral universe toward justice, Kelly’s willingness to even consider Gonzales-McLinn’s application is bold.

Yet those making the case for her clemency have an “open door” to members of Kelly’s legal staff, said Dave Ranney, an advocate and retired journalist who met Gonzales-McLinn in 2015 while volunteering at the Topeka Correctional Facility. “They’ve not thrown us out.”

At two presentations, at 6 p.m. at the Lawrence Public Library on May 20 and at 6 p.m. at the Topeka Public Library on May 22, those pushing for Gonzales-McLinn’s release will also make their case to the public.

They’ll show some of the evidence of abuse that Lawrence police and prosecutors knew all about — evidence that jurors never saw or heard.

Testimony on abuse, drug dealing not allowed in trial

The judge in the case, Paula B. Martin, who retired five years ago, granted then-Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson’s motion not to allow any testimony about abuse or drug dealing by Sasko to be heard by the jury.

“It’s the state’s contention that it be inappropriate for the expert to discuss any of the allegations of abuse that the defendant allegedly suffered,” Branson told the court, asking that all “nitty-gritty details” be omitted.

Carl Cornwell, Gonzales-McLinn’s defense attorney, argued that what was happening in the house they shared helped explain “what happened on the night in question,” but the judge disagreed.

The state also moved to keep out information from interviews about Gonzales-McLinn’s history of abuse as a child, and Cornwell went along with the idea that that history was “irrelevant.”

Prosecutors successfully painted her as bloodthirsty, calculating and in control, and Sasko as her kindly “benefactor.” Defense attempts to show that she suffered from dissociative identity disorder didn’t work.

During the sentencing phase, after she’d been found guilty of premeditated murder, Cornwell referred in court to the fact that abuse allegations “can’t go to the jury. I understand that.”

Then prosecutor David Melton said that in any case, there was no evidence “that there was any abuse suffering (sic) at the hands of Hal Sasko.”

Which just isn’t true, though his team had managed to keep that evidence from ever coming out in court.

That Gonzales-McLinn was vulnerable when Sasko drew her in is beyond question: After being raped and burned with cigarettes at age 16, by the friend of a friend, she had attempted suicide and had been hospitalized for PTSD and depression.

On top of all that, her parents were going through an ugly divorce when Sasko, who’d been her boss at one of the Cicis pizza restaurants he owned, started picking her up at school, coming over when her mom wasn’t there and offering to rescue her. He could be a real dad to her, he said, and could send her to college, too.

Instead, after she moved in with him at age 17, he gradually started charging her for everything, held what he said she owed him over her and convinced her that if she left she’d be homeless. He also began hounding her sexually, and at one point told his nephew that “having” a girl her age was amazing. To blot out what was happening, she’d get as drunk as possible so she could “check out” during encounters that, since she was incapable of consent in that condition, would under Kansas law be defined as rape.

Initially sentenced to a “Hard 50” years in prison without the possibility of parole, that sentence was later amended to a Hard 25. But Gonzales-McLinn could still spend the rest of her life behind bars, and that’s just wrong.

Jury foreman regretted guilty murder verdict

I’ve written about her case a number of times, starting back in 2019, yet still learned a lot more from a preview of the upcoming presentations.

In 2021, the foreman of her jury, Brandon Wingert, who was only 18 when she was found guilty, told me that he regretted the verdict: A few jurors, he said, “thought maybe she was in some sort of horrible circumstance that wasn’t presented to us. But people on my side of it, we just viewed it as, our job was to determine” one thing and only one thing. “Was the crime done? Yes? Then you say guilty. Some people were a little, ‘Hey, I’m doing this. I have other things to do. Boom, guilty, she did it, let’s move on with our lives’ kind of thing.”

At the presentation, you’ll hear what Wingert and others on that jury did not get to hear.

For instance, about the text messages that showed what was going on in real time.

About the police interview with the mother of 16-year-old twins who said that Sasko had been grooming them, showering them with expensive gifts and trying to move them in with him, too. He told them that the only “rule” would be that his drugs would then be theirs to share.

You’ll hear about the two of Sasko’s three ex-wives who describe him as a sex and porn addict attracted to underage girls.

And you’ll hear directly from Gonzales-McLinn, via audiotape, explaining how she was groomed and then broken, so that “by the first time he harmed me in a physical, sexual way, the grip on my psyche was so strong.”

Other survivors of abuse have been released early

Today, 29-year-old Sarah Gonzales-McLinn is a healthy and model inmate who trains service dogs and is taking classes through Washburn University. If Kelly did grant her clemency, it would not be a first in this country, even in as conservative a state as Kansas.

In 2019, Cyntoia Brown, originally sentenced to life in prison for killing a man who’d bought her for sex when she was 16, was granted clemency by the Republican who was then governor of Tennessee, Bill Haslam.

In 2020, 76-year-old Beatrice Taylor was finally released from a Louisiana prison after 23 years. She’d been expected to serve the rest of her life there for stabbing her abusive ex-boyfriend to death in 1996. But Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards commuted her sentence, along with those of a handful of other women who had fought back against violent partners, “after reconsidering the role intimate partner violence played in their convictions.”

In January, a Poughkeepsie, New York, woman convicted of murdering the father of her children in 2017, after years of physical and emotional abuse, was released on parole. Nicole Addimando’s sentence of 19 years to life was reduced to seven under the state’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act.

Kansas needs a law like that, but won’t be getting one anytime soon. What we have right now, though, is a governor who can give Sarah Gonzales-McLinn the second chance she deserves.

Of course there would be pushback. On a Facebook post about the upcoming meeting, one man wrote, “I don’t believe she was abused.” A woman wrote, “Many of us have been abused much worse by people” and yet managed not to cut their heads off.

If you think you know that, I invite you to not only come to the presentation, but come to it open to the possibility that you don’t.