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: What the Judge Ate for Breakfast

Presumed Guilty: Searching for evidence

By Ron Sylvester

The evidence wasn’t in a broom closet at the courthouse. We know this because we asked court and county officials to look for it there.

Wichita Police evidence logs suggest that evidence in the 1981 murder case of Ronald Rhodes was sent to the Sedgwick County Courthouse for trial.

That included scrapings from underneath the fingernails of the slain Cleother Burrell, and from Rhodes. There were also hairs taken from Burrell’s right hand. Those could now be tested for DNA — technology not available in 1981 — to either prove Rhodes’ guilt or his claim of innocence.

Rhodes had asked the court to test the evidence. But no one has been able to find it.

Jackie Robinson remembers the trial well, when she worked as a court reporter for Judge Nick Klein.

“I remember it because there was so much bloody evidence,” she said. “It was a stabbing.”

Evidence in those days usually remained inside a vault adjacent to each judge’s courtroom. Kline’s court is now occupied by Judge Timothy Henderson on the ninth floor of the courthouse. Henderson had his court reporter, Jennifer Redd, look in the vault to see if there was still any evidence from the old case. But there wasn’t.

“That vault was cleared out for the Carr case,” said Ellen House, court administrator, of the 2002 capital murder trial of Jonathan and Reginald Carr.

But Robinson remembered she didn’t use the judge’s vault. She used a closet, which is now used by the building’s cleaning crew.

We asked county officials to find someone with a key and look in that closet. There’s no old evidence in there, either.

Some of evidence Robinson remembered, such as a bloody mattress and clothing from the stabbing, has been marked destroyed as early as 1982. Other evidence was marked destroyed in November of 1988.

But it’s not clear what happened to some of the fingernail clippings and hair samples.

House said evidence from the judge’s vaults were stored for years on the fifth floor of the courthouse. When courtrooms were added to the fifth floor during a 2002 renovation, the old evidence was logged and returned to the law enforcement agencies.

House found no evidence for Rhodes’ case in those logs.

Neither do there seem to be any court orders authorizing the destruction of evidence in the case.

“From the documents so far reviewed by my students, it appears that some evidence in the case may have been destroyed without an appropriate court order, and other evidence may not have been destroyed and might therefore be available, but nobody seems to know where it is,” said Rebecca Woodman, adjunct professor at Washburn. “That shouldn?t happen.”

Full post as published by What the Judge Ate for Breakfast on August 18, 2010 (boomark / email).