KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand the Kansas death sentence of a man convicted of killing a college student more than two decades ago in a state that hasn’t executed anyone in more than a half century.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review Gary Kleypas’ case, the 61-year-old inmate - the first person condemned in Kansas after it reinstated the death penalty in 1994 - still has state and federal appeals options likely to take years to resolve.
“We’re obviously disappointed (with Monday’s development), but the Supreme Court doesn’t take that many cases,” Meryl Carver-Allmond, one of Kleypas’ appellate attorneys, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “It’s like winning the lottery for them to take the case.”
Kleypas’ case now returns to Kansas courts for more likely legal challenges meant to undo his conviction and sentence related to the 1996 rape and stabbing death of 20-year-old Pittsburg State University student Carrie Williams.
The Kansas Supreme Court had overturned Kleypas’ death sentence in 2001, but a jury restored it in 2008. Last October, the state’s high court upheld Kleypas’ death sentence, and as of Tuesday he was one of 10 men on Kansas’ death row.
At the time of Williams’ death, Kleypas was on parole from a 1977 Missouri murder conviction for which he served 15 years in prison.
During December 2015 arguments to the Kansas Supreme Court, Carver-Allmond acknowledged that Kleypas’ culpability for Williams’ death is undeniable. But she pressed, among other things, that jurors who condemned him during the 2008 resentencing hearing should have been removed from the case after seeing the victim’s father lunge at Kleypas in court.
But the state’s high court ultimately sided with the state’s insistence that the judge’s response to the would-be courtroom attack was “reasonable and rational,” given that jurors who witnessed it were properly vetted by the judge about whether they could be impartial.
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