Wyandotte County residents who oppose the death penalty are potentially much more likely to be kept off juries in capital murder cases, a judge heard Wednesday as he weighs whether to strike down Kansas’ death penalty.
Over the past few months, the murder case against Hugo Villanueva, a Hispanic man in his mid-30s accused in a 2019 shooting outside a Kansas City, Kansas, bar that left four dead, temporarily transformed into a trial of sorts against the state’s death penalty.
Attorneys for Villanueva, including lawyers with the ACLU, spent weeks building a case that the way Kansas practices the death penalty is unfair and racially biased. More than a dozen witnesses testified on aspects of the state’s death penalty and jury selection process.
“The people who are opposed” to the death penalty are “more likely to be excludable,” Mona Lynch, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California-Irvine, testified, summarizing the findings of a survey of 500 Wyandotte County residents.