Topeka, KS – Yesterday, the Kansas Supreme Court denied former Attorney General Phill Kline’s motion for rehearing or modification of its order to indefinitely suspend Kline’s Kansas law license for ethics violations related to abortion clinic investigations.
“The Court took only five business days to deny a 90 page motion that proved objectively that the Court’s opinion misrepresented Mr. Kline’s conduct in at least six different ways. In doing so, this Court has joined the abortionists, the Kansas press, the Disciplinary Administrator, the so-called ethics panel, and the pre-recusal Court in a willful distortion of the fact record to unjustly condemn Kline. The Court’s unwillingness to answer Mr. Kline’s challenge to its own distortions will reinforce the belief of many pro-life observers that the Kline case was a sham from the beginning,” said Kline’s attorney, Tom Condit, in a written statement.
The motion presented evidence that the Court’s decision to suspend Kline’s law license was based on misrepresentations and bias that stemmed from a political vendetta against Kline.
In one of the more egregious charges made in Kline’s the motion, evidence was presented from transcripts of a citizen-called Johnson County Grand Jury proceeding that completely contradicted the testimony of one witness who said that Kline failed to properly relate Kansas law to the grand jury investigating Planned Parenthood for the non-reporting of child sexual abuse. Even though it could be proved that the witness offered perjured testimony, the Court based its ruling against Kline in part on that testimony while ignoring the actual record that showed Kline accurately related the law to the grand jury.
“For a Court that is known to take an average of four years to decide an appeal, it moved with lightning speed to deny Kline’s lengthy motion,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue. “Because of the serious arguments and evidence included in the motion, the speed of the ruling indicates that it was never seriously considered, which profoundly shakes our confidence in the judicial system in Kansas. This only serves to reinforce our concerns that political bias has infected the state’s highest court to the exclusion to justice.”
Further evidence of court bias surfaced when an Appellate Court Clerk, Sarah Peterson Herr, posted disparaging tweets from the Kansas Supreme Court during oral arguments in Kline’s case last fall that attacked Kline and revealed insider knowledge of how the Court planned to rule. Operation Rescue staff notified the Court of the improper tweets, resulting in Herr’s firing.
Read background story with link to Kline’s full motion
Kansas Court Displays Political Bias with Rapid Rejection of Kline’s Motion for Rehearing in Abortion-Related Ethics Case
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