DOUGLAS COUNTY —Law enforcement authorities are investigating two suspects on drug and weapons charges.

Just after 2 a.m. Friday, deputies responded to reports of shots being fired into the air from a vehicle near the intersection of U.S. 24-59 and U.S. 24-40 intersection, according to Sgt. Kristen Channel. Deputies were unable to locate the suspects.

A short time later, Lawrence Police officers spotted a suspect vehicle in the 900 block of Pennsylvania Street and questioned the two occupants and discovered a large amount of methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana as well as a stolen handgun and more than $11,000 in cash.

They arrested 31-year-old Antonio Brown and 28-year-old Bounsouay Khanya on requested charges of possession with the intent to distribute narcotics/methamphetamine/marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. Brown also faces counts of felon in possession of a firearm and criminal discharge of a firearm.

By JOHN HANNA AP Political Writer

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas Supreme Court decision will force the state Senate into voting to reject a judicial nominee over political tweets that lawmakers found offensive.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly did not have the authority under a 2013 state law to withdraw her nomination of Labette County District Judge Jeffry Jack for the Kansas Court of Appeals, the state’s second-highest court. And, under the law, if the Senate fails take a vote by next week, Jack would be considered confirmed.

Kelly’s withdrawal of Jack’s nomination in March touched off an unprecedented and bizarre legal dispute with Senate President Susan Wagle over whether the governor could name a second nominee — as Kelly eventually did. The Supreme Court’s decision means that Kelly will get that chance if the Senate, as expected, rejects Jack’s nomination.

“I encourage the Senate to act swiftly to vote down the Jack appointment next week,” Kelly said in a statement after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The nomination was doomed after political tweets from Jack in 2017 came to light. They included vulgar language and criticism of President Donald Trump and other Republicans, with one post calling the president “Fruit Loops.”

Wagle, a Wichita Republican, has called Jack “absolutely unacceptable.” Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, predicted no senator would vote for him.

Wagle and other Senate leaders already anticipated the possibility of such a Supreme Court ruling, and the Senate is scheduled to convene Tuesday. Lawmakers wrapped up most of their business for the year early Sunday.

The Senate president contends Kelly failed to properly vet Jack and said Friday that the legal dispute resulted from a “display of her incompetence.”

“Sadly, this avoidable situation by the Kelly administration has turned into a waste of taxpayer dollars,” Wagle said in a statement.

The Supreme Court ruled only a day after hearing arguments from attorneys. It was also less than three weeks after Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, filed a lawsuit against Kelly, Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss and the Senate to resolve the dispute.

The Supreme Court appointed a substitute for Nuss, who removed himself. His attorneys told his colleagues that he had no position on how the case should be resolved.

The vacancy on the Court of Appeals was created by the retirement of longtime Judge Patrick McAnany on the day that Kelly took office in January.

The 2013 law says that if governor fails to make an appeals-court nomination within 60 days of a vacancy, Nuss makes the appointment. The deadline was March 15, the day Jack was nominated, and Wagle argued that Jack’s withdrawal meant Kelly failed to make a proper nomination in time.

Under the law, the Senate has 60 days to act on a nominee if the Legislature is in session, as it was when Kelly named Jack, or the nomination is deemed confirmed. The law says that if the Senate rejects a nominee, the governor appoints another.

Kelly cited that section of the law in arguing that she could name a new nominee, and she chose Sarah Warner, a 39-year-old Kansas City-area attorney.

It’s time to move forward and fill this vacancy,” Kelly said in her statement.

The 2013 law applies only to Court of Appeals appointments and doesn’t specifically say what happens if a nomination is withdrawn. A broader law applying to other appointments allows nominations to be withdrawn.

Justice Dan Biles wrote in the Supreme Court’s opinion that the Court of Appeals is “the obvious outlier” and the justices would be “adding words” to the 2013 law if they concluded that it allows an appeals court nomination to be withdrawn.

“We conclude the Governor is powerless to withdraw a Court of Appeals nominee once it is made,” Biles wrote.

If a nominee withdraws, Biles wrote, the only “practical purpose” is “clearing the path” for a quick vote against his or her confirmation. The court also concluded that Kelly’s nomination of Warner must be treated “as if it never happened.”

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — A government report forecasts a bountiful Kansas winter wheat harvest.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service reported Friday that this year’s wheat crop is expected to be up 17 percent from a year ago. It predicted Kansas growers would bring in 323 million bushels.

The agency forecast the state’s average yield at 49 bushels per acre, up 11 bushels from last year.

It also anticipated that grain would be harvested from 6.6 million acres in Kansas, down 700,000 acres from a year ago.

The government’s estimate is a bit more optimistic than the one put out by participants in last week’s winter wheat tour who estimated the size of the Kansas crop at 306.5 million bushels.

KANSAS CITY (AP) — The Missouri River is causing new problems in a flood-battered part of northwest Missouri where the river broke through levees in March.

The rain-swollen waterway has again inundated the tiny village of Big Lake in Holt County, where some of its approximately 160 residents were beginning to clean up after the last deluge.

Water levels haven’t dropped enough to fix the failed earthen levees intended to protect the area, Holt County emergency management director Tom Bullock said Friday. That means even moderate rises in river levels can cause problems. He calls it “a continuous mess.”

Several roads in the region are closed again, including a portion of U.S. 59, a key transportation artery between northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri.

In eastern Missouri, water levels are falling along the Mississippi River after some levees were busted.

Northwestern Missouri’s new troubles come just as some areas were showing signs of improvement. A stretch of the Kansas Turnpike near the Oklahoma border has reopened, as has the Iowa Highway 2 approach to a Missouri River bridge that links southwest Iowa to southeast Nebraska.

The Kansas Turnpike section near Wellington, which is about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of Wichita, flooded Wednesday when up to 10 inches (254 millimeters) of rain fell across parts of the state in just 24 hours. Flooding also forced evacuations and school closures.

The National Weather Service says the rain is expected to move across the Deep South this weekend, putting millions of people in the path of potentially dangerous weather. The Storm Prediction Center says there’s a marginal risk of severe storms from eastern Texas — where parts of Houston have already seen flooding this week — to South Carolina and western North Carolina.

Forecasters say wind damage and hail could be seen in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina on Saturday. On Sunday, there’s a chance of storms across central Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina.

In Louisiana, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned to open a major spillway Friday, four days earlier than expected due to torrential rains that saw the Mississippi River rise 6 inches (15.24 centimeters) in the past 24 hours. Officials said opening the Bonnet Carré (BAH-nee KEHR-ee) Spillway relieves stress on New Orleans levees.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Gov. Laura Kelly says she hopes that extra state funding for the Kansas higher education system will lead to lower tuition for students and their families.

Kelly on Friday touted the additional $33 million included for higher education in a proposed $18.4 billion state budget for the fiscal year beginning in July.

She said during a Statehouse news conference that legislators included the extra money hoping that the Kansas Board of Regents could keep university tuition flat.

Kelly said she would like the regents to go further and reduce tuition. She said she’s worried that students are being priced out of higher education.

The regents have complained in the past that tight state funding has forced them to increase tuition to pay for vital programs on the campuses.

By NOMIN UJIYEDIIN
Kansas News Service

Kansas may soon turn to private contractors to take the overflow from its crowded prisons, raising questions about growing costs and the reliability of for-profit jails.

That plan ran into complications over the weekend when lawmakers insisted on a closer review from a state commission to OK some of the line-by-line spending. But taxpayers could soon be spending almost $36 million more to deal with a range of problems in the prison system.

• $16.4 million in contracts for 600 outsourced prison beds
• $11.5 million in raises for the state’s prison staff
• $4.5 million worth of Hepatitis C treatment for inmates
• $3 million to move 120 inmates from the state’s women’s prison to an empty unit in its juvenile prison
• $340,000 for stab-proof vests for staff

But following a heated week at the Statehouse, the Kansas Legislature only gave a fraction of that money immediately.

Lawmakers added just $5.5 million to the corrections budget for contracts next year, enough funding for only 200 prison beds. The Legislature also decided to give a pay raise only to employees of El Dorado Correctional Facility, at a cost of another $2.5 million. It also funded the stab-proof vests.

The State Finance Council, a board consisting of Gov. Laura Kelly and high-ranking members of the Legislature, will decide the rest of an additional $27.6 million in spending.

Now the Kansas Department of Corrections will have to make its case for that funding in front of the State Finance Council later this year.

Kelly, speaking to reporters on Monday, said she hopes to use her position on the finance council to clear the way for the added spending on prisons.

“That’s sort of a pain,” she said, “but certainly doable.”

But Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz said the state’s prisons need the money now. The DOC has already taken contract bids to outsource 600 inmates to county jails or private prisons next year.

“The problem’s immediate,” he told reporters on Saturday. “I don’t know when that money is going to be released.”

Solutions For Overcrowding

State prisons currently have a capacity of 9,916 people. As of May 6, they hold 10,022 people, with a projected population of 10,655 by next year.

Werholtz said he had repeatedly told the Legislature about overcrowding problems, including increased inmate violence, danger to staff and inmates not getting the mental health treatment or training that they need.

“I want something to lower the pressure in the system so we can operate it more safely,” he said. “We’ve laid out in detail, with money figures attached, what it would cost to fix the problem.”

With that in mind, Kelly last week asked legislators to put an additional $16.4 million in the state’s budget for “contract beds” — agreements with outside prisons to house Kansas inmates for a fee. The proposal would essentially rent 600 prison beds and everything else it takes to keep inmates locked up for $75 each per day.

Now that the Legislature has awarded enough funding for only 200 beds, Werholtz said the DOC will still consider bids from outside contractors. But it is still deciding how those beds will be used. He said in a phone interview that the department has three major needs: to reduce crowding in the system overall, to increase the number of solitary confinement units and to move some inmates out of El Dorado Correctional Facility to relieve staff, some of whom work 16-hour days.

“We have to choose,” he said. “Two hundred beds is only sufficient to partially address any of those three.”

Some of those contract bids could go to county jails in Kansas. The state already contracts with two county jails, in Jackson and Cloud counties in the north-central part of the state, to house about 80 inmates at a cost of about $45 per inmate per day.

But most likely, contracts will be awarded to private prisons outside of the state with room to take in more inmates and the ability to ship them to the new locations.

Private prisons may have a poor reputation, but Werholtz said the state could successfully monitor any contracts with them.

“There’s nothing inherently good or inherently bad about either a public or a private prison,” Werholtz said. “It all hinges on who’s operating it, what resources they have available to them, and how closely you monitor the terms of the contract.”

Werholtz said the DOC would track security, operations and mental and behavioral health programs, possibly sending a full-time staff member to work on site if one contract facility takes on hundreds of inmates.

However, he said he would prefer to contract with county jails in Kansas, where inmates can be closer to their families and the medical services provided by the DOC provides in state prisons. But the state’s county jails won’t have enough beds.

“We’ll look at those first,” Werholtz said. “But I’m not optimistic that that will satisfy all our needs.”

Among those needs are 300 beds for people assigned to solitary confinement.

As of May 6, nearly 900 people were in solitary confinement in Kansas. It’s used as a form of discipline or to isolate inmates who exhibit suicidal tendencies, have a contagious illness, intimidate witnesses or attack others. The state has to swap them in and out because there aren’t enough beds.

“In order to put somebody in who’s engaged that kind of behavior, we’ve got to take somebody out who just did the same thing, maybe two or weeks prior to that,” Werholtz said. “That makes it much more difficult to discourage that sort of behavior.”

Staff in private prisons, however, are often inexperienced and paid less than employees of public prisons, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the nonprofit Sentencing Project, based in Washington, DC.

“Private prison operators have promised many things to public officials. They say that they can keep people housed in prison at less cost to the state. They told their shareholders that they’re going to make a profit,” Mauer said. “If you want to cut costs in order to meet both of those goals, the main cost is personnel.”

Mauer says moving inmates out of state can affect inmates’ quality of life in other ways.

“If you’re far away from your home state, that means your family visits are going to be limited,” he said. “If you have a legal case pending, it’s going to be very difficult to meet with your attorney.”

Sentencing Reform

Ultimately, Werholtz said, lawmakers will have to contend with the root cause of the problem: the ever-growing prison population. He credits the growth to the state’s sentencing guidelines, which determine the length of prison or probation time.

Those recommended sentences can only be reduced through legislative action. And the DOC’s aging computer system would need time to adjust to those changes, Werholtz said.

“You’re looking at, at an absolute minimum, a two-year process,” he said. “More likely a three or three-and-a-half-year process.”

In the meantime, he predicts the state’s prisons will remain full, with contract beds catching the overflow, and costs increasing every year.

“We’re going to be overcrowded,” he said, “for the foreseeable future.”

Nomin Ujiyediin is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can send her an email at nomin at kcur dot org, or reach her on Twitter @NominUJ.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Authorities say a suspected drunken driver who fled from police with two children in his car crashed into a parked vehicle outside a Wichita senior center.

34-year-old Markston Adkins, of Wichita, was booked into jail on suspicion of driving under the influence, aggravated child endangerment and several other charges.

The Kansas Highway Patrol says a trooper attempted to stop him Wednesday for a traffic violation. The crash report says the trooper stopped the pursuit before Adkins’s car jumped a curb and struck the parked vehicle.

Adkins was taken to a hospital with a suspected minor injury. The crash log says a 3-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl in his car had complaints of pain, but the report indicates that they weren’t taken to a hospital.

WOODSON COUNTY —  The search for one of three inmates who escaped from the Woodson County jail in Yates Center ended just after 8a.m. Friday.

Three inmates escaped from the jail Thursday. Two were found approximately an hour later, according to the sheriff’s department. The manhunt for 29-year-old Jordan Alan Stout continued overnight. 

On Friday morning, law enforcement authorities received a tip that Stout was returning to town.

They located him in Yates Center where he drove away in Chevy S-10 pickup on Thursday, according to the sheriff’s office.

On Monday Yate’s Center Police arrested Stout for alleged criminal threat. He had been held on a bond of $6500.

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WOODSON COUNTY — Authorities are investigating after three inmates escaped Thursday from the Woodson County jail in Yates Center, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol.

Two are back in custody but the search continues for one inmate identified as 29-year-old Jordan Alan Stout.  

The Woodson County Sheriff’s office had no new information on the search as of 7a.m. Friday.

Stout is described as 6-foot-2, has brown hair and hazel eyes and was wearing orange jail scrubs.

He was possibly driving a maroon 2001 Chevy S10 pickup with a dark greet tailgate and a Kansas license 303HYV, according to the sheriff’s department.

Stout was arrested by Yates Center Police on May 6, according to online jail records. He was being held on a bond of $6500.

Authorities released no additional details.

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WOODSON COUNTY — Authorities are investigating after three inmates escaped Thursday from the Woodson County jail in Yates Center, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol.

Two are back in custody but the search continues for one inmate identified as 29-year-old Jordan Alan Stout.

According to the Woodson County Sheriff’s department, Stout is described as 6-foot-2, has brown hair and hazel eyes and was wearing orange jail scrubs.

He was possibly driving a maroon 2001 Chevy S10 pickup with a dark greet tailgate and a Kansas license 303HYV, according to the sheriff’s department.

Stout was arrested by Yates Center Police on May 6, according to online jail records. He was being held on a bond of $6500.

Authorities released no additional details.

Vox.com took a deeper look at the “chumbox” sponsored ads populating websites, including the ones often located around the comments section on Hays Post.

An interesting read can be found HERE if you’ve ever wondered!

SHAWNEE COUNTY — Law enforcement authorities are investigating a burglary and asking the public for help to locate suspects.

Just before noon Thursday, deputies were dispatched to a residential burglary in the 1300 block of SE 85th in rural Shawnee County, according to Capt. Danny Lotridge.

The victim interrupted the burglary in progress and followed the criminals as they fled the area in a vehicle described as a new dark blue Dodge Dually pickup with a brush guard on the front and a Kansas tag 756(unknown letters)

The suspect vehicle stopped at 93rd and California where a passenger exited the vehicle and threatened the victim with a knife. The suspects fled westbound on 93rd Street.

The three criminals were described as white males. Shortly after the burglary, deputies were notified the victim’s credit card was used at Home Depot in Topeka, according to Lotridge.

Anyone with information about this vehicle or the suspects are asked to call the Shawnee County Sheriff’s Office.

Interstate 35, the Kansas Turnpike has been repaired and is fully open, less than 48 hours after it closed. Late Thursday, the KTA released video of the work necessary to reopen the road.

We are so proud to share I-35/KTA has been repaired and is fully open, less than 48 hours from when it closed. The first 24 hours belonged to Mother Nature; the second 24 hours belonged to us. Watch how the work unfolded: https://t.co/8GVaanwbzg

— Kansas Turnpike (@KansasTurnpike) May 10, 2019