KS Legal Ethics Head Stan Hazlett Faces Own Ethics Charges

Stan Hazlett

The director of Kansas’ state attorney ethics division, Stan Hazlett, is facing serious charges of his own, basically that he was “dishonest,” “unfair,”and broke the rules governing discipline of attorneys.While similar charges against Hazlett are part of the Phill Kline defense (discussed below), scathing allegations against Hazlett were filed in a May 2012 legal brief (that fills a three-inch deep binder) by Alma attorney, Keen Umbehr. Umbehr says he has been victimized by Hazlett,

who pressed for disciplinary action against Umbehr without having received the required decision from a 3-person disciplinary review panel that there was “probable cause” that ethical violations were committed.

Umbehr was the subject of a complaint to Hazlett initiated by the director of the state department of women’ corrections. Umbehr had shown the temerity to expose the scandal of sex between guards and inmates, including drugs and a procured abortion.

The resulting explosive Topeka Capital Journal newspaper series on conditions inside the women’s prison ran in October 2009. It was written by reporter Tim Carpenter, who accompanied Umbehr when meeting with jailed clients. The scandal triggered federal investigations that continue today.

Umbehr was threatened with loss of his law license for not volunteering that Carpenter was a reporter. After two years, it was found that he had not violated any professional ethics.

Umbehr’s filing shows how Hazlett stonewalled verifying whether the ethics charges were being handled according to the rules. Umbehr alleges the initial required review panel never even convened and that Hazlett lied repeatedly about it. Umbehr’s action against Hazlett now proceeds to a panel of the state Supreme Court.

As relates to former AG Phill Kline’s protracted case, Kline’s attorney, Tom Condit issued a demand letter to Hazlett Nov, 21, for additional documentation on the working of Hazlett’s office in light of the derogatory comments tweeted by an appellate law clerk (see post here). Condit’s letter draws attention to numerous failings by Hazlett, in pursuing Kline:

There are seemingly infinite ironies between the many failings and omissions of your [Hazlett] office and …the standard of absolute perfection required of all of Mr. Kline’s acts and communications.”

Condit notes that— as in the Umbehr case— Hazlett failed to secure a written “probable cause” finding for Kline. When asked for the report, Hazlett asserted that review panel results were “oral.”  This is the same excuse Hazlett gave Umbehr, although the Rules clearly state that the panel must commit their findings to the record.

Also noteworthy in the Kline case, is that Hazlett’s own investigators did not find Kline guilty. And Hazlett ignored the “not guilty” findings of a special inquisition of Kline in 2007 and the ruling of Wichita Judge Owens on related matters.

So what compelled Hazlett to take the path he did with Kline?  The results of the legal complaint filed by attorney Umbehr may verify whether Stan Hazlett has been violating the very ethics he is in charge of enforcing.

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KS Abortionist Neuhaus “can’t pay” but will get appeal

Kris Neuhaus

The Kansas state Board of Healing Arts will likely never be repaid the $93,000.00 it already spent revoking the medical license of abortionist Kris Neuhaus. And it’s hard to believe the ongoing expenses of the district court and the Board involved in her appeal will ever be reimbursed either.

The protracted medical license revocation action against Neuhaus was based on ‘psych referrals’ she made for 11 teens receiving late-term Wichita abortions in 2003. The Board spent $75,000.00 for expert testimony and review of Neuhaus’ records for those cases, finding that she failed in multiple ways to meet medical standards.

District Judge Franklin Theis is presiding over Neuhaus’ appeal of that revocation, which is in the initial stages. The Board issued its final revocation order July 5, 2012, allowing a delay in repayment, but then asked the court to enforce the Board’s right to require a bond. This was the only time in Theis’ memory, he said, that the Board had asked for a bond in this kind of proceeding.

Abortion attorneys argue Neuhaus is impoverished and would not be able to pay the $93,000.00 “in the foreseeable future.”

They said she could only afford a bond of $100, which Judge Theis said “would be a joke.”

Theis then ruled that Neuhaus merely “sign a statement saying she’ll pay any judgment imposed by the courts.”

Neuhaus was uncovered in 2006 as the sole source of second opinions for abortions performed after viability by George Tiller. Under the law, totally “independent” referrals would give proof that the abortion was needed to prevent irreversible and substantial bodily damage- or death– to the mother. Although Tiller escaped a misdemeanor conviction in March 2009 for repeatedly using Neuhaus’ services, the Healing Board proceeded with license revocation filings for Tiller until his murder in May 2009.

Although the Board has regrettably taken no disciplinary actions against other physician associates of Tiller who also used Neuhaus’ referrals, they did proceed with revocation against Neuhaus –a licensee they twice officially called “a danger to the public” and first began to discipline fifteen years ago. (see Neuhaus Board history here)

Neuhaus has no viable medical practice and for the last few years held a strictly limited license until it was revoked. According to sworn testimony, she has worked at a variety of part time positions including a blood bank, laser hair removal salon and an indigent clinic. Yet, under a “due process” claim, she will continue to eat up Court and Board expenses during an appeal process for which she has virtually no chance of winning.

The awful irony is that the court is bending over backward to give Neuhaus the due process that thousands of children and their mothers were denied in Kansas clinics.

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Anti-Kline tweets earn KS appellate clerk suspension

Anti-Kline tweeting court clerk Herr

The shocking “tweets” of a Kansas appellate court clerk, during Thursday’s Supreme Court review of ethics charges against former Kansas AG Phill Kline, have earned her a suspension, pending review, according to the Associated Press.
UPDATE, Nov. 19: AP reports Herr has been fired

The Kline-denigrating tweets of Sarah Peterson Herr (outed Thursday evening by Operation Rescue) reflect the culture of abortion corruption that has long plagued Kansas as well as a deep, dangerous and pervasive animus towards Kline among the legal authorities in this state.

1) The state’s attorney ethics division.

They are demanding a permanent revocation of Kline’s law license for what they portray as ethical violations during his attempted prosecution of child rape and illegal abortions, begun in 2003. (Read allegations and rebuttals at KlineCaseFile.com.)  The charges were pursued even after their own investigative staff recommended they not do so and even after a panel (with questionable neutrality) recommended only a suspension.

2) The Kansas Supreme Court.

During one of their cases filed by abortion businesses to avoid criminal prosecution, the state Court held a unique internal trial of Kline, in which he was exonerated. The ruling written by Justice Carol Beier (who has lectured on how courts should be used to advance feminist ideology) was criticized by her senior justices, in essence, for her anti-Kline diatribe. The bias was so strong on this court that 5 members recused themselves from this hearing and a substitute judge at the hearing remains under a cloud (see details here).

3) Certain state prosecutors who consider abortion criminal prosecution “a career killer” (more on them in future posts).

The incident involving law clerk Herr is troubling on several levels. First of all, as an attorney, Herr is sworn to uphold a certain comportment and reserve, which conflicts with tweeting denigrating comments during a state hearing. She wore her badge in court, and it is assumed she was on state salary as she sent out various messages against Kline’s court responses and called him a “douchebag.”

But it also shows how deep the media-assisted pro-abortion and anti-Kline messaging has succeeded. Her tweets resemble those of a young pro-choice adult responding to Planned Parenthood propaganda; yet Herr is a highly trained attorney who is supposed to be able to read challenging legal documents, and edit legal submissions for the court.  This is a person paid to “sift” through complicated documents and recommend legal pronouncements. Nevertheless, on Thursday, she tweeted in capital letters for emphasis:

“ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME. WHERE ARE THE VICTIMS? ALL THE PEOPLE WITH THE RECORDS WHO WERE STOLEN.”

Ms. Herr–no abortion records were ever stolen. Court-ordered medical files were legally obtained and protected—inordinately so. The victims of illegal late-term abortions and non-reported rape in Kansas were the focus of Kline’s actions.

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Trust Women takes over Tiller abortion clinic property

After over a year of threats by ex-Tiller political operative, Julie Burkhart, to re-establish a Wichita abortion business, the Wichita Eagle reports that Burkhart’s Trust Women group officially owns the old Tiller clinic building.

The Eagle obtained no definitive information about how Burkhart would be using the building, but Kansans for Life had alerted its members September 12th of credible inside information that a Wichita clinic staffed with three non-Kansas abortionists would indeed be opening in January 2013.

If in fact Burkhart does open a business with itinerant abortionists, women will be in much jeopardy. Out-of-state physicians do not have

• a stake in the community with family ties,
• a medical reputation to maintain,
• a permanent real estate investment.

Abortion clinics are notorious for sending abortion-injured women to the hospital without the necessary first-hand information for accurate emergency treatment– apparently what happened in the Tonya Reaves botched abortion death from a Chicago-area Planned Parenthood this July.

This is the reason that a provision requiring local hospital privileges for itinerant abortionists was passed in 2011 as part of the abortion clinic licensure law.  Unfortunately, this law is under injunction and thus not in effect, so the Eagle report is wrong that at least one of Burkhart’s abortionists would have to attain hospital privileges within 30 miles of the clinic.

An abundance of incidents across this nation have documented a variety of schemes with abortionists crossing state lines to take advantage of differing state laws governing abortion. Without a clinic licensure law in effect, the Kansas state health department cannot inspect, restrain, or penalize clinics.

Additionally, the Healing Arts Board cannot discipline a non-resident abortionist who drops his/her license and leaves Kansas.  Even if malpractice has occurred, the Board cannot chase abortionists into other states and force them to return to testify in Kansas, nor can the Board compel information from other state medical boards.  And certainly, personal lawsuits for injury and death on behalf of a woman or her family cannot be filed in other states.

If the information Kansans for Life received is true, the abortionists for the slated new clinic are residents of Missouri, Oklahoma and Nebraska. Nebraska abortionist LeRoy Carhart, a longtime Tiller-associate, still possesses a Kansas license.

Two other former itinerant Tiller abortionists, Shelly Sella and Susan Robinson, did not renew their Kansas medical licenses after Tiller’s murder.  Although this past year, Kansas State Board of Healing Arts did revoke the medical license of Tiller associate, Kris Neuhaus, for repeatedly violating the medical standard of care, they took no actions to discipline Carhart, Sella and Robinson for fraudulent late-term abortions.

Kansans for Life Executive Director, Mary Kay Culp, commented:

“It is tragic Burkhart appears poised to re-engage in destroying unborn children and exploiting women for money, again using out-of-state abortionists who can escape discipline from the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, and not yet subject to our new licensure law due to litigation; Burkhart knows that illegal abortions in Wichita were not penalized, and more recently, Planned Parenthood escaped prosecution when state documents were shredded with impunity–a situation that key legislators are currently investigating.”

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More anti-Kline bias found on Kansas supreme court panel

Judge Arnold-Burger

Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline is appealing a ruling last year by the state’s Board for Discipline of Attorneys that his Kansas law license be revoked for “misleading” actions undertaken when he worked to prosecute illegal late-term abortions.

This week, he is once again seeking recusal of a judge on the state Supreme Court panel scheduled to review his license appeal.  A few months ago, Kline’s legal team was phenomenally successful; they submitted documentation arguing that at least two of the seven state Supreme Court justices were hopelessly biased against him and the result was historic– five sitting justices recused themselves!

To fill those five positions, three district judges, and two appellate judges were selected. It is Court of Appeals Judge Karen Arnold-Burger that is now being asked to recuse herself in Kline’s filing, because she

“has already announced her views on these matters in a way to impugn Mr. Kline before the state judiciary.”

As reported Monday in the Topeka Capital Journal, Kline’s attorney, Tom Condit, said the motion urging Arnold-Burger’s recusal “was filed Friday after Kline discovered the judge’s role in ‘publishing a factually inaccurate, if not dishonest, newsletter to judges throughout Kansas that further distorted and demeaned the professional conduct of Mr. Kline.’ ”

The newsletter in question is The Verdict, a publication for Kansas lower court judges, edited solely by Arnold-Burger, and which folded after she was appointed to the Court of Appeals in 2010. But in early 2009, The Verdict featured a negative article on Kline, including (according to Kline’s motion)“twelve statements [that] read like a pro-abortion editorial, and are famously inaccurate.”

Kline argues that two judicial ethics rules are in play: 1) a judge must not make public comments on impending cases, and 2) a judge is disqualified from any proceeding in which the judge’s
impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

The action to pull Kline’s license was a ‘payback’ virtually promised by Justice Carol Beier, the author of both state Supreme Court rulings for Planned Parenthood protracted lawsuits in which Kline prevailed. Justice Beier’s animus against Kline was so out of bounds in the majority opinion that the two most senior justices backed away from Beier’s “threatened penalties” to Kline and complained that the ruling had been used “as a platform from which it can denigrate Kline for actions that it cannot find to have been in violation of any law.”

Prosecution for some of those Planned Parenthood illegal late-term abortions in 2003 are still headed for trial. Unfortunately, it was only last fall that the current prosecutor of the suit discovered that crucial state evidence to secure convictions had been shredded by the Sebelius’ administration in 2005 and by her hand-picked attorney general in 2009.

Kline had to press the state supreme court justices to step aside from judging his appeal; now he is exposing the bias of one appellate replacement.

This is “another disturbing revelation about the lack of neutrality in the Kansas disciplinary and judicial systems,” said Condit. “I cannot say that those controlling the Kansas disciplinary process are deliberately stacking the deck against Mr. Kline. I just cannot imagine how things would be any different if they were,” Condit said.

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Pro-life surge threatens pro-abortion Kansas Senators

The political season is upon us, even though Kansas is awaiting judge-drawn maps to determine voting district boundaries for state senators, reps, school board and U.S. Congressional seats.

There’s no way to predict how equitable the judge-drawn state district maps Kansas will be, but the fight to retain pro-abortion Senatorial power played heavily into this situation.

Certain Republican Kansas Senators (whom the media calls “moderates”) have been trying to escape announced challenges from conservative, pro-life opponents.  They hoped to create contorted boundaries for their districts that would exclude their challengers in the face of the the growing strength of the Kansas pro-life electorate.

In the stories covering redistricting, the media groans that Kansas Republican conservative lawmakers want “moderates” eliminated, but the same media remained undisturbed by years of bare-knuckle politics against pro-life Senators from these moderates.

 Pro-life bills were prevented from getting hearings in the Kansas Senate because GOP moderates loaded all committees relevant to abortion with a pro-abortion majority and a pro-abortion committee chair.

To retain their pro-abortion voting block in the redistricting situation, moderates joined with Democrat Senators (all but one of whom is pro-abortion). In the past, both groups were supported for re-election with abortion-funding,

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KS abortionist Neuhaus revocation hits procedural snag

A final ruling on the long-sought revocation of Kansas abortionist Ann Kristen (Kris) Neuhaus has been delayed until the next meeting of the state Board of Healing Arts in mid-June.

The Associated Press reported Friday that Board President Gary Counselman said Board members were “very uncomfortable proceeding at this point,” because members didn’t receive copies of 70 pages of previously submitted legal arguments from Neuhaus’ attorneys until Thursday afternoon. They wanted more time to review them.

The petition to revoke, filed in April of 2010, “accuses Neuhaus of negligence in conducting mental health exams for 11 patients, ages 10 to 18, who terminated pregnancies from July to November 2003,” according to the Associated Press’s John Hanna.

“Neuhaus diagnosed the patients with acute anxiety, acute stress or single episodes of major depression, concluding their conditions met requirements in Kansas law for late-term abortions.” However, state law required independent referrals to verify that such abortions were obtained only to prevent the death of, or irreversible and substantial injury to, the mother.

All the 11 young women were in their sixth or seventh month of pregnancy when they met with Neuhaus at the Tiller facility.  Neuhaus was never trained as a psychiatric consultant, and ended up utilizing an online ‘answer tree.’

Evidence from the patient files repeatedly indicated such diagnoses were logged in and completed within 2 to 3 minutes.

Thus the teens were

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Unsealed: Planned Parenthood special requests for jury trial

The stakes are high for Planned Parenthood of Kansas Mid-Missouri, as the prosecution for allegedly illegal late term abortions in 2003 inches closer to trial under Judge Stephen Tatum. After years of fits and starts, and with a July 11 scheduling hearing, the judge has still not confirmed whether there will actually be any trial.

Steve Howe, the District Attorney for the Kansas-City suburban district of Johnson County, is pursuing 58 of 107 criminal charges initiated by Howe’s predecessor, Phill Kline.  In November, the prosecution had to abandon 49 charges, including felony false-writings (forged patient forms), when it was discovered that both the Kansas health department (under Gov. Sebelius) and the Attorney General’s office (under Steve Six) had shredded paper evidence crucial for conviction.

The charges remaining are 29 counts for “unlawful failure to determine gestational age” and 29 counts of “unlawful late-term abortions”. On Tuesday, seven filings by Planned Parenthood attorneys were “unsealed” (made publicly available) and include

pre-trial special requests by Planned Parenthood attorneys for extensive written jury questionnaires, with special one-on-one closed door interviews with potential jurors.

While technically permissible to poll jurors on their fitness to serve (i.e. citizenship, ties to litigators or their own criminal record) this specific request –if granted– would prevent the public from hearing in open court how Planned Parenthood attorneys ask invasive questions including (according to the filing)

the juror’s “religious” concerns and “personal, as well as family members and close friends’ experiences with abortion”!

Planned Parenthood attorneys also

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Revoked KS abortionist “recycles” abortion patient files

Krishna Rajanna

Yesterday it was revealed that disgraced Kansas City abortionist Krishna Rajanna had thrown, into a school recycling bin, abortion patient records with extensive personal-identifying information while those files were still legally required to be retained and protected. (See KC Star here and here)

Rajanna was a failed surgical internist who came to do abortions at the Aid for Women Clinic in the inner-city area of Kansas City, Kansas. Following wage disputes with abortionist co-owners Malcolm Knarr and Sherman Zaremski, Rajanna opened his own “Affordable Abortions” competing clinic just three blocks away from Aid for Women.

In 2003, after former governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill to regulate abortion facilities, one of Rajanna’s staff secretly took photos of the clinic’s outrageous sanitation and safety violations. Open drug syringes and fetal parts were stored in the staff lunch refrigerator. Patient records were in open boxes on the floor in the kitchen. Two police officers, who were called to the clinic for a robbery report, refused to sit in the roach-infested clinic. (See photos here and related posts here, here and here.)

The local District Attorney could not get the state Board of Healing Arts to inspect the clinic premises, even though the Board had already privately issued disciplinary sanctions against Rajanna,

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Former & wannabe abortionists their own worst enemy

Mila Means (LATimes photo)

Some recent pro-abortion media entries (see here and here), along with a piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, bemoan the alleged “hounding” of Mila Means, a would-be Kansas abortionist, and Kris Neuhaus, an ex-abortionist facing the imminent loss of her medical license. Collectively, the accounts blame a pro-life governor and pro-life bills (which are conveniently mischaracterized), in the process ignoring that both women have a disciplinary history with the state Healing Arts Board.

According to Times reporter Jenny Deam, in the summer of 2010, “Means began going each weekend to Kansas City, Kan., to learn first trimester abortion procedure.”  For $20,000 she bought out the equipment of another abortionist “which cut deeply into her practice’s meager budget.” So, according to the story, why is Means not doing abortions? “It’s the lawmakers who now prove to be her most daunting opponent,” Deam writes. “She says she doesn’t dare go forward now. So she waits.”

Really? No.

In fact, there is no practical barrier to opening an abortion business in Kansas. State health department rules for abortion clinics developed in 2011–while attained by Planned Parenthood– were successfully enjoined

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