In a tumultuous legislative session, a police raid on a small town newspaper, pitched political battles over Medicaid expansion, and so much more. 2023 may not have seen a major election, but that was about the only news that didn't happen this past year in Kansas politics. I'm Clay wire stone Kansas reflector opinion editor. And this is a retrospective edition of the reflector podcast looking back at the top stories of 2023. I'm joined today by editor in chief Sherman Smith. Hello, Sherman. Happy New Year clear, indeed. And reporter Tim carpenter.
It's my honor and pleasure to be here.
Well, it's my honor and pleasure to be here with you. So let's go look back at the year that was Sherman starting with you and a story that happened August 11. in Marion, Kansas, you know,
I think this is by far our most read story since we launched three and a half years ago. For those of you who may have been living under a rock or have just forgotten over the past six months or so. The Marion County record was investigating a local restaurant owner who wanted to liquor license, they used a State Revenue Department of Revenue database to look up her driving record found some red flags in there and the police started investigating them for identity theft, and perhaps some other alleged wrongdoing for for this even though it was, you know, public records that they were looking up. And this led magistrates who authorized search warrants to raid the newsroom of the Marion County record as well as the publishers Home and the Home of US city council woman. So on the afternoon of August 11, we were all in the newsroom along with our colleagues, Rachel Mipro. And Sam Bailey, who was our intern at that time, got the email from Emily Bradbury, the Press Association who'd sent out word to everybody that there's a concerning situation in progress. And so I think we we basically dropped whatever we were doing that afternoon, and everybody put their attention to finding out what had happened and why it had happened. You know, I was working the phones, sim was digging through what the newspaper had reported in recent days and weeks, Rachel was looking through the social media postings of these characters, and Sam hit the road to go down there and actually get photo and video and quotes from people on the scene. And we're able to put together this the story that that really showed a an alarming attack on First Amendment rights. There's federal protections that specifically prohibit this situation, you're supposed to go to a judge convince them to sign a subpoena, make somebody come to court and present evidence there. Because there is a potential for for police to kind of weaponize this power against journalists that they don't like and to try to find unnamed sources, which is exactly what happened in this raid. What we've learned in more recent months is that the the Marion police chief didn't act alone he acted with cooperation from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Revenue. The State Fire Marshal's office had a an investigator who was part of the raid the local sheriff's office. And you know, it's clear that the DEA was involved in the lead up to this and there's some correspondence immediately after a few days after when this had blown up. A lot of people tried to distance themselves from having any culpability in this. And we're just kind of waiting now for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation which is taken over the the inquiry into all of this to release their findings.
Well on Sherman, it's important to note as well that there have been some consequences already from this police chief Gideon Cody in Marion is no longer police chief in Marion. He stepped down. Yeah,
he resigned after Kansas City TV reporter Jessica McMaster I obtained text messages where he was telling the restaurant owner to delete their their text exchanges before authorities could review them.
And I believe as well the city manager has resigned. Yeah, Brogan
Jones has stepped down as well. It was a
really remarkable month or two there. And in August and September this this became a story. You know, not just in Kansas, but really in the you know, in the country and world. There were there were stories pretty much everywhere. And I don't think, you know, I'd certainly never seen anything quite like it.
No, there was, you know, a national watchdog group Committee to Protect Journalists who send somebody for the first time to the scene within the United States. You know, usually they go to another country where this kind of thing happens. It was shocking to do it here.
So I just stem and I just want to add, I think there's this is going to be a drawn out issue because there's going to be a bundle of lawsuits that are that are going to be filed, and we'll go to court in regards to what people have done here. I can't help just from, you know, an outsider's perspective can't help but feel like it's just like, some folks involved in this in law enforcement. And otherwise, he's kept reaching into a bag of bad ideas and pulling out another one. You know,
it is shocking that nobody anywhere in the lead up to this said, you know, maybe maybe we should think twice about what we're about to do here. Yeah,
the locals don't like the newspaper. But maybe this is a warning, you can serve as a warning to public officials about what not to do when they're in power and irritated with the local journalists, a local newspaper or local radio station.
And but you know, I'll also make make a point. And I think if if the reflector can really claim anything in this whole situation, it's that we reported it early and loudly. And, you know, I wrote an and with a real understanding of what the stakes were, I mean, I wrote a number of columns about this. I mean, we from the very beginning saw, I think, how important this was. And I think making taking that stand early and reporting it in that context earlier that this was an outrageous assault on free speech, hopefully made a difference in the way that other people saw and then pursued the story. We
of course, benefited from the Press Association, immediately recognizing the seriousness of this and alerting numbers. And also the publisher, the Marion County record, Eric Meyer being open and willing to talk about this and having the kind of intellectual authority to talk about what happened. Yes, we
I mean, there have been some other situations later this year, there was a there were a couple of arrests of journalists in Alabama, for instance, where for other various reasons, the folks were not as willing to talk quite as openly about what was going on. And it just meant that there was was less coverage. Yeah. So, Tim, turning to you now look at let's look back to the 2023 Kansas legislative session, nearly a year ago now, at least for when it started. For you as someone who was in the State House nearly every day during the session, what were the top few takeaways for you?
So obviously, there's hundreds of excuse me bills introduced every year, but not a lot of them gain enough traction to actually get passed. But let's narrow this down and follow some of the money maybe look at a few issues that really seem to fire up the conservative base and the Liberals as well. When they get debated in the Capitol. Let's start with taxes. The Republican leadership in the House and Senate were huge advocates of a piece of legislation that would have created a flat individual income tax of 5.1%. And it would have cut state revenue will say $300 million a year. But what was controversial about it well, and probably the reason governor, Laura Kelly vetoed it was that a lot of the benefit went to wealthy individuals. And I think these are rough numbers. But if you made over $250,000 a year, you might get $250 a month in benefits. But if you made $75,000 a year, you might get $8 a month and benefits. So So I think clearly this is a income tax reform that was structured to benefit the wealthy. When it could be argued that maybe the lower income people are the individuals that really need substantive help. Laura Kelly proposed something like an $800 million, one time rebate, that might have been $450 a person and the Democrats kept talking about their objections to property taxes, which, which I think if you polled Kansans, they would say their number one concern is property tax, you know, residential property tax rates, not the income tax.
You know, the Democrats have have seized on this going into the new session as well, they they've proposed a massive property tax package to reduce that burden for people. And they make the point that with the flat tax, it was structured so that 43% of the tax cut went to the top 3% of wage earners. Yeah,
they. So some of the stuff, you know, this flat tax is coming back, the senate president Ty Masterson said it's among his top priorities, so they're gonna push it again. And I think they may be close to getting what they need for a veto override. But Kelly will remain adamantly opposed to this. She says she's unmovable on this subject and clear really will veto it again. So, you know, you can pass a bill with 63 votes in the house 21 In the Senate, but you need two thirds majorities of the legislative body to override the governor. And she's she's hanging by our fingernails on some of those vetoes to avoid that two thirds blowback there,
they're looking at a two or $3 billion surplus. And so I think there's tremendous pressure to do something with tax cuts, predict, I think we can predict that the the flat tax will be packaged with a lot of other things that people really do want to try to make it in
this bill that the flat tax bill had, you know, a little bit of side benefits or something $40 million residential property tax reductions, $40 million in reduction in corporate tax, and it would have ended the state sales tax on food on January 1, when in fact, the current law doesn't completely phase that out for another year.
Well, and I think it's really important, just as a side note, whenever you start talking about taxes, and cutting taxes, and all of this, that, because you're taking revenue that otherwise, you know, would just extend into perpetuity, right? You, it has big knock on effects that keep going down. And so when people say it's like, oh, it's only so much this year, or whatever, you're really talking about, you know, in an extended period, and it can, and this is, of course, one of the reasons why Laura Kelly is concerned about doing something like a flat tax, you know, talking about former governor Sam Brownback tax experiment and whatnot, you know, a few billion here, a few billion there, you know, use it pretty soon, you're talking about real money. And
I think the Republicans want to reward their wealthy donors who want income tax cuts. And if you reduce revenue, and this massive multibillion dollar surplus at Kansas, you know, shrink that back down through tax cuts, you can maybe get to a point where you got to squeeze the budget and maybe get some cuts in areas that you otherwise might not achieve. There's another issue here that I think was took a lot of oxygen out of the room. And that was essentially transgender rights. And you're thinking about what is said and what is printed on driver's license, identification cards, birth certificates, screening big controversy in the statehouse in the last session. And, you know, there's a wide political gap on this issue. There's people that believe that if you're transgender, for example, if your those documents should reflect the gender or sex at birth, and there's many other people who believe that those documents should reflect the identity of that person at the time the document was issued. And the trouble here is that people have been have had driver's license or birth certificates modified in recent years, and this has thrown the brake switch on that. And it's, it's hugely litigated. And it's something that will continue in the courts and probably will percolate back up into the legislative session. But this is one of those things where the Conservatives push this agenda, and it fires up their base, it gets them out in the street, they want to protest about and they want to go vote. And I don't know consequentially how many people it's really applying to, it's got to be very small numbers. You know, you got millions of people in Kansas, and maybe 1000s, actually affected by these kinds of changes who want to change their driver's license, for example. But it's something about their well being their identity. And it causes all kinds of problems. If you're going to switch back and forth like this, imagine trying to fly in an airplane, where you have an ID that says that has your gender wrong, your photograph looks messed up, if you're if you're supposed to be a male, you know, it's just very complicated. You
know, they, they were finally able to ban transgender athletes in school sports. And I think that's a policy that affects maybe one or two students in any given year across Kansas, and public schools. But, you know, I think there's a lot of confusion from the general public, but certainly among lawmakers about the distinction between sex and gender sexes, assigned at birth based on biological characteristics, gender is a social identity social constructs are an expression of yourself. And I think that, you know, there's a an intentional blurring of the lines between these two ideas. And I think to clear, I don't know that many lawmakers, least not the Republicans are pushing this. I don't know if they understand what it means to be transgender.
No, I was going to say I think, you know, you're talking about the difference between sex and gender. But I mean, I think there's even more basic concepts here such as I don't know that lawmakers understand the difference between a transgender person who is someone who, you know, believes that that is, you know, that they have a gender identity and a self that is different than how they may have been Born, they don't know the difference between that and someone who's a drag queen, like literally someone who just puts on the clothes of the other gender as an entertainment, you know, to entertain an audience for maybe an hour in an evening, and then goes, you know, and then stops being an entertainer, like these some of these these things, I mean, these things are have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. But they've been kind of conflated in the conservative discourse somewhat. And I think if you actually sat down some of these people and said, No, look, this is actually what it means to be a transgender person. This is how a transgender person lives, they might be rather surprised. There are also
intersex Kansans, who are effectively erased by some of these laws. And then, you know, advocates for the LGBTQ plus community will say that there's a very small percentage of Kansans, who might be intersex, but it happens to be the same percentage of people who have red hair. So if you think about that, it's it's a little more significance. And I think also, there's this idea that the the average Kansan doesn't know what it means to be transgender. I've heard advocates say that they shouldn't have to, no, they shouldn't have to have hard opinions about what it means to be transgender. But this is being used for political leverage. And
the legislature passed the so called women's Bill of Rights, and it a lot of fanfare about that, but it actually had no enforcement mechanism about these identification markers that people are supposed to have. Maybe they're gonna come back next year and do something more substantive in regards to enforcing this, the legislature probably going to come back, they tried to ban gender affirming care for people under 18 and Kansas. And that didn't fly. So they may come back and try that as well. There's another issue that came up during the 2023 legislative session, and we'll be back is that there were a bunch of proponents of issuing what you could just generally call vouchers or scholarships, or what have you, that would transfer hundreds of millions of dollars from Kansas K 12, public schools, to private schools. And, you know, the the arguments for it is that these individuals and public schools are not being properly served. And they need that, that private schools are better. But you know, the opponents would say it's grossly unfair to cherry pick students out of public schools and put them into private schools. And the fact is, a lot of the people that would benefit from these resources are kids that are already going to private school. So it's really people trying to throw a lot of tax dollars at parochial schools that maybe are struggling financially. But it's really also just a massive denunciation of the public school system. A system that is embedded in the Kansas constitution is constitutionally required to provide a suitable education to people. There's no constitutional provision about private schools. So there's a lot of conflict about this issue. And I think it'll come back soon.
You know, it's, it's always described as a school choice bill, but I thinking increasingly, people realize half the counties in Kansas don't have the private schools, there's no choice for students there. But also the cost of private school tuition would be prohibitive, even with this roughly $5,000. kickback from from the state. And so the forecast is that almost all of the money that was going to go into this voucher program would benefit students who are already in private school. And so there's there's not really a choice that is being given to anybody. It's just a way of benefiting private schools.
And I think Tim, you really you really hit on something about the support for parochial schools. I saw a story this morning, reported that folks associated with Leopold Leo A, or sorry, Leonard Leo, I think his name is a big guy in the Federalist Society and the right leaning legal movement. They are pushing a plan in Oklahoma that would essentially create the first publicly funded Catholic school be a a virtual school there that of course, flies in the year and flies in the face of decades of Supreme Court precedent. They're trying to create a test case here. But obviously, I think for a lot of people, this is the end game, which is the ability to send public tax dollars to religious institutions. So moving on, that was that was a relatively quick legislative session. All things considered. Soon after that session, Sherman Smith wrote a series for the reflector along with reporter Rachel nipro. She's wisely on break right now called church and state. And it served as a little bit of a wrap up of the session that also included some really fascinating details about discussions going on in the in the state. So Sherman, tell us a little bit about that.
You know, last year we've over the past year, we've kind of engaged in a number of townhall kind of forums across the state, we go out and talk to people and tell them about what we're doing and hear from them. We we went out to Hutchison in March, and came away with a secret audio recording of a conversation that Republican officials had had in Hutchison. This was a conversation led by Adam Peters, who was the Ellis County GOP chairman. But it's in Hutchison. And, you know, they're talking about their idea for forming a conservative sanctuary, which is basically as they say this, this idea of purging the state of anybody who disagrees with with their actually very fringe religious beliefs. These are, you know, some radical religious beliefs that at times, it's tinged with violence, the need to do whatever you have to do to keep God on your side. And yet, these ideas also closely aligned with so much of the legislation that we've seen, in recent years, and especially this past session, we've talked about a couple of these already, the attacks on the LGBTQ plus community, efforts to get money into private schools. And also just general attacks on what is being taught in public schools. We also saw, you know, just this outright rejection of racial injustice, the idea that it even exists, which has this kind of religious basis, and the idea, we're all descendants of Adam and Eve. So race doesn't exist. So it's just a distraction that absolves them of any wrongdoing. And then, of course, they would pivot from that in this secret recording into talking about very racist tropes. The other big issue that of course, was with reproductive health care. And, you know, we saw this during the legislative session, despite overwhelming rejection of a constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion in Kansas or led to abandoned abortion in Kansas. The legislature came back and continued its its assault on reproductive health care. We saw a lot of money going into these pregnancy centers and programming the just actively working to discourage women from choosing to have an abortion, we saw a couple of bills that are based on outright lies, one one being the reversal pill that you take the the abortion pill, and then you could take another pill to reverse that the science around this is very dubious, it doesn't actually work. And it actually causes harm to women. That's being challenged in court. There's also so called born alive bill, this absolutely false narrative that the infants that are being aborted, could live outside of the womb. And so if you try to abort the baby, and it survives, you have to keep it alive. It's something that just doesn't happen. But there are also a couple of other efforts here, there's a un recognized need to to address the shortage of gynecologist in Kansas to the legislature passed a program to provide some tuition assistance for medical students who want to become gynecologist and then attached a provision that would claw all that money back if they ever provided an abortion. There's also an attempt to block abortion providers from getting liability insurance. So though that that ended up not going through?
Well, and Sherman, I would say just from my perspective, as the opinion editor what's so shocking about kind of how this whole series started with this, this recording, made was the person who's speaking is a GOP chairman and Ellis County, and he is speaking to the Reno county Republicans. And they're also meeting in a church.
They're meeting in the church, their state legislators there. So it is
this this total fusion between you know, the party and you can't even say that it's fringe elements of the party, because this is literally the person who's the chairman of their county party talking to a meeting of another county party. And I think this was one of the reasons to why this this series actually gained quite a bit of notice when when you published and when we published it in the spring from other Kansas outlets because I don't think it's always been reported or quite grasped how extreme some of these these appendages of the state party have become.
Can I just say something about the state house? I've been going every day for Are you no more than 15 years and and if you go back to the early aughts, there might be a couple of legislators during the legislative session that might refer to Scripture. In their arguments for against legislation. It's much more common now. It's it's frequent. And I saw I think people instead of just kind of wearing religion in their heart and trying to blend that it's overt and out in public. I remember Governor Brownback used to say that, yeah, well, you know, the separation of church and state, not so great. But he really wanted to make religion, part of the dialogue in the statehouse. And so that goes back quite a ways. And so that kind of that kind of conversation is much more prominent. So it doesn't surprise me at all that out in the boondocks, you got some Republican leaders, saying it like it really is that that we want a religious state here. We're going to create a religious enclave in that era, particular area, central Kansas or maybe for the entire state. It
is pervasive in the statehouse. Now, where you have these competing morning prayer groups, among legislators, there's a prayer room. I think it's called a meditation room now, but I think everybody recognizes it as a prayer room. That you know, brown Beck's former spiritual advisors still roaming around the halls, going to caucus meetings, influencing votes, every session on the House and Senate floor starts with a prayer. I mean, in again, we hear legislators now more frequently saying things like, you know, owning a gun without paying for a registration fee, or, or a concealed concealed license is a God given rights. You know, we heard that come up. You know, I don't remember that from my very limited religious teachings. But we hear that those sorts of references more frequently.
So, Tim, pushing ahead, both in terms of this podcast, podcast and crowded chronologically, over the summer and fall, Governor, Laura Kelly, has been criss crossing the state advocating for Medicaid expansion, a plan she's been advocating for in one form or another for a while, but she seemed to really be turning up the volume and turning up the temperature a little bit about that. So, so explain a little bit about what's what's at stake here and why now?
Right, so a few years ago, the Kansas legislature approved a Medicaid expansion bill that was vetoed by Governor Brownback. And the House has has kicked the dirt clods around a little bit. But basically, since then, the Republican legislature has thrown the stop switch on this governor Laura Kelly has proposed Medicaid expansion five times I think, in come January, she's going to introduce a sixth version of that she's really interested in providing Medicaid to about 150,000 working adults and children. And it's our top legislative priority. And the conservatives will be diehards about this and oppose it. They they don't believe they call it welfare, and they don't believe it should be done. 40 states have done this. And it's not you don't see Medicaid expansion ever returning back because just think about the math of this. If 40 states have done it, at over 100 United States senators are living and working in states that have Medicaid expansion. You think those ad people, Republican or Democrat are going to stand up and vote to repeal that legislation? Don't think that's happening. And so, Governor, Laura Kelly has gone out on the road, she's gone to cities all over the state, she's tried to engage different groups, business groups, or health groups or agriculture groups, to try to highlight the reasons why some of those constituencies might embrace improvement of preventive and emergency health care for people living just above the poverty level in Kansas. It's a very hot political issue. And so we'll see what happens this year. I think she's tried Laura Kelly's tried just about everything else that she could think of. And so she went directly out out on the road to try to touch base with Republican legislators who would be willing to buck the leadership and vote to get a bill on Medicaid expansion on the floor and voted on, because that's principally the tactic of opposition. you bottle it up in committee. You don't let committee meetings have a pass out bills that could be amended by Medicaid expansion. So you actually have the last handful of years a bunch of health care bills that are pushed to the side and not adopted in Kansas simply because they want to stall Medicaid expansion. So It's a huge political issue. It touches a lot of things rural population, whether hospitals stay open or not possibly the economics of town Imagine, imagine you're you live in, in Oregon or thinking about moving back to where you grew up in rural Kansas. But you know, the closest hospital, you will raise family closest hospital could be an hour away. And so why would people do that? Of course they're not. And so there's there's access to health care as a key element of economic growth and expansion. And, you know, this is this is one avenue for improving that.
We explored this in a series of stories that really looked at, you know, the financial stakes for rural hospitals and the the burden that's being placed on county jails, I talked to a number of Kansans, who would be directly impacted by Medicaid expansion to better understand who they are, there's this kind of false narrative about it only benefiting so called Able bodied adults who choose not to work. Actually, the people who had benefits are primarily either self employed, small business owners or employees of small businesses who can't afford to provide insurance for them. Half of the people in the states do not get their insurance from their employer, currently, and, you know, many of them are sick, they have a very serious illness, they might be cancer patients, or have some other disease that prevents them from you know, going back to working and getting the money that they could use to buy insurance. And so that's what we're really talking about here. A lot
of this debate, frankly, reminds me of the national debate that folks had about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for many years, which was there was always this supposition on the part of Republicans that it's like, oh, we have this great replacement plan, this great thing that will replace Obamacare, and yet they never actually came out with anything. Because the problem the point is, is that the Affordable Care Act is a very complicated multi layer piece of legislation that really works to expand healthcare, and none of their replacements would actually achieve covering more people. Well, I think you see the same thing here in Kansas, when you have legislative leaders say Medicaid expansion isn't the answer, we have to do X, Y, and Z. But they've never actually proposed anything substantive that would address any of the issues that Medicaid expansion
or there's the the opponents of this have a tough time with some of the realities of Medicaid expansion, the federal government pays 90% of the cost, additional cost the state 10%. There's projections that this infusion of federal dollars, hundreds of millions of federal dollars a year would create 20,000 Something jobs, you know, there's real hospitals, what was the number, so like, about 60 rural hospitals in Kansas are in jeopardy of closing this, this would this money would flow into the health system and help rural hospitals with all that uncompensated care that people without health insurance bring to them, they if they get sick, they go to an ER, and that uncompensated care is something that Medicaid expansion would alleviate, because at least about 100 150,000, people would now have health insurance.
Well, and again, this is part of the whole the architecture of the Affordable Care Act. That's why Medicaid expansion exists and why we, you know, essentially, if you're very poor, you can get Medicaid. And then if you if you're essentially middle class, lower middle class, you can get subsidies for the Affordable Care Act plans. But Medicaid expansion was supposed to take care of everyone in kind of the middle there who were kind of lower income, but not as low low income enough to qualify for traditional Medicaid. And if you don't expand the program, those folks just go without they're just out of out of luck.
Politically, it's it's a strange issue, because this expansion would definitely benefit the constituents of rural Kansas Republican legislators, but a lot of them have consistently voted against it. And and I think the effort by Laura Kelly was to highlight that clash between what the constituents need Medicaid expansion by polling is popular in Kansas, that clash of idea about need, and the political issues that swirl around these Republicans in the Capitol, and to try to hold them accountable. And the question is, whether it was enough may not be.
Well, we'll we will see this upcoming session. So wrapping up today, we're going to talk a little bit about extra stories, things that we ran across that might not have made the, you know, barely half dozen things we've talked about so far in this podcast. I will just say I published a column in the reflector on Friday that talked about the top 10 opinion columns of the year, a few of the issues covered by those columns, I think were also things that people paid a lot of attention to this year such as governor, Kelly's botched unveiling of a license plate designed for Kansas that a lot of people didn't like, and then her subsequent effort to let people vote on a replacement. that that happened. Also, Taylor Swift became a fairly frequent visitor to Kansas City Chiefs games, since she started dating a player, we ran a number of columns about that, and people were paying attention to that as well, along with a single column that I wrote about which states made up the Midwest, and I will tell you people were very interested in defining where they came from. So Tim, and Sherman, what's what stuck out for you guys?
This last year. So there's, of course many issues, and even go to the capitol and pick any of 25 things to talk about on any given day. But one of the things that stuck with me is the conflict over among legislators and the governor, about special education funding, Kansas School Districts, the Kansas is supposed to contribute 92% of the extra spending required to deal with special education student needs. Kansas has the money to do about 70% of that, we'll say, and there have been all kinds of proposals from Laura Kelly, spend 80 something million dollars a year to bring that percentage up to the legally required level, the legislature continues to say no, both, mostly because I think they think they spend too much enough on public schools. They don't want to spend more. But they did throw a bone to this. And they added about $7 million for special education funding in the last session. And I don't know why Kansas just doesn't follow the law. And if they have the resources to do it, which they do, they could just follow the law and be a law abiding legislators. And so this this issue is just sticks with me because I don't understand why it's not resolved. And why it's more of a political issue than an education issue for children that have special needs. And so this will be again debated in 2024. And if they don't fix it, they it'll be debated in 2025, and 2026. Indeed, Sherman,
way back in January, I wrote about sir Gonzalez McGlinn says, I've Lawrence woman who, in a very brutal way, murdered a man who we now know, had relentlessly raped her for months on end. She had been since 250, was able to kind of negotiate that into a hard 25. But she have advocates now who are saying, you know, it's not fair that the jury wasn't allowed to hear about the abuse that she suffered leading up to this crime. There's no question that she committed this crime. But the question is, what should the sentence be? Should it be full 25 years? Should it be five years somewhere in between? They have asked Governor Laura Kelly to grant her clemency they filed that application about a year ago. And, you know, I think it's a way of elevating issues for for better understanding for the public, for law enforcement for judges about what's going on in these situations where somebody's being basically subjected to human trafficking, even if it's just one person with with one other person. But it also raises a question what, you know, what should the mitigating factors be in a homicide case in a murder case? We had an opportunity at the end of the year, one on one with with Governor Laura Kelly, some tried to ask her about this and very much got the next question, please trip and he said, you know, do you have a timeline for when you're going to make a decision? She said, No. Do you know what your decision is going to be it? No. Have you already said no, no. Next, you know, that was kind of the response. So we're still waiting to see how that plays out.
So Tim, and Sherman, thank you so much for coming in and talking about your the top stories of 2023. Before we end, I would also like to thank all of the Kansas reflector, listeners and readers who've stayed with us over this past year and we look forward to bringing you even more news and commentary in the year to come