Sherman Smith
speaker
1,886 appearances
17 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 21 Sep
Sherman Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And it came to a head in a hearing where uh you know this Kansas Supreme Court had to appoint a new retired judge to take over this case, this capital murder case, because the judge who had been working on it had to recuse himself because of communications with uh the boss of the the two attorneys who were complaining, the whole thing gets crazy.
voice-verified
And this this judge who took it over just said, you know
voice-verified
This whole situation suggests that this agency shouldn't exist.
voice-verified
There are inherent conflicts of interests and within this agency.
voice-verified
You know, one of the responsibilities is somebody would have represented this client through the the trial, the conviction, and so on.
voice-verified
Somebody else who works down the hall from that person now has to come in as part of the appeal and say, well, actually, my
voice-verified
colleague was really bad at his job and that's why you should give him a new trial.
voice-verified
And it's really hard to do that if you and your colleague are both working for the same boss.
voice-verified
So those are the kind of problems that this it really exposed.
voice-verified
And it's all complicated of course by decades of severe underfunding by the legislature.
voice-verified
You know, months before this came to a head and I was reporting on it, the the leader of this agency, a longtime leader, quit the job running the agency because of the funding cuts.
voice-verified
And she said then that they are headed for a constitutional crisis.
voice-verified
You know, one of the challenges is they are so overworked.
voice-verified
Uh they they have to handle so many cases with so few people that at some point they have to go to the judge and say, I can't take any more cases.
voice-verified
you have to let these people go.
voice-verified
You know, you could have people who one hundred percent committed these crimes walking free because we are n unwilling to pay for them to have an attorney.
voice-verified
That's right.
voice-verified
I mean this past session, uh when the former leader said, uh, this is how many more millions I need, they responded by cutting your budget two percent.
voice-verified
Yeah, the lack of funding I think is absolutely at the root of it.
voice-verified
Showing 1481–1500 of 1,886 · page 75 of 95
← Previous
Next →