Later this year, the United States Supreme Court will hear an appeal in a nearly decade-old quadruple murder case from Osage County.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt says the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal of James Kraig Kahler, who was convicted of capital murder in 2011 for killing his wife, two daughters and his wife’s grandmother in November 2009.
Last year, the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed both the conviction and resulting death penalty sentence in Kahler’s case. Kahler had raised 10 issues on appeal, including allegations of misconduct, challenges to jury instructions and the constitutionality argument regarding the death penalty for people with severe mental illnesses. The state high court said there were errors during trial, but the majority of justices said none of them affected the trial’s outcome and as a result those errors did not justify reversing either the verdict or sentence. The majority also reaffirmed the constitutionality of a state law that eliminated the insanity defense, instead letting jury members consider evidence of a person’s mental state only as a baseline as whether the person had the requisite mental state for the crime.
No court date has been set, although the appeal is expected this fall.
