TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas’ top court wrestled Thursday with whether it can mandate new, separate sentencings for two brothers facing execution for four notorious slayings that became known as “the Wichita massacre.”
Jonathan and Reginald Carr had a joint trial and sentencing hearing over dozens of crimes in Wichita in December 2000 that ended with three men and a woman shot to death in a snow-covered soccer field. The crimes were among the most notorious in the state since the 1959 slayings of a western Kansas family that inspired Truman Capote’s book “In Cold Blood.”
This is the second time the Kansas court is considering whether the brothers — who turned on each other at trial — should have been sentenced separately. The court in 2014 listed their being tried and sentenced together as among the most serious flaws that made the court proceedings so unfair that the men should be re-sentenced, but the U.S. Supreme Court ordered another review.
