Richard Ney, ‘attorney for the damned’ in Kansas, will be sorely missed | Opinion

Richard Ney once gave me a book to read: “Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned.” It spoke powerfully about Darrow’s deeply emotional opposition to the death penalty. Darrow fought for clients as though he himself might find himself crammed into a suffocating pine box.

Ney, one of the state’s top defense attorneys and one of the few credentialed to handle federal death penalty cases, seemed to fight for his clients similarly.

His recent passing means that Kansas and justice has lost one of its most devoted defenders.

I learned about Richard when I managed a team of reporters who covered the police and the courts. Our court reporter mentioned how Richard had been a federal public defender in Hawaii. We met a few times. I remembered his bearing and the bass in his voice, but also his broad, bearded smile.

Years later, he had a client who had come to Kansas for school but hailed from South Central Los Angeles. The client sat in jail facing the death penalty. Ney visited him regularly but believed the youngster needed interaction with someone other than him. So Ney asked if I’d make weekly visits that the young man’s family could not.

That began my trips to the jail for Richard’s client. It also began my journey of getting to know someone I’d already come to admire.

I’m guessing Richard asked me to do the visits because he knew the case would take a while, and he cared about the young man’s mind and spirit. I think I’d only visited the jail one other time, but found myself there once or twice a week.

I never discussed the case with the client. I was there to help him feel human. We talked about his life in L.A., a place I’d grown familiar with as a kid and preteen, with my father and my sister living out there. He talked about sports. He was trying to maintain a long-distance relationship.

The more I learned about the young man, the more panicked I felt about him being killed, guilty or not. I already believed that our system had proven itself incapable of dispensing justice impartially. I had a sense for why Richard always seemed so serious and so resolute, and why he worked so hard.

That client owes Richard his life. Richard didn’t win an acquittal, but he got the death penalty taken off the table and the prison sentence pared way down.

Opened public defender’s office, worked to fight racism

According to his obituary, Richard came to Wichita in 1984 and launched the public defender’s office. He was the first Kansas lawyer to “successfully introduce testimony given under hypnosis while winning an acquittal for Bill Butterworth, charged with killing three people in a 1987 murder case.”

His office also was the first to successfully use the battered-woman defense in Sedgwick County.

He was instrumental in broadening the reach of jury selection beyond voter registration rolls and adding driver’s licenses. He saw almost daily how prosecutors regularly dismissed Black jurors and felt compelled to try to address the issue.

Richard had John Henry’s work ethic, even as modernity marveled at how this locomotive of a man chugged along in all his mundane and disciplined greatness. You knew you’d get his best effort and argument — and yet, he still impressed.

I wrote a series of columns about a stabbing death at a convenience store in which patrons walked around and stepped over the mortally wounded woman. One customer, police said, even paused above the woman and snapped a photo. Richard ended up representing the defendant.

Covering the trial, I thought while watching him work that he’d put up an amazing defense in such a case that had so much pretrial publicity. He really was something to see in court. The so-called “damned” had a zealous advocate in him.

He earned a degree in journalism from the vaunted Missouri School of Journalism, so in many ways, he and I marched in the same tribe — the journalism tribe, the one where we learn to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable while scouring landscapes for the best obtainable version of the truth. He went to law school only to become a better journalist, graduating from the Boston University School of Law and then working as an investigative reporter and editor before moving on to work in public defender offices in Illinois and Vermont.

Richard and his wife Judith had six children. In fact, one of his kids courageously confronted some other kids who bullied my son. I also remember considering moving to my current employer, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, and calling him to ask what he knew about the organization.

Sadly, as in many cases of loss, I had not realized all the ways our lives intersected until his passing.

Only a few months ago, our national office and our affiliate mounted an argument against the death penalty in district court in Wichita. A court observer recognized me from my visits to Richard’s office and shared that he was in the building. He was talking to one of the judges, and I might be able to catch him.

I lingered hoping to see him, but somehow I missed him that day.

I’m sure a lot of us will.

Mark McCormick is the former executive director of The Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. This commentary originally appeared in the nonprofit Kansas Reflector.