Topeka ? The deck was unfairly stacked against a Douglas County man who was labeled a “sexually violent predator” in a 2003 trial, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled Friday.

In a unanimous decision, the court granted 46-year-old Randy Foster a new trial on whether he should be committed to the state’s sexual predator treatment program at Larned State Hospital.

Foster, a former Lawrence area resident, has a history of numerous sexual assaults of girls as young as 2. In 2003, he had finished serving his prison time when Atty. Gen. Phill Kline’s office sought to have him indefinitely sent to Larned for treatment.

Kansas’ sexual predator law, implemented in the mid-1990s, was designed to treat sex offenders found by a jury to have a “mental abnormality or personal disorder” that made them likely to reoffend. But hardly anyone has graduated from the program, causing some critics to say the program is merely an expensive prison.

Randy Foster

Foster alleged on appeal that during his commitment trial before Judge Jack Murphy in Douglas County District Court, the prosecutor, Assistant Atty. Gen. Nola Wright, made inappropriate comments that prejudiced the jury. For example, Wright told the jury that Foster already had been deemed a predator in numerous evaluations and screenings, and that even the judge had found probable cause to go forward with the case.

The state Supreme Court agreed with Foster’s arguments and said he was entitled to a new trial.

“(W)e conclude that these statements by the State, and this type of State evidence, ‘stack the deck’ against Foster,” Justice Lawton Nuss wrote in the Supreme Court’s opinion.

The court also found that jurors were allowed to hear references to inadmissible polygraph evidence indicating Foster may have had contact with young children while on parole.