photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

DA candidates Dakota Loomis, left, a Democrat, and Mike Warner, a Republican, attend a forum Sept. 30, 2024, at the Lawrence Public Library.

The two men competing to be the next district attorney for Douglas County have both been highly critical of the outgoing one-term DA, citing high turnover in the office, poor outcomes in the courtroom and damaged relationships with police and judges, among other issues. Each candidate has downplayed the role of partisan politics in his own campaign and has characterized his run as an attempt — a calling, almost — to right a ship that has gone badly off course. With all of that in common, each has also tried to make the case that his type of experience is the best type to lead the DA’s Office into the future.

photo by: Contributed

Mike Warner

The career prosecutor

Republican Mike Warner — in multiple forums, interviews and campaign materials — has argued that his nearly 40 years of legal experience, 30 as a prosecutor, have ideally suited him to take the reins from outgoing DA Suzanne Valdez.

At 71, he says that he has the courtroom know-how to prosecute “every type of crime,” and he also claims to have experience training attorneys and fixing prosecutor offices that have become “dysfunctional” through over-politicization, underperformance and other ills.

Warner, who has a wife, two adult children, three stepchildren, an 8-year-old grandson and “three very domineering older pets,” says he had decided to retire but was “drafted” to run by law enforcement personnel who desperately wanted a change in the DA’s Office, which had developed a contentious relationship with police and judges, culminating in a disciplinary procedure against Valdez in which a state panel has recommended censure.

The biggest change that Warner would immediately bring to the DA’s Office, he says, is a competence rooted in hands-on experience, citing his 15 years as a state prosecutor in various Kansas counties and 15 years as a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Missouri and the District of Kansas.

Warner has described Valdez, a former University of Kansas law professor, as an academic who, despite good intentions, was ill-prepared for the real-life courtroom.

That’s not a knock on academia, a profession that Warner at one time pursued.

“I had intended to be a college professor,” he told the Journal-World. “I got a master’s degree and was working on a doctorate, and I actually taught (economics) at some small liberal arts colleges for a few years” before the prospect of being in a PhD program for years on end became unappetizing and the “real world” beckoned.

That’s when Warner, who was raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and attended UMKC, applied to Washburn University’s law school and acquired a taste for the trenches of trial practice.

“I had no desire to be an office lawyer or a research attorney,” he said. His desire was for the courtroom — a desire he still has, as he has vowed that, if elected, he intends to personally be in front of juries and judges regularly and will take the lead in mentoring assistant DAs.

“Prosecutors want to work for a prosecutor,” he said at a recent forum, “not an administrator,” and definitely not a politician.

Warner is well aware that running as a Republican in Douglas County, where he has lived for 35 years, is challenging. A Republican hasn’t held the DA’s Office since Christine Kenney was defeated by Democrat Charles Branson 20 years ago. Warner has made a point of identifying as a moderate in the mold of Bob Dole and Dwight Eisenhower and distancing himself from high-drama “extremists” like Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and former President Donald Trump.

“I like the old Republican values … where you worked with the other side, you were concerned with public safety, fiscal transparency, good government — not intrusive government — and that sort of stuff,” he says.

He sees the DA’s position not as a political occupation, though, but as a “law enforcement job” that is primarily about keeping the community safe.

“I’m not just a law-and-order guy,” he says, noting that he has also worked many years as a defense attorney. “I also believe in alternative dispositions and reformation-oriented alternatives (like the specialty drug and mental health courts — and some others that he would like to see added, such as domestic violence and veterans courts). “But we’re just going to have to start with the basics.”

The turnover among assistant DAs (cited in disciplinary procedures against Valdez) and a consequent lack of training and experience have harmed the community, Warner says.

“The defense bar is feasting off the fire sale that’s going on right now down there,” he says of what he regards as troubling plea deals, dismissals, inappropriately charged cases and guns that “magically disappear,” referring to plea agreements to ignore that a crime was committed with a firearm. “We’ve got to turn that around.”

Warner has said that his opponent, Dakota Loomis, whom he has repeatedly bashed for wanting to lead the office while never having prosecuted a felony case, is the preferred choice of local defense attorneys because “they want one of their own in office.”

“The last thing defense attorneys want is an experienced, independent DA,” he says.

One of Warner’s other main goals is to give voters a real choice. Valdez, he has noted, was elected in 2020 with only 7,500 votes in the Democratic primary. Because no Republican ran that year, the race was finished three months before the general election even occurred, with no one except a fraction of Democrats having had a say.

“I believe county voters are tired of arrogant single-party control,” he says.

photo by: Contributed

Dakota Loomis

Longtime local expertise

Since he filed to run for DA last spring, Democrat Dakota Loomis has been arguing that a big change is needed in the county’s top law enforcement office, which he said had lost its reputation for professionalism in the last four years and, hence, the public’s trust.

Loomis, 44, set that big change vividly in motion two months ago when he unseated fellow Democrat Valdez in a landslide primary election that may also have set a campaign-finance record as he amassed over $70,000 in contributions. Now he’s facing Warner in the general election in November, in a race where the two have offered many of the same diagnoses of the DA’s Office but a different cure.

Like Warner, he has painted himself as a reluctant candidate with no higher political aspirations — someone who has been “recruited” by cops, community partners and his own conscience to steer a new course for the embattled office.

For Loomis, the cure is using his longtime familiarity with the local justice system to “stabilize” the office and help the community be more like the safer environment he knew as a kid.

Loomis grew up in Lawrence, the only child of Burdett and Michel Loomis. Burdett, who died in 2021, was a KU political science professor and a big name in state Democratic circles. Michel was Dakota’s gym and English teacher at Central Junior High.

“She would yell at me to sprint faster while getting past participles correct,” he says, and now — further evidence of her toughness — she does pull-ups and pushups with chains on her back.

It’s always good for your character when your nearly 80-year-old mother is “stronger than you,” he says of the woman he calls his biggest fan and also his biggest critic.

Loomis attended Carleton College in Minnesota and law school at New York University before returning to his hometown, where he lives with his wife and two young daughters. He has been practicing law for 15 years, primarily as a defense attorney, but also briefly as the deputy chief of staff in the Shawnee County DA’s Office, where he charged domestic violence cases, prosecuted cases and developed office policies and procedures, he says.

He is also currently the prosecutor for Baldwin City and is the defense attorney for the Douglas County Drug Court.

He has described his experience as “local, relevant and recent,” in distinguishing it from Warner’s.

“There has been lots of noise about experience during this election and rightfully so,” he told the Journal-World. “The choice for voters is between my Republican opponent and his decades-old experience in Missouri, the federal system, and Johnson County versus my current, extensive criminal litigation experience here in Douglas County.”

Loomis has said that while it’s true that he has not worked a felony case from the prosecutor’s side, he has handled around 500 felony cases as a defense attorney and is in the local courthouse daily. He sees his “intimate familiarity” with the court, the DA’s Office, law enforcement and community partners as giving him a distinct edge.

Loomis has also said that the DA’s Office is not going to be stabilized overnight, or even in a couple of years. It’s clear that community relationships need to be rebuilt and strong prosecutors need to be recruited and retained, he says, but seeing where exactly “all the fissures are” in the office is going to take time and careful administration.

Though Warner has said he would serve more than one term “if needed,” Loomis has criticized him as “treating this position as a short-term retirement hobby.”

“I am committed to working as long as it takes to repair the District Attorney’s Office,” Loomis says, predicting that that could take a decade or longer.

The first step in stabilizing the office, he says, will be making sure that cases are being prosecuted correctly “and making sure we’re getting back on track to hold folks accountable who need to be and get folks help who need to get help.”

The latter not only includes working with community partners, like mental health and addiction agencies, to combat recidivism, but to also help young people get the resources that might deter them from crime in the first place.

Like Warner, Loomis wants to put resources toward the most serious offenses, like gun violence and sexual assault, and to center victims of violent crimes and give them a stronger voice.

Though no result in the legal system is ever going to make everyone happy, he says, it’s important that all parties understand how a decision came about and to feel as if they were listened to.

“I think a lot of this just comes down to procedural fairness,” he says.

If you’d like more information about the DA’s race, you can read about candidate forums covered by the Journal-World on Sept. 24, Sept. 30 and Oct. 6.