Theatre Lawrence is opening its new season Friday with a musical that explores the lives of Black women and, along the way, delves into an array of divides – Black/white, rural/urban, North/South, young/old, shame/pride. “Crowns,” as director Annette Billings says, “is a very celebratory play, and I think it fits so well in our current times of lots of personal and professional and (national) ...
The special prosecutor in a disciplinary case against Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez is objecting to Valdez's motion that the attorney for the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys be recused, and she characterizes many of Valdez's assertions in the matter as inaccurate. Valdez's attorney, Stephen Angermayer, filed a motion to have the board attorney, Krystal Vokins, recused based on ...
Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez is requesting that the counsel to the Kansas Board for Discipline of Attorneys be recused from matters involving a complaint filed by a special prosecutor against Valdez, due to the counsel's having a "direct conflict" of interest. Valdez's motion, filed Wednesday but not released to the Journal-World until Friday, was in response to an order last week from the ...
A relative of a 14-year-old Black boy who was allegedly killed by a 17-year-old white boy in Lawrence is calling for the FBI to investigate and for the case to be tried as a federal hate crime. Michael Berry, a cousin of the late Kamarjay Shaw, has addressed a letter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Kansas, Kate E. Brubacher, requesting that Derrick Del Reed, now 18 and facing a first-degree murder ...
Last winter, as four pre-teen girls at Lawrence’s Liberty Memorial Central Middle School were discussing a man calling and sending them messages on Snapchat, a teacher happened to overhear them and alerted the school resource officer. That overheard conversation — about naked pictures and obscene solicitation to 11- and 12-year-olds — led to an investigation of a 43-year-old Lawrence man, which turned up ...
The Douglas County district attorney appears to have changed her explanation about why rape survivors weren't notified about their rapist potentially getting out of prison decades earlier than they expected. The DA, Suzanne Valdez, is now saying that one of her former employees, attorney Eve Kemple, agreed to the motion that resulted in the substantial sentence reduction without notifying the victims or ...