photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Derrick Del Reed listens as the prosecution questions a witness at a hearing on Sept. 14, 2023, in Douglas County District Court. Reed is charged with first-degree murder in connection with the shooting death of 14-year-old Kamarjay Shaw.

Updated at 5:25 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 14

A Douglas County sheriff’s lieutenant testified Thursday in Douglas County District Court that multiple phone calls between attorneys and inmates in the county jail have been improperly recorded since February because of a mistake he made, and a murder defendant’s attorney brought to the court’s attention that a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office had been discussing the case online under a profane pseudonym.

The testimony came from Lt. David Hardy during a hearing for Derrick Del Reed, 18, of Lawrence. Reed is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Kamarjay Shaw, 14, on March 18 in the 1300 block of Maple Lane. Reed is scheduled to go to trial on the charge on Nov. 27.

Hardy testified that he is in charge of the call system, ICSolutions, at the jail and that he took over the duties in February. He said that when a person is booked into the jail, he enters their information into the call system, then later adds their attorney’s telephone numbers into the system, and on the registration page he marks the number as “privileged” and “no cost,” but he is also supposed to mark a box that says “do not record.”

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Lt. David Hardy with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office at a hearing for Derrick Del Reed on Sept. 14, 2023, in Douglas County District Court.

“That is where the mistake was made. I did not click ‘do not record,'” Hardy said.

The error was discovered when a witness coordinator with the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office, Michelle Walter, was listening to Reed’s calls on Aug. 30 in anticipation of an upcoming hearing, Walter said.

Hardy said that failure to mark the “do not record” box has been happening since he took over the position. He said that his training prior to being in charge of the system was day-to-day and that the need for the extra step to mark the box wasn’t in his training notes.

He testified that a review of the system revealed that seven attorneys, whose information he has entered in since February, have had their privileged calls recorded.

Chief Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Tatum asked Hardy how many of those privileged calls had been listened to.

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Jennifer Tatum questions a witness at a hearing for Derrick Del Reed on Sept. 14, 2023, in Douglas County District Court.

Hardy said that he knows of three calls that were listened to — two for Reed and one for another inmate — but that when he fixed the error in the telephone system for Reed’s attorney, Mark Hartman, he lost access to see if other recorded calls had been listened to.

Hardy said he reviewed the call logs for the other attorneys whose calls were recorded, before losing access, and he believes that those other privileged attorney-client calls were not listened to by anyone.

Walter testified that she was reviewing Reed’s calls as a standard procedure and that she had never heard a call between an inmate and an attorney. She said that she recognized Hartman’s voice from court and that as soon as she realized what she was listening to, she stopped the audio and informed Tatum, who then informed Hartman.

Walter said that she only heard Hartman getting into a car and Hartman telling Reed that he was surprised that Reed had called him so soon. Walter said that Reed had called Hartman two times previously on the day of the call.

Walter testified that she listened to at most a minute of the call before closing the audio and contacting Tatum. Hardy said that records showed that the call was 12 minutes long and that 16% of the call was listened to.

Another call from Reed was listened to on Aug. 19 by a former Douglas County corrections officer, Jacob Kallenbach, Hardy said. Kallenbach was scheduled to testify, but Hartman had a hearing in another jurisdiction and the Reed hearing was continued from Thursday to Sept. 18.

Prosecutor on Reddit

Before Hardy’s testimony, Hartman brought to the court’s attention that a prosecutor in the DA’s office had been engaging people on Reddit, which is a social news aggregation, content-rating and discussion website.

Hartman said that someone posted in the “Lawrence, Kansas, subreddit” a story published about Reed. He said a Reddit user responded to that post saying it was “abhorrent to try children as adults” to which another user replied “even for first degree murder?”

photo by: Chris Conde/Journal-World

Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden at a hearing for Derrick Del Reed on Sept. 14, 2023. Reed is charged with first degree murder in connection with the shooting death of 14-year-old Kamarjay Shaw.

Hartman said someone alerted him to the exchange and he was able to identify the user who responded — user name “Classy_Mother(expletive)” — as a member of the District Attorney’s Office.

“Classy” exchanged additional messages with other users defending the DA’s office and said that Reed turned 18 in July, as the court proceedings were just getting underway, Hartman said. “Classy” also said that if Reed were convicted as a juvenile, it would be like a “slap on the wrist.”

Another user commented that Reed’s parents should bear some of the blame, to which “Classy” responded “the parents’ negligence didn’t kill anyone, the kid did.”

Deputy District Attorney Joshua Seiden said that he has identified the prosecutor in question and that the office takes the messages seriously and is handling the situation internally. He said that the prosecutor does not have anything to do with the Reed case and does not have access to any of the case information. Seiden specified that the attorney in question wasn’t him or DA Suzanne Valdez or Tatum or Senior Assistant District Attorney Ricardo Leal.

Hartman did not ask the court for any remedy for the situation at this time and said that he would need to do more research on whether there was some sort of action that should be taken.

Reed is currently being held at the Douglas County Jail on a $500,000 bond.

Joint statement by DA and sheriff

Later Thursday afternoon, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office released a joint statement about the attorney-client recordings that said that the phone calls that were testified about were the only calls that were listened to by law enforcement or DA employees and that the sheriff’s office immediately began to remedy the situation.

“The Sheriff’s Office promptly instituted protective measures to remedy the situation for future calls and to prevent any further such instances, including blocking previously recorded calls from being accessed,” the release said.

The release specifies that the call Walter listened to is the only instance where a member of the DA’s office has listened to a recording of that kind.

Both offices are working to identify and contact the affected parties, and they said they had no reason to believe there was any malicious intent. The sheriff’s office is working with the DA’s office to conduct an audit of the system to ensure there are no additional errors, the statement said.

“There was a data-entry error, and we recognize we fell short of implementing safeguards of privileged conversations,” Sheriff Jay Armbrister said.

In a separate email to the Journal-World, sheriff’s office spokesperson George Diepenbrock said that the sheriff’s office staff initially “found seven different phone numbers from law offices tied to five attorneys — some attorneys used more than one number from their office — that should have been set to not record,” and later the office found “11 additional attorneys who should have had their numbers marked as not to record as well.”

“For all of those phone numbers, we have added the no-record setting going forward and blocked previously recorded calls from being accessed,” Diepenbrock said.