photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World File

Shaleah N. Kauffman, left, is pictured with one of her attorneys, Anshul Banga, and Douglas County Judge Sally Pokorny on Tuesday, March 17, 2026.

After a four-day trial, a Douglas County jury on Friday acquitted a woman of five of the six charges she faced in a domestic abuse case.

Jurors convicted defendant Shaleah Kauffman only on one count of violation of a protective order, a misdemeanor. On the other five counts — aggravated domestic battery and domestic battery, both felonies, and endangering a child, theft and criminal damage, all misdemeanors — the jurors found her not guilty.

Kauffman’s former significant other had alleged that Kauffman violently assaulted him — while he was holding their 2-month-old daughter — after she came home from a night of drinking. He had also alleged that a month later she had physically attacked him, resulting in his ankle being broken. Additionally, he claimed that she had stolen his truck and damaged it and that she had contacted him when she was ordered by a judge not to. The latter is the only crime that the jury believed the state had proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Kauffman did not take the stand in her own defense. The man testified at length about the encounters, and the jury saw redacted videos of sheriff’s deputies interviewing each party at their rural Douglas County home.

The man repeatedly said that he wanted to keep their family together and did not want Kauffman to get in trouble but that he didn’t know how else to curb her violent tendencies other than by getting law enforcement involved. He also noted that it was unusual for a man to come forward as a victim of domestic violence.

Defense attorneys, though, had painted the man not as a victim, but as controlling and abusive, while they portrayed Kauffman as a fearful woman trapped in a toxic relationship.

The jury heard about the three DUIs on the man’s record and a case of domestic violence against him (not involving Kauffman) that was dismissed for lack of evidence. The mention of the domestic violence case brought a swift and loud objection from the state — one of numerous lengthy sidebars at Judge Carl Folsom’s bench out of hearing of the jury.

Defense attorney Razmi Tahirkheli implied to the jury that the dismissal of the man’s case was somehow improperly related to the state’s prosecution of Kauffman, and he had earlier attempted — unsuccessfully — to have the entire Douglas County District Attorney’s Office removed from trying the case.

At one point during his closing argument, which began by likening the case to Beowulf’s battle against sea monsters, he pointed to the prosecution side of the room and suggested that jurors should infer something untoward about people from the DA’s Office being in the gallery to watch — a phenomenon that is in fact common at jury trials in the county. His pointing to the gallery brought another vociferous objection from the prosecution, leading to another lengthy sidebar.

The jury did not hear that Kauffman has two previous convictions for domestic violence, one in 2019 and one in 2022. Nor did they hear about a theft conviction in 2025 in Johnson County. Previous convictions are generally inadmissible at trial if meant to show a defendant’s bad character or propensity to commit a crime.

The case was notable for the public resources it consumed, including at least five publicly funded attorneys conducting the four-day trial: three for the state and two for the defense, which also had at least two other court-appointed attorneys before the case got to trial.