Rape victim’s murder jury foreman was just 18: ‘I’ve grown some humanity since then’

And no, jurors did not see her as fighting back against an abuser.

“Not at all,” he said. The terrible abuse she’d suffered as a child “was brought up, but to solidify the idea that that trauma” in her childhood “had developed a mental illness, not necessarily that she was still going through said traumas.”

‘MORE SAD THAN HEATED’ IN JURY ROOM

There was one female juror who’d had a loved one in an abusive situation, and “I feel like she had the most clear view of what was going on in this case,” though the dots were never really connected in the courtroom. “Looking back, we needed more of her on that jury. She was probably the one to bring up everything that was correct and the right way of looking at it. But there were so many of us on the jury who just thought that we had to find the evidence true” if she’d killed him, and she had.

“That’s literally the phrase we always kept coming back to. Not to say we were trying to weigh down the people who were saying things like, ‘Maybe she went through a lot,’ but the ones on the guilty side were like, ‘That’s not the question.’ We just blanket statement said that it’s not a question of why she did it, it’s a question of if she did it. Which makes me feel pretty terrible today.”

No one ever used the word “rape” in the jury room, either, that he remembers.

“Looking back now, it’s very obvious, definitely. Back then, I just felt something was off. It was definitely not organic,” a 17-year-old with a history of abuse and rape moving in with a 50-year-old. In retrospect, “the word ‘freedom’ makes a lot more sense. But it seems like everything worth talking about wasn’t discussed.”

It wasn’t “12 Angry Men,” in the jury room, either, he said. “It was more sad than heated. One of the dissenting jurors was bringing up her abuse in the past and trying to link that to things, which was kind of the correct way to do it, especially since it’s now fairly obvious that this was ongoing. But yet again, we were still at the point where we were like, ‘Hey, we’re not judging character, we’re flipping a yes or no.’ ‘’

The gory photos admitted into evidence, he said, weren’t much of a factor. “I wasn’t sitting there with popcorn.”

Neither was he wowed by the “mechanical” prosecution, led by then-District Attorney Charles Branson, who presented the defendant as killing for fun, and using a hunting knife rather than a gun to enhance her enjoyment.

But the defense, Wingert felt, just left her “underrepresented.”

“I’m no lawyer, I had maybe two months of college, but maybe he should have explained the why, or the circumstances, or something like that. Anything that was concrete.”

Wingert has thought about Sarah “in pockets” in the years since her trial. And maybe especially since they’re so close in age, he’s uncomfortably aware that “I get to do all these things” that aren’t possible for her. “Not that my life is glamorous, but I’m afforded a lot of freedom. Maybe if I’d had a different mindset back then, it wouldn’t be that way.”

NO SELF-DEFENSE ANGLE OFFERED TO JURY

Sasko, who owned several Cicis pizza restaurants in Lawrence and Topeka, did not come across as the “benefactor” that the prosecution described, he said. “Even then I thought, ‘Wow, this is sleazy.’ It was presented that he had this sort of fathership role to her, but that was like Swiss cheese. There were obvious holes in that. There was a power dynamic going there for sure.”

But then, there “was no self-defense angle” made available to jurors at the trial. “If it was presented as self-defense, I could see a not guilty. That makes a lot of sense. I couldn’t tell you if it would have changed the verdict then, but in today’s age I’m sure it would.”

And even though the jury did find her crime “heinous,” Wingert insists that he personally had no idea that meant she’d get a “hard 50,” and might never get out of prison: “We wanted a lax sentencing. Instead of just straight incarceration, behind bars, we wanted some sort of mental treatment.”

Which, of course, she doesn’t get in the women’s prison in Topeka.

More than a year after a hearing on whether Gonzales-McLinn should get a new trial, Judge Amy Hanley has yet to rule on whether Cornwell’s decision not to present a “battered woman’s defense” deprived her of adequate counsel.

Hanley also has yet to rule on whether he sufficiently explained a plea offer of a 25-year minimum sentence. She and her family say she never understood the offer, which they knew nothing about. At her hearing last February, Cornwell was asked whether he‘d left the final decision about whether or not to take the deal up to her, as required by law. “It’s kind of hard to have her make the final decision,” he answered, “because there’s four of her.”

The new Douglas County district attorney, Suzanne Valdez, has offered to file a motion that would reduce Gonzales-McLinn’s sentence from a “hard 50” to a “hard 25” minimum of 25 years in prison, according to her mother, Michelle Gonzales.

But it’s not clear that Hanley would approve such an agreement, which might not shorten Gonzales-McLinn’s time in prison by a single day. Accepting that deal would seem to preclude even the possibility of the new trial she deserves, in a world that hopefully has become at least a little more enlightened since 2015 about predators and victims who kill their attackers.

Wingert hopes that the woman he once considered “guilty, boom, done” does get a new day in court: “I think a reevaluation would be fantastic. A lot of things weren’t included that were pretty fundamental. It’s pretty unfair. If I were in that position, I’d be screaming.”