When Clinton Holman took the stand April 28, 2009, to testify at the federal courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas, he felt like his heart was going to stop.
Not only was he a witness in a federal drug case, but he knew his testimony would be a lie.
Holman had been in prison serving time on his own case when he was hauled to the courthouse in handcuffs and led into a small room with photos displayed on a whiteboard.
Here he was confronted by a federal prosecutor who, he says, pressured him to identify a woman from one of the photos. The prosecutor, Terra Morehead, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Kansas, wanted Holman to testify he had seen the woman at a drug deal — even though he never did. If he didn’t cooperate, she threatened, she could charge him too.
“She showed me pictures,” Holman told The Star. “‘This is such-and-such. I want you to point her out when you get on the stand.’”
When Morehead prosecuted this case, she was decades into a career now marred by numerous complaints that she threatened witnesses to secure perjured testimony and failed to turn over evidence to the defense. She has played central roles in some of the biggest recent legal scandals in Kansas City, Kansas, including the wrongful conviction of Lamonte McIntyre and the rampant eavesdropping on attorney-client phone calls at the private prison in Leavenworth.
On the witness stand, Holman identified Latysha Temple as the woman from the photos, implicating her as one of two dozen defendants indicted in a drug conspiracy. Temple went to prison for more than eight years, even though Holman and two other people from the case say she was innocent.
Temple, now free, maintains her innocence and joins the ranks of those accusing Morehead of railroading them on false testimony.
“She should never practice law again,” Temple, 48, said during an interview last month. “She should be held accountable.”
Holman told his story earlier this year, after finishing the prison sentence on his own case and moving to Texas. His is one of the most recent allegations against Morehead, and comes after the U.S. Attorney’s Office removed her from criminal prosecutions, reassigning her to civil cases.
Among more than 20 people familiar with Morehead who were interviewed by The Star, several said the prosecutor was carrying out hard-nosed policies set forth by the U.S. Department of Justice. Others said she has shown a pattern of unethical tactics that has devastated people’s lives and corrupted the justice system.
“I think that witnesses, I think defendants, families, all think that she is a bully and that she gets away with it,” said Carl Cornwell, a high-profile Kansas City defense attorney who has had many run-ins with Morehead over the years.
Reached for comment about Morehead, the allegations that she had coerced false testimony, and general questions about accountability for prosecutors, Scott Nace, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, declined to comment.
“We do not discuss personnel and their individual assignments within the office,” he said.
Morehead did not respond to an emailed request for an interview.
Several complaints have been filed against Morehead with the state ethics board. She has never been disciplined.
Moving Morehead off of criminal cases is considered a demotion but it is not real accountability, said Edward Bartlett, president of the Center for Prosecutor Integrity, a Maryland-based nonprofit.
“Being reassigned is clearly not a sanction in any meaningful sense,” he said. “A prosecutor who is misbehaving is a serious threat to justice.”
Prosecutors, Bartlett said, are the most powerful figures in the criminal justice system, tasked with considering charges, bond and plea deals. They are relied on to hand over crucial evidence to the defense.
Even civil attorneys at the federal level deal with regulations that can become criminal matters.
The accusations against Morehead are “hair-raising,” said David Sklansky, a Stanford Law professor and former federal prosecutor.
“The allegations that were made about this prosecutor are the kind of allegations that should raise questions about this person working for the government in civil or in criminal cases,” he said.
“If there’s reason to believe that this is a person who is threatening witnesses in order to secure testimony and then not disclosing that to the other parties and to the courts, that’s a serious problem on the civil side as well as on the criminal side.”
Operation Stonewalled
Before her arrest, Temple, a mother of five, had a happier life: attending her children’s school programs and football games, and managing X-ray storage for local health centers.
While she was being prosecuted, she lost her job and her home in Kansas City.
Temple was in a relationship with one of the defendants in the drug case, Monterial Wesley. But she says she never sold drugs.
She remains perplexed about how she got roped into the case and said she suspects prosecutors cast a wide net to get people to testify against each other.
“Terra Morehead — she had tunnel vision,” Temple said. “I don’t know if it was just about her with another notch on her belt of a win.”
A law enforcement officer who was the first to testify at the month-long trial said no drugs or money were found at Temple’s home.
Eric Jones, a Kansas City, Kansas, police officer assigned to a DEA task force, said the investigation was dubbed “Operation Stonewalled” after the street Wesley lived on in Leavenworth. Investigators set up undercover drug buys, wiretapped calls and put people under surveillance
That included Temple, who lived on the Missouri side of the state line miles from Stonewall Street.
“I do not think that Ms. Temple distributed narcotics,” Jones told jurors.
But Holman’s testimony suggested Temple was involved.
When he took the stand, he said there were a few times he met up with Wesley and Temple to drop off money used to purchase drugs. He said Wesley and Temple were in a white SUV.
Holman now says he had never seen Temple before Morehead showed him the photos at the courthouse. And even at trial, elements of his story did not match the facts.
Holman was jailed in February 2006 and stayed there.
The white SUV he claimed to have seen Temple in was not purchased until months later, in May 2006.
“Can you explain how she could have been driving that white SUV when she didn’t even purchase it until three months after your arrest?” Temple’s attorney asked on cross-examination.
“No,” Holman replied.
Even so, Temple was convicted of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute 50 grams or more of cocaine. She was sentenced to 12.5 years in federal lockup. She ended up serving 8.5 years.
Holman was released in July of last year after serving 15 years. Speaking from his home in Dallas, he said he was directed to lie.
“You’re going to get on there and destroy somebody because this is what (Morehead) wants you to do or she’s going to try to put you on the case,” he said. “It was like scary.”
“I think people like that, that take advantage of their federal power, they shouldn’t do that. She shouldn’t be there,” he said.
Of the 24 people who were indicted, 19 were sent to prison. One man was sentenced to life, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In April 2017, he was released after former President Barack Obama granted clemency.
Contacted by phone in prison, Wesley admitted that he sold drugs. But he and another co-defendant, Shevel Foy, maintain Temple was innocent.
Several other co-defendants said they were pressured to inflate the amount of drugs they trafficked, increasing the penalties, and two men said Morehead used their family situations to gain leverage over them.
Allicia McDaniel, whose husband Keith, 47, will remain in prison until September 2033, said transferring Morehead onto civil cases doesn’t go far enough.
“She’s not held accountable. She’s really the real criminal,” Allicia McDaniel said. “She does not need to be in the courthouse at all.”
Morehead’s history
In early 2019, Jay Giannukos discovered that Morehead had accessed recordings of three phone calls he made to his lawyer while awaiting trial at the private prison in Leavenworth.
For him, it was a violation of his rights: attorney-client communications are confidential.
Giannukos was ultimately convicted and sentenced to more than 26 years for possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute, illegally possessing a firearm and counterfeiting money.
But he does not believe he received a fair trial.
“How can you expect somebody, any of these defendants, to come in here and accept responsibility for the crimes that they did when you’re committing crimes to convict them — you’re lying, you’re cheating and you’re basically doing anything you can to convict somebody,” he said during a call from the Leavenworth prison.
Giannukos found out about the calls during a three-year investigation into eavesdropping on attorney-client phone calls at the prison.
A scathing order issued by U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson named Morehead 13 times, saying she failed to exclude phone numbers of attorneys on her requests for recordings of inmate calls, failed to respond to an email acknowledging documents related to the investigation should be preserved and failed to produce paper documents related to the calls.
Mike Warner, a Lawrence attorney who worked for the District of Kansas from 2010 to 2014, testified during a court hearing that Morehead and four other prosecutors were the most resistant to policies that addressed abusive discovery practices, abusive charging in drug cases and retaliatory sentencing enhancements.
He quit out of frustration with the office’s culture, which he described as “unbelievably difficult and out of control.”
During an interview last week, Warner said he observed prosecutors using discretionary tools “in the most draconian, most strident way,” and personalizing cases which turned them into “grudge matches.”
“What would be very nice to see and what that office needs is culture change and a U.S. attorney who has the courage to confront, expose and eradicate misconduct,” Warner said.
Last month, U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas Stephen McAllister stepped down, as is customary with a new administration. President Joe Biden’s administration will appoint new U.S. attorneys.
Cornwell, the Kansas City defense attorney, said he has personally witnessed Morehead threaten his clients.
“I have had clients where she came out of a federal courtroom and threatened them if they testified. They cussed her out and went on the witness stand,” he said. “But other people are intimidated by her and maybe rightfully so — she’s an assistant United States attorney and the things she does, how she acts, the way she treats defense attorneys … that’s not how the system works.”
Her conduct goes beyond being “just mean,” Cornwell said, because she has repeatedly violated the ethics she is bound to uphold.
In 2004 the Kansas Supreme Court, in overturning a murder conviction, concluded Morehead committed misconduct during closing arguments. No disciplinary action was taken.
When Morehead was a Wyandotte County prosecutor in the early 90s, she had a romantic relationship with Judge Dexter Burdett. The conflict of interest was not disclosed in court until 2006.
Burdett presided over the 1994 trial of Lamonte McIntyre, an innocent man prosecuted by Morehead and wrongly convicted in a double murder.
As in the Holman case, Morehead was accused of getting a witness to falsely identify McIntyre from a photo.
McIntyre was released in October 2017.
Lawrence Fox, a Yale law professor who taught legal ethics, said in a report that Morehead violated state law by intimidating a witness, violated federal laws by pressuring the witness to commit perjury and violated the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct.
Accountability
There is little recourse in situations like Temple’s, said Sean O’Brien, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who has worked on innocence cases.
“What we know about wrongful convictions is just the tip of the iceberg because when you see an exoneration typically it is someone who has done 20 years or 30 years,” he said.
“The average exoneree has done at least 11 to 12 years before the evidence that clears them is discovered.”
Prosecutors rarely face consequences for misconduct, even in cases where someone was sent to death row. They have more legal immunity than police officers and cannot be sued except in very limited situations.
The primary avenue for accountability among lawyers in Kansas is the Disciplinary Administrator’s Office. It is responsible for investigating complaints.
The office can recommend censure, suspension or disbarment for misconduct. The Kansas Supreme Court has the final say.
Complaints against federal prosecutors can also be made through the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
Bartlett said he did not think the office was effective.
According to the office’s 2020 report, 13 investigations were opened out of a total of 863 complaints. The DOJ shields the names of prosecutors even in cases where misconduct was confirmed.
But the details in one review match a case Morehead handled.
In December 2017, Judge Robinson said Morehead intimidated a witness and belatedly disclosed evidence to the defense. Robinson took the “extraordinary” step of dismissing the case.
The Office of Professional Responsibility concluded the prosecutor had used “poor judgment,” but did not find any wrongdoing.
“We do not comment on the existence or results of an inquiry or investigation, or identify the subjects of a professional misconduct inquiry or investigation,” said Joshua Stueve, a Department of Justice spokesman.
Temple wonders how many other people have been cheated, abused or wrongfully convicted by Morehead. There’s been no accountability, she said.
Temple said the years she spend behind bars, where she was routinely strip searched, was “a trauma that I can’t explain.”
Though she got out about four years ago, Temple and her family continue to grapple with the years they lost. As a convicted felon, the case followed her on job and apartment applications, and she’s still on parole.
“It’s like a sign on my back that’s saying ‘not worthy,’” she said. “You’re scared to do anything because you didn’t do the last thing.”
Though Temple has found a comfortable home and a job at a Kansas City boutique, Morehead’s actions — Holman’s lie, years in lock up, co-defendants’ decades long sentences — still weigh on her.
At times, Temple is conflicted, thinking Morehead belongs in prison.
But then she reconsiders, saying “I don’t wish prison on nobody.”
“I just want her to not be able to practice anymore because of the harm she brought on to many families.”
This story was originally published March 23, 2021 5:00 AM.
